It’s Friiiiidaaay!!

And guess what I have for you today?

2 meals, red sauce, no new recipes + sub-par photos

Excited?

You should be, because these are two must make meals + the sauce is my favorite!

First. Gina’s breakfast cookie. Good lordy, did I love this! I’m only a few years late in trying this out, but it’s going to become a regular in my breakfast routine!

ingredients I used:

oats
peanut butter
coconut oil
cinnamon
Raw Protein
almond milk
mashed banana

Instead of using 1T peanut butter, I used 2t pnut butter + 1t coconut oil. I wanted it to harden from refrigerating the coconut oil. The peanut butter I used was extra drippy, so the texture was pretty soft. But in a completely fantastic way. Like a raw oatmeal cookie, with super soft oats, from soaking overnight.

I topped it with toasted coconut + mashed blackberries.

If you like oatmeal or overnight oats, you will love this. The next time I make it [uhh, tomorrow!], I’m going to amp it up a bit.

1/2c oats, instead of 1/3c : full scoop of protein powder : etc. I tend to do best when I eat around a 500-550 cal breakfast.

I was too excited to dig in, so I didn’t grab my tripod, hence the sub-par photos. heh

Thanks Gina!!

For dinner tonight, I invited Kelsey over, for vegan lasagna.

Originally, I was going to make lasagna roll-ups. Where you spread the filling mixture on par-cooked lasagna noodles, then roll them up, cover in sauce + cook. I’ve done this before, but never with GF lasagna noodles.

I used this brand, which are perfect for lasagna. Doughy, with a good bite and not slimy at all.

However, par-cooking them, and trying to roll filling inside, did not work so well. Gluten-free noodles are quite fragile and they broke apart as I took them out of the large pot of water. I did succeed in not having the noodles all stick together though! Just use parchment in between each layer of noodles.

Since I’m on a homemade, money saving plan right now, I made my own sauce. I really should always make my own sauce. It takes about 30-45min to finish cooking, but it’s really only about 8min on on-hand time.

I make the red sauce a little different every time. Today I used fresh basil, rosemary, + thyme, with dried oregano, garlic, and everything else in the recipe list. It may have been my favorite batch yet. I can eat this by the spoonful!

Yes, you can buy an organic pasta sauce for $3-4, but I’ve yet to find one that is thick + nicely flavored. I hate runny sauce, and I also refuse to spend $8 on a good jar of sauce.

A few things to know:

the longer you cook the sauce, the thicker it will become
if you want a smooth consistency, stick it in your blender or use an immersion blender
if you want to turn it into pizza sauce, drain all of the tomato liquid, instead of just part of it
ALWAYS double this recipe…trust me!

This sauce will cost you $2 for a 28oz can of tomatoes + $.99 for tomato paste + then it basically uses common herbs you most likely have on hand.

Chu-ching.

So, for the vegan filling, I used Jenna’s recipe for Stuffed Shells. The only thing I added was 1/4c fresh parsley and I blended the spinach into the mixture. I meant to just mix it in, but before I knew it, I dumped the spinach into the food processor + turned it on.

It turned quite green. hehe

The filling was perfect. The texture was exactly like ricotta!