Meal Plan: May 3-May 7th- Down Home Curry with Broccoli and Chickpeas

April is finally behind us! It felt to me like the longest month ever! The weather is still a tad bit unsure of itself but all this sun is really doing great things for me. Life and work have been busy lately and while I'm grateful for it, it's exhausting! In any case, there are lots of things to look forward to this spring and summer (including a trip to the states in August!!) so I'm hoping for a fun May.

This week's recipe is the Down Home Curry with Broccoli and Tofu from the stew/soup/curry chapter. I pretty much had all of the ingredients on hand already so grocery shopping wasn't too expensive this week. All in all, I spent 67 shekels on groceries this week which included carrots, sweet potatoes, onions, corn, a bag of rice (I returned the five pounds of rice-- it just wasn't tasty!), cucumbers, and mushrooms. I've stopped getting as peppers as I think nightshades don't agree with me. Sad but true.

Before I share my thoughts on this recipe, I should say that I do not like things that are creamy. Even in my SAD days, I hated the texture of whipped cream, or anything too mayonnaise-y, and if the coldness of ice cream didn't dull my senses, I wouldn't have liked that either. So it stands to reason that even on this WOE, I wouldn't like creamy, coconut-y sauces and things and I steer clear of anything that fits that bill. In my recent exploits that called for coconut milk, I made some homemade milk, which was thinner than store bought, but still, I just wasn't a fan. I decided that I'd leave out the coconut milk in my future curries (even though that lowers the fat, it's kind of blasphemous, isn't it?!) and that's what I did in this recipe. Consequently, it turned out less of a curry/stew and more of a nice vegetable mixture with which to top rice. I'm not complaining about that, I actually enjoyed that and find that it worked. That said, this is the first recipe that I made that while totally acceptable is just "good" to me and not something fantastic, like the previous recipes were. I will happily devour this until the last stalk of broccoli but it's not something I'd run to make over again.

I did make a number of changes to the recipe.. I used chickpeas instead of tofu, omitted the oil and coconut milk, used frozen broccoli, and sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes (those darn nightshades again!). I also chose to make this in the IP, obviously, just using the saute feature. You can find the recipe here.