The No Meat Athlete Sauce System!

No Meat Athlete recently put out a podcast (and accompanying blog post) about hosts Matt and Doug's favorite healthy dinner — the grain/green/bean meal. As their post mentions, this can be as simple as a bean and veggie bowl with brown rice. Or it can be something more creative, like tempeh (counts as a bean) tacos with red cabbage (counts as a green) on corn tortillas (counts as a grain).

I know that I feel healthiest when I'm eating bean/grain/green-inspired meals, and I loved all the fresh ideas they threw out. I'll be trying a number of them over the next few weeks. They also included a link to a past blog post on their No Meat Athlete Sauce System, a fancy name for NMA co-host Doug Hay's favorite five whole foods-based sauce recipes and various ways to use them. You can see all the recipes and serving suggestions here.

When I was making my grocery list last week, I picked out two sauces to try. Starting meal planning with a sauce rather than the main ingredient is a new way of thinking for me, and it's fun! After all, the sauce makes the meal. One of the sauces I selected was the Coconut Curry, which I used for this tofu stir-fry.

This fits into the grain/green/bean category since I have tofu (beans), brown rice (grains), and cauliflower and green beans (both count as greens!). Plus, there's red pepper thrown in there for fun.

A stir-fry was one of the main uses mentioned for this easy coconut milk-based sauce, but they also suggest using it as the base of a curry soup or to add peanut butter and make peanut noodle bowls. Yum!

Other sauces in the system include a tomato sauce, lemon tahini, teriyaki, and cashew cream, with plenty of suggestions for using them all. Next week, I'll make their recipe for tomato sauce and blend in some chickpeas (Matt's suggestion for sneaking beans into pasta) and then serve it over whole wheat pasta with kale and mushrooms.