The ultimate cheap meal.

Tonight for dinner, I made a slight variation of Susan V’s Irish White Bean and Cabbage Stew, easy biscuits, and Meatfree BBQ balls.

First, the balls. Because I fricken’ love me some balls.

I can’t stress enough how good (and easy! and fast!) these were. Of course, I’m slightly obsessed with anything that has BBQ sauce on it, but I’m sure anyone will like these. The seitan recipe uses applesauce, which makes it really moist. In the future I’m going to be experimenting with adding applesauce to my regular seitan recipes.

For the soup, I followed Susan’s recipe almost entirely, except I added fat. I love the way fat makes food taste, and since I’m not watching my weight, I see it as being okay in moderation. I sweated the onion, celery, and carrots before adding the other ingredients. I also added cayenne pepper to give it a bit of a kick, and garnished it with hickory smoked sea salt and Cajun hot sauce. It was surprisingly filling, and it makes enough to feed two people for 3 or 4 meals.

I didn’t have any non-dairy milk, so I made these biscuits out of flour, baking powder, salt, oil and water. That’s it. I switched up some toppings to give them a bit of flavor. The one on the left is lemon pepper, and the right one is chives and garlic. I think I’ll be able to improve upon these in the future.