One of our favorite meatless meals

We try to eat at least 1 or 2 meatless meals per week.  First off, it's less expensive (have you seen the meat prices lately, especially red meat?).  Secondly, meatless meals usually require you to integrate much more healthy foods to make up for the missing meat.

So, frugal and healthy?  Yes, please!

I've talked about our vegan phase before, and even though it didn't last, it was a real eye-opener.  We were so used to having meals revolve around meat that we were missing out on some awesome food.

Here is one of our favorite meatless meals.  I had never had anything like this before and was skeptical at first (it honestly didn't sound that great), but I went for it.  And I must say, we were surprised because it is delicious.  Even my meat-eating husband enjoys it!

Here's the recipe:

Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burritos

1 onion, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped
2 tsp minced garlic
1 1/2 - 2 cups black beans, cooked
1/2 cup brown rice, cooked
2 tsp cumin
1/2 - 1 tsp salt (to taste)
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
2 large sweet potatoes, cooked
whole wheat tortillas (or flour)
cheese (optional)

1. Cook sweet potatoes, peel off the skin, and mash up.
2. Saute onion, bell pepper, and garlic in a skillet for about 5 minutes.
3. Add the beans, rice, cumin, salt, and cayenne pepper, and cook over low to medium heat until heated through.
4. Spread some of the mashed up sweet potatoes on a tortilla, add some of the bean mixture, add some cheese, roll up, and eat!
5. We ate this with corn on the side (Jared actually put the corn in his burrito).

A really easy way to cook sweet potatoes is in a crock pot.  I threw the sweet potatoes in, turned it on high, and let them cook for about 3 hours.  It beats heating up the house with the oven, especially in the summer.  (I cooked 2 extra just to eat for lunch during the week.)

I used some yellow and orange peppers this time.  It really doesn't matter what type of bell pepper.

Spread some mashed up sweet potatoes on the tortilla.

 Add everything else.  Yum!

If you try it, let me know how it went!