4 hour body dinner: bangers and fake-mash with sauteed onions and sauerkraut.

for one:
- 4 medium sized (preferably not breakfast) sausages
- 1/2 to 3/4 of a can of white kidney beans (called cannellini beans sometimes, but not in canada.)
- 1/2 of a medium yellow onion
- 1/2 cup of sauerkraut
- 1 tsp gravy mix.

So first off, these don't really taste like potatoes. They pretty much look like potatoes, and have the approximate mouth-feel (my least favorite word!) of mashed potatoes, but they pretty much taste like beans. don't get me wrong, I like beans, and I like these. They're close enough to the flavour and texture of potatoes that you can sort of lose yourself in the pub-foodiness of this and forget that you don't actually get to eat potatoes anymore.

ingredients. I'm adding more pictures in an effort to make this more interesting and mask my ability to write out a recipe like a normal person!

so, boil a pot of water, open a can of white kidney beans and rinse them, and chop up half a yellow onion.

fry the onions in a pan with some butter or ghee, don't burn them but you actually do want to fry them, not just soften them. caramelize those babies.

boil the sausages in a pot of water for about 5 minutes, I feel like this helps draw out some of the fat, but I'm honestly not sure if that's true. transfer them to a pan, and fry them until they're browned and cooked all the way through.

note: I am using mild Italian sausages here, because they're the only kind I could find that didn't have some kind of sweetener in the ingredients. they were good, I probably would have preferred a bratwurst or something, but they were all sugar.

put your rinsed kidney beans into a pot and cook them with a little bit of water, some butter, and all the salt and pepper you'd put into mashed potatoes. mine were pretty soft to start with, but about 5 minutes of cooking and they were mashable. I used my Bamix (which is a fancy immersion blender) but you could probably mash using an ordinary potato masher, or even just the back of a fork here. I also added a tsp of gravy powder mix to the bean mash, in an attempt to make them taste more like potatoes. you could probably just MAKE gravy and it would add much more, but all my gravy mixes contained small amounts of sugar, so I minimized the damage with just a smidge in.

my stove is so tiny!

anyways, this is an easy meal. plate your mashed "potatoes" and add the sausages and the onions to it. I ate some sauerkraut with this because I like it, and it's good for you. fresh veggies on the side would have been good too. this is a super filling meal, and really has a comfort food feel to it.

quick meal, not too much else to say.

protein:  4 sausages = 52g (wow.) about a cup of cannellini beans, 15g, and 1g each in the sauerkraut and the onions. for a grand total of 69g of protein.  wow, no wonder this was so filling.

4 hour body dinner: pan seared scallops and curried green pea puree. with crisp proscuitto!

This was freaking delicious. I'm not joking. go buy the stuff for it right now.

first thing you need to do is get some wild sea scallops. get the big ones, the small ones always end up really salty and weird tasting to me. Giant Sea Scallops, Wild Caught. that's what you want.

defrost em.  I made 7 here, and ate all of this (in case you haven't noticed, I'm almost always cooking for one, so double or triple of quadruple or however many people you're cooking for. I'm just me.)


Put two slices of procuitto in a 375° oven.
Heat up a pot and a pan with about a tablespoon of ghee in each. (I like to cook with butter or ghee, you go right ahead and use whatever you like. ghee is kind of expensive or time consuming.)
Medium heat for the pot, medium high for the pan.

Cook some garlic in the pot, when it smells delicious, throw in one cup of frozen peas and half a cup of water. Little bit of salt, pepper, garam Marsala, (or curry powder. about a tsp of this.) thai chili sauce, unless you're heat sensitive. Boil for like... 5 minutes. (check your proscuitto right now or it might be burnt. take it out when it's crispy.)
 
Meanwhile, in camelot, dry off your defrosted scallops and season them with salt and pepper, put them in the pan with the hot cooking grease of your choice, sear for 5 to 7 minutes on each side until cooked through and there's a nice brown colour on the outside. Scallops stick like the bejezzus if you don't move them around a little but when you first start cooking them, so make sure you do that.

Puree the peas and whatever pea-broth is left in the pot with an immersion blender or regular blender. Plate the pea puree, crumble the crispy procuitto on top, plate scallops, garnish if you're so inclined.
Yum. Easy-peasy as they say, and this was suuuper tasty and fast.

protein: (can't find proscuittos information, so I'm counting 2 slices of it like 1 slice of bacon.) 3g. I'm a little unsure about scallops too, but I'm going to count 7 of them at about 150g which is 35g protein and peas which is 8g for a total of 46g.