Trigger warning: confession of disordered eating

I made a drastic decision yesterday after cooking some ground pork for a mish-mash of a recipe. The end taste result was okay, but because I hadn’t planned well, I was so hungry I ate until I was ill. It was just too much meat and too much fat in one sitting; I’d gotten used to having FAR less over the past few months.

This intense craving reaction I had clued me in to something I’d only suspected: meat IS one of my trigger foods, especially when paired with heavy carbs.

Guess it’s a good thing I was planning on going vegetarian, anyway. But what was I gonna do with all the rest of the meat I had on hand?

I decided to give the pounds of ham, chili meat, and ground beef I had to my next door neighbor. She’s taken in some folks who were having a rough time and with a house full of hungry teenagers, odds are she could use the meat. She was glad to get it because now that school is out, they’d definitely be eating everything not nailed down.

That wasn’t part of my initial plan. I was going to use up what I had left and then go vegetarian, but I have plenty of batch-cooked meals with meat in it still in my freezer. The only things I saved I’m going to batch-cook tomorrow: chicken fajitas. And chicken doesn’t seem to give me as many problems as beef and pork started to (and fish hasn’t messed with me yet, so the sardines are staying til I run out… that’ll take a while).

I calculated that with all the ham I still had, it would’ve been the end of summer before I could go vegetarian, and I did NOT want to eat all that for months on end.

It’s a bit of a stall tactic to have these few meaty meals in my freezer, because I need the time to learn how to cook veggies in different ways. Being summer, I’m totally okay with mostly salads and smoothies, but on days when I’m at home all day, I don’t think I could do salads constantly (mostly because I have limited ideas for what to have in them and not cover them up with super-fatty or sugary dressings).

The tricky part is when I’m in a budget crunch, how much can I stretch what funds I do have WHILE I do this experimentation?

I am determined to use up the rest of the month for this experimentation while eating up the last of the meat dishes in my pantry and freezer. By August 1st, I expect to be at least vegetarian at home (work has no vegetarian options other than fried stuff and the same old boring side-salad, so I need more leeway there). I did remember some recipes I had for overnight oats, and that would make for a good breakfast. Smoothies I already love, and salads will work.

It’s just other options I’ll need to have so I don’t get bored and binge on fried food and meat. I learned decades ago that I’m a boredom eater, and that probably triggered my intense craving for that meat dish last night (I was sluggish and tired after a terrible night of sleep, which is a terrible combo when I let myself get bored because it means eating for no reason).

So yeah, I’ve got several vegetarian cookbooks and I’ll spend this week before shift looking up simple recipes and flavor combos to try out. I think that’s the biggest thing I have to learn about: best pairings for spices and flavors. That and cooking veggies without making them too mushy or crunchy… I just can’t get the gist of them yet.

Can I even batch cook vegetarian dishes without ruining them? I guess if they’re in casserole form & rice-heavy as the carb base (since rice freezes well, pasta sucks at that). It’s gonna be tricky finding recipes that don’t depend on sodium-filled soups or cheeses to bring it all together, if we’re talking casseroles.

But I forgot about stir-frys, and learning to make my own bean burgers, how to use tofu for once, including seitan again… This might not be so tough to figure out after all, at least at the start. Hopefully my budget opens up a bit more so I can re-fill my pantry when needed.