It’s Day 2 with my Griddler grill/panini press, and in another attempt to use up some leftovers, I accidentally recreated my second favorite pizza joint sandwich, vegan style:

The Godmother, from Nancy’s Pizza – Oven Baked Breaded Chicken Tenders with Red Sauce and Melted Mozzarella Cheese, served on Homemade Garlic Bread

Oh, yes. Yes. YES!

Not coincidentally, my ultimate favorite pizza joint sandwich also comes from Nancy’s. Of course, now that I’m neither eating chicken nor cheese, I will have to find a way to recreate this one as well:

The Chicken Club – Oven Baked Breaded Chicken Tenders, Fresh Bacon, Melted Mozzarella Cheese, Lettuce, Fresh Roma Tomatoes, and Creamy Garlic Sauce served on our Homemade Garlic Bread

I bet I could make a wicked-good vegan garlic sauce! The rest is cake, since I already figured it out.

Behold:

Starring:

- Chickpea Cutlets from Veganomicon

- Mom’s Marinara from Appetite for Reduction

- Daiya mozzarella (best vegan cheese evah!)

- A little bit of Earth Balance (vegan butter)

Supporting act:

Help! I'm running out of vegetables!

Mixed greens, a grated carrot, and a handful of alfalfa sprouts doused with Sanctuary Dressing (also from Appetite for Reduction). The produce drawer in my fridge is looking pretty sad at the moment. Not even a cucumber to be found.

Tangent!

My veggie drawer typically contains:

- 1 bunch of kale (for making kale chips!)
- 1 cucumber
- 1 avocado (OK fine, avo is a fruit, so what)
- 1 red pepper (I know, I know! Red pepper is technically [botanically] a fruit too. But I eat it as a vegetable!)
- 1 bunch of broccoli
- 1 onion (yellow or white)
- 1 bunch asparagus
- Leafy greens (either an organic spring greens mix, or a mixed greens with spinach type thing)
- 1 bag of carrots

Those are my weekly go-to’s, mostly for salad purposes. Other veggies find their way into my fridge, but the list above is pretty much what I buy every week. Since there’s only one of me, I have to go to the grocery store weekly because I can only eat so much before it goes bad! Luckily, being a Perimeter Shopper at the grocery store, it’s easy to get in and out quickly. Sometimes the asparagus turns into green beans. Sometimes the broccoli becomes cauliflower. There’s usually 1 dinner veggie and a ton of salad veggies.

What’s in your veggie drawer?

The most significant acquisition of my Spring Break shopping spree was this Cuisinart MultiClad Pro Stainless Steel 12 piece cookware set. It came highly recommended by a food blogger that I enjoy reading, Vegan Burnout. I still, of course, spent days reading reviews and whatnot. I definitely needed a new set of cookware. My existing hodge-podge of a set consisted of scratched-up nonstick pieces from when I got my first apartment 17 years ago (yikes! Math be damned!) and from a housewarming gift when I bought my first house 8 years ago. Every time I have gone to cook something recently, I have had to pretend I didn’t see the flaking nonstick stuff… which led to pretending that the pots weren’t leeching chemicals and carcinogens into my food…. It didn’t matter as much when I only cooked once a year, but now that I’m cooking at least several times a week, it concerns me.

So, enough of that! I chose stainless because I have 2 pots that I love. They’re both stainless, and are both pieces from a set of Revere cookware that my parents got as a wedding gift 37 years ago (awwww!). So it seems I like stainless steel, and will not have to fear the chemical nonstick stuff. Done and done.

I also added a Cuisinart Griddler Jr grill/griddle/panini press to my arsenal. I do own an ancient George Foreman grill (the first one ever made, I think). It just doesn’t work very well anymore – but it too is nearing a decade old. Like I said in my Welcome post – I really never cooked until 2010! These gadgets just collected dust in my cabinets.

Other nifty items of note: a cookbook holder, an olive oil spray bottle, a couple new cookbooks, and an Eye-Fi memory card for my little camera (that will hopefully result in me shooting more of my kitchen adventures to post here).

I tested out the Eye-Fi with today’s lunch. (Impressive little device, actually – I’m surprised at how much I like it. I wish they made it in a CF version for my big camera – but a friend mentioned the possibility of using an SD-to-CF convertor. Looking into that).

First up, I made a sandwich out of some leftover Falafel (from the recipe in Isa Chandra’s Appetite for Reduction).

Outside, this sandwich used a special “ancient grains” bread from the local grocer’s bakery. It listed spelt flour and amaranth flour, amongst others. It was so crusty on the outside and soft on the middle! So good. I plan to get some more use out of my bread machine too – and recreating a bread like this is high on my list of things to do. Inside this sandwich, I stuffed leftover falafel, cucumbers, and some Sanctuary Dressing (also an Isa recipe), with more dressing on the side for dipping. I whipped out the new Griddler to try toasting this sandwich and.. mmm mmm mmm.

With it, I tossed together a salad of spring greens, crunchy tempeh crumbles, leftover grilled leeks and peppers (from yesterday’s pizza adventure), some alfalfa sprouts, and… I think that was it – with Sanctuary Dressing. (That stuff is SO delish, at only 40 calories per 1/4 cup!)

I try to have a giant bowl of greens, every single day.

I’ve still got some of that grilled leek & peppers pizza to finish up, and some no-meatballs in the infamous grape jelly/chili sauce marinade. (For the record, the omnivores at yesterday’s family gathering ate the no-meatballs right up – and my mother, the picky eater she is, even asked me to leave her some leftovers). Vegan meatballs ftw! Unfortunately, the marinate was chock full of high fructose corn syrup, as I was too time-pressed to make it from scratch for a nice organic version. Gotta pick your battles.

I hope to get in one more good bit of cooking on Monday before my schedule gets crazy again.

I’m looking at registering for the midwest Warrior Dash. Who’s in?! What’s better than a 5K through obstacles, mud, and fire?!

My mom used Peapod back in the mid-1990′s, when they operated out of our local Jewel grocery stores in the Chicago suburbs. I remember installing their software off of floppy disks onto the computer, and listening to the dial-up modem groan and wheeze as it connected to the internet. My, how far we’ve come!

In my quest to find organic products at grocery stores that are at least somewhat convenient to me, I stumbled upon Peapod. Why, yes! Peapod! I was shocked, quite honestly, at their selection of organics. I could order everything from organic meats to produce to prepared foods, all for home delivery.

So, I tried them out. I spent a week or so filling up my Peapod shopping cart. You can save your grocery list and come back later, and I did that quite a few times. When you’re ready to check out, you input your payment information and select a delivery time slot. Longer time slots offer a $1.00 discount on your order, and paying with your checking account offers another $1.00 off. With reasonable delivery fees ($6.95 for orders over $100), these two discounts make the delivery cost less than the equivalent cost of gas for me to drive to one of the local (within 20 miles) organic-carrying grocers. (Maybe if I drove a hybrid vehicle, this logic would be moot – but even at 20-23mpg, my Jeep is a bit of a gas guzzler).

You can edit your shopping cart up until the evening before your delivery – which is dangerous, if you’re me, because you’ll find yourself thinking of oddball things to add right up till the last minute. After the cutoff time, you can opt to receive an email or text message with the final delivery time window (if you selected one of the longer time frames when you placed your order).

Finally, the cutoff time arrived, and my wallet breathed a sigh of relief. My order would be delivered today, Wednesday, between 9am and 11am. At 8:57am this morning, the big white Peapod truck pulled up in front of my house, and at 9:01am, my doorbell rang. It was the friendly Peapod Guy! He had a hand truck stacked with Peapod boxes, and in those boxes were bags of food, glorious food. Some boxes had insulated coolers inside.

Mr. Peapod propped the door open and brought all of my goodies into the kitchen. He offered an invoice for me to sign, and I tipped him $5. The Peapod web site makes it very clear that tipping is optional, but hey – it’s Chicago and it’s freezing cold outside, and I did order a heck of a lot of food. And, the guy was smiling – at 9am. That to me is a miracle in and of itself (as I was still half unconscious, having sleepwalked out of bed at 8:51am when the alarm went off for this little adventure).

The whole process took about 10 minutes. That sure beats spending an hour and a half or more in the grocery store!

All in all, I’m happy as can be. Peapod delivered everything on my list. No items were damaged, and the produce looks freshly picked. Frozen items were frozen solid, and fresh items were fresh. All groceries were bagged “properly,” which seems to be a lost art in the modern grocery store. (You know… colds with colds, non-foods with non-foods, etc).

With the various discounts, I feel that 5 bucks for delivery and 5 bucks for a tip is a phenomenal deal for the convenience of not having to leave home to shop for my organics. (And of course, the tip is my choice – I could have had all of this for just $5!) Future orders will be even quicker, because I can shop from my previous list instead of searching all over again for each item, and I can create custom lists and save them on Peapod’s web site.

This Peapod grocery delivery service is a steal! I feel like I just got away with something! I highly recommend it.

EpicOrganic.net