Key Points
- As shoppers await price cuts, retailers like Home Depot say their prices have stabilized and some national consumer brands have paused price increases or announced more modest ones.
- Yet some industry watchers predict deflation for food at home later this year.
- Falling prices could bring new challenges for retailers, such as pressure to drive more volume or look for ways to cover fixed costs, such as higher employee wages.
Do lentils have much taste?
They’re like beans.
While having them home cooked is better, try some prepackaged Indian or Middle Eastern foods that might have them from a local health food store. Regular grocery stores might have them in some canned soups.
I’m personally not a fan of lentils, I find them somewhat dry/mealy in consistency, but I’m not going to turn down a good dish with them in it.
I honestly have never had beans. The only vegetable I’m good with is hummus, but I’m super curious about vegan/vegetarian proteins. I won’t start with lentils, though. Sounds unpleasant for someone with texture issues. Thank you.
Hummus is made with beans.
My brother in christ, it’s garlic and chickpeas. I’m choosing not to call them garbanzo beans but specifically peas. Tho, yes, but it’s all blended and shit.
Peas and beans are both legumes and there’s no reason to separate them biologically into two types the way we do it.
Protein is made up of about 20 amino acids. Your body can produce 11 of them itself. You need to ingest 9 of them, the so called essential amino acids.
Meat usually contains the complete protein, as well as soy (tofu, edamame, tvp) does. But there are others like quinoa or hemp seeds.
Other plant based protein sources like legumes, beans, peas, grains, seeds & nuts need to be combined to get the 9 EAA because they all are a bit deficient in mostly one amino acid (but they too contain all of them). That’s why beans and rice are often eaten together:
https://www.piedmont.org/living-real-change/what-is-a-complete-protein
I would look into tofu and TVP (textured vegetable protein). The latter is made up of soy but comes in the form of crumbs of varying sizes. It’s dirt cheap here and high protein. If you get the finer grained, you can process them into stuff that resembles ground meat. You can make bolognese, casseroles or burger-patties (in combination with a binding agent like aquafaba or linseeds, onions, mushroom) out of it.
If you don’t want to cook you could make shakes with a food processor or smothie mixer. Plantbased protein powder (pea/rice/soy) + fruits, seeds cocosmilk etc.
I’d install the app cronometer and get a kitchen scale if you don’t have it.
Cronometer contains a gigantic database of products you can easily enter by scanning the barcode. The database is contributed to by users. I can tell they seem to be strict with the quality-control of the contributed products. I contributed one 3 weeks ago and it’s still not in the DB although I looked at pretty in depth websites for the micro nutrients and triple checked the units and numbers.
So you enter your body data and it tells you what your goals are. You can set individual targets, e.g. protein according to your level of activity. You can track workouts too which then modify your macro goals accordingly. You can enter the ingredients of a recipe, save it and restore it when you cook it again. I made myself one e.g. for morning cereals which let me meet my overall daily protein and overall target of 30-40% already. With a daily report it tells you down to the individual vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and amino acids what you need. All in the free version.
What you need to do yourself is to find out what micro and macro nutrient is in what product. Cronometer gives you hints if you click on them in the daily report. You don’t need to track forever as it’s sure cumbersome but to get a feeling for proper nutrition it’s an eyeopener.
In forgot vital wheat gluten alias seitan which a bite of would probably obliterate a gluten sensitive person. It’s often used in convenience food.
It’s made out of flour and nothing much else and it happens to have the highest amount protein per gram among the plant based products and even higher than some meat products. The problem is the amino acid profile:
https://vegfaqs.com/seitan-amino-acid-profile/
Most of the listed foods don’t have much taste on its own. And nobody should eat them unprepared. RememberTheApollo_ described it well. But spices are a thing. With them you can transform them into culinary experiences.
Combine chickpeas with cumin, lemon juice, olive oil, tahini/peanut butter and garlic: delicious nurturing Hummus.
Combine chickpeas with parsley, onion, garlic, cumin, coriander, pepper and sesame seeds: mouth watering falafel.
Combine tomatopaste, oliveoil and spices to get a nice base for frying crumbled tofu (a complete protein) to emulate ground meat.
With all the dried food it’s important to prepare them correctly (rinse, soak, cook) to get rid of plant toxins like phasin, solanin, oxalates or arsenic.
E.g. a study found out the best way to prepare natural rice. Peeled rice doesn’t contain much arsenic but natural/brown rice may contain it in its shell (amounts vary by its country of origin).
Not really, but that can be a positive if you know how to spice food properly. I make a lentil taco recipe in the instant pot and it comes out pretty good as long as I don’t forget any of my spices.