Spaghetti with "meat" sauce

This isn't the most exotic recipe around, but it's super easy and tasty to make, and fits three key categories: vegetable, grain, and protein. Well, the vegetable is a little stretch, but I'm counting the tomato sauce (which comes out of a jar) as a vegetable. Nothing here was homemade and I whipped this dinner up in about 15 minutes and it was perfectly proportioned and satisfying. I love that in a meal.

I started off by thawing two veggie burgers, broken into halves, in a frying pan on the stove. I used Morningstar mushroom lover's burgers, but any burger will do. Meanwhile, I was also boiling water on another burger for the pasta.



After the burgers were mostly thawed through, I removed them from heat and chopped them up into bite size chunks.



I put the chunks of veggie burger back into the frying pan and then added the tomato sauce. The tomato sauce came out of a jar, and for those of you interested in the details, I like the Classico brand and this time around, I used Sweet Basil sauce. One of these days I'll make my own tomato sauce, but certainly not on a weekday and definitely not after a tough workout when I'm absolutely famished! I let the tomato sauce and chunks of veggie burger simmer about 4-5 minutes while I finished draining the pasta. Doesn't this look yummy?



And finally, after the pasta was drained, I poured the warm sauce over the pasta, and enjoyed myself a rather quick, tasty, and healthy meal. Not inexpensive, because veggie burgers aren't really that cheap anymore -- about $4 for a package of four now -- but still, this meal probably cost me about $3, which is still cheaper than going out to eat, which is what I would have done in the past when I was starving after a workout. Much better for the waistline and the wallet!