Do you have clever tricks, ideas and recipes for fixing meals with less meat? Do you use meat as a side dish or condiment? Perhaps you eat several meatless meals each week, and then use a little meat here and there to round out the textures, flavors and nutrition of your overall diet.

For some people, learning to cook with less meat is part of an intentional transition to a vegetarian diet. For others, it can be a way to stretch food dollars or simply to up the ante of grains, beans and other hearty stars of the dinner table.

Whatever your motivation, if you have insight into the almost-meatless kitchen, please share your recipes and ideas with each other in the comments section below. 

One thing that I've been reading a lot about lately is how trying to eat sustainably is just not affordable for most people and it's only the rich that can afford to shop at the high-end organic supermarkets like Whole Foods. The classic stereotype is the yuppie green-wannabe spending hundreds of dollars a week buying imported organic produce or trendy specialty natural products. On the opposite end of the stereotype are the organic beans and rice, bulk food buying hippies.

But is there something in between? Can a sustainable lifestyle, preferably chock-full of locally and sustainably grown produce, meats, dairy and other products that are affordable, be achieved by the average American? I am convinced that it can be.

How does one define affordability? Well, one way of going about it is to use the federal government's food assistance program's guidelines. For example, they assume that a family of four should be able to eat reasonably well on a food budget of $588 a month. This also assumes that, most likely, conventionally grown foods are being purchased and not "expensive" locally or sustainably grown food.

I've challenged the readers of my blog, for the month of April, to see if it's possible. Can they find sustainably grown food (organic, local or both) in their area and keep it at or under the federal guidelines? If you are interested in joining us, the full guidelines are available on the post for the Sustainable Food Budget Challenge. I'd like to show that it can be done without breaking the bank.

"Free range" refers to chickens being allowed to range freely outdoors where they can eat whatever grass, weed seeds, insects and worms they choose. This results in more nutritious eggs and meat for consumers, and more healthy, humane conditions for the birds. Some producers abuse this term and label their eggs as “free range” when in fact all they have done is open a door to allow their chickens to range in an outdoor area of bare dirt or concrete, with no pasture in sight. 

Thus you need to confirm if your eggs or chicken comes from "true" or "pastured" or "grass-fed" free-range conditions. Also, some producers choose a modified system that involves keeping birds safe from predators by confining them in pens or inside electric fencing, and moving the pens frequently onto fresh pastures. Thus, pastured birds may be true free-range or penned, but either system is correctly referred to as “pastured.” And either system is a better choice than products that come from industrial factory farm conditions.

To learn a great deal more about all the terminology you might have to decipher on egg cartons these days (like "cage free" or "enhanced with omega-3s"), check out How to Decode Egg Cartons.

See also:  USDA definition