Week 2, Day 5: Warding off vampires w/ Hummus & Garlic Flatbread

For dinner tonight, enjoy three dishes made with garlic: Hummus (page 142 in Wildly Affordable Organic), Garlic Flatbread page 188), and a Spicy Sauce (page 129) made with homemade Yogurt (page 127) or with Cashew Cream. It's a perfect meal to have before watching Twilight.

Today's classic menu

Again, you've got a great head start on your meals. Homemade yogurt, Noodles in Spicy Peanut Sauce with Summer Vegetables, Ginger-Glazed Carrot Cake, Hummus, dough for Garlic Flatbread, and watermelon pieces are all waiting for you in your refrigerator or freezer. The bold text below shows what you'll be preparing today.

breakfast	Oatmeal, two eggs, Vanilla Yogurt, tea
lunch	Noodles in Spicy Peanut Sauce with Summer Vegetables, blueberries
snack	Ginger-Glazed Carrot Cake
dinner	Hummus, Garlic Flatbread with tomato, cucumber, and Spicy Yogurt Sauce; watermelon

Today's plant-strong menu

Homemade Cashew Cream, Noodles in Spicy Peanut Sauce with Summer Vegetables, Ginger-Glazed Carrot Cake, Hummus, dough for Garlic Flatbread, and watermelon pieces are all waiting for you in your refrigerator or freezer. The bold text below shows what you'll be preparing today.

breakfast	Oatmeal, Chickpea-Flour Scramble, tea
lunch	Noodles in Spicy Peanut Sauce with Summer Vegetables, blueberries
snack	Ginger-Glazed Carrot Cake
dinner	Hummus, Garlic Flatbread with tomato, cucumber, and Spicy Cashew-Cream Sauce; watermelon

Breakfast

Cook for Good menus include oatmeal about once a week. It's a thrifty, quick-cooking whole grain. Many readers say they cook oatmeal overnight in a slow cooker. 

If you love a make-ahead breakfast, make the plant-strong Chickpea Scramble the night before and just reheat in the microwave. It keeps for about four days in the refrigerator, so you can make a big batch to start several mornings off with a delicious, cholestrol-free dish that will keep you energetic and alert until lunch.

If you want to have blueberries for breakfast too instead of for lunch, make it so! All the menus are flexible; you can move servings around during the day or week without changing the average prices or shopping list.

Garlic Flatbread

Make Garlic Flatbread with the other half of the dough you made for pizza. For the freshest bread, bake some every day for the next three days. For the least work and energy use, bake it all today. Either way, you can make all the garlic oil for topping the bread today; just refrigerate any extra for up to four days.

Dust flour on top of the dough where you'll cut it. One-third of this half-batch of dough serves four.

Cut the dough into two or four pieces.

Each dough ball on the left serves one; the larger ball on the right serves two.

Roll out dough and spread with garlic oil. I use my fingers to spread the oil after it's cooled a bit, but you can use a brush.

Bake for eight minutes or until lightly browned. Sometimes the bread puffs up like a football. You can puncture it with a sharp knife if you'd like or just consider it to be bread with personality.

Keep any extra at room temperature.

Update on Jul 26, 2012 by Linda Watson

Updated to show plant-strong option: Cashew Cream for Yogurt, Chickpea Scramble for eggs.