I posted yesterday about El Taco Italiano and if you look at the recipe it looks like quite a bit of work for a lazy person. Making baked Seitan is not difficult but it does take some time. Probably less time then it would to go to the health food store and buy some seitan but time nonetheless that could be used doing really important things, like watching Project Runway.
For me, the best way to keep things cheap and easy is to batch cook items all at once and then use them for the rest of the week. For example, I often make a crock pot of black beans and then when I come home I make black bean burgers for that night, put a bunch of burgers in the freezer along with some beans (make sure you spread them out on a cookie tray for the first hour to let them freeze individually or else you are going to have a big block of frozen beans on hand), I keep other beans in the fridge to make soup the next day and Gallo Pinto for breakfast. I pack beans and rice and salsa into lunches and that is it for the week. For about 4 dollars I have food for many meals.
Cooking beans is an obvious example but I think that always cooking more than you need of certain things makes life really simple. Usually, what I eat today is inspired by what I made yesterday. So if one day I spend 2 hours making seitan I will have stuff for the rest of the week since I have a lot of seitan and I used the oven to multitask. While baking the Seitan I made two potatoes, a couple roasted garlic bulbs, roasted bell peppers, and I could have done even more. Making lunch the next day was easy because I had the cream and sausage left over and made a bagel
with the left overs at work (hence the bad pic) and then that night dinner could have been an already baked potato smeared with the sauce and seitan or I could have made some quinoa, thinned out the sauce and added some vegetables and seitan for a delicious dinner. The key is to then, is to make more quinoa then I need so that the next day I can think, well I have this quinoa, what should I make with it. Well, I have that roasted garlic from the other night…. It always helps to have a starting point and to have food prepared on hand so that I don’t go to Whole Foods or wherever else, and spend a bunch of money when usually the food I make at home is better anyway. And I don’t have to go anywhere.