Protein for boards

Ever notice how food blogs (see links to the right, along with the NY Times Recipes for Health column) feature vegetarian dishes heavy on grains and legumes, while restaurant cookbooks (like Mario Batali's, which I have in my kitchen) have you do as little as possible to more expensive ingredients: cheese, roasted fish, meat, etc.? (The more you can spend on ingredients, the less you need to do to them.) Some of this is motivated by health, no doubt, but I also suspect that it's financial. Bloggers have themselves and their audience in mind: poor, busy young adults like myself. Grains and legumes are way cheaper than meat and cheese.

As someone who has bought into the mostly vegetarian, high fiber, lowish salt and lowish fat way of cooking, I occasionally wonder if it always makes sense. I've been running longer distances again lately and came home the other night craving some solid protein. I switched over to turkey burgers for the week: nothing fancy, no seasoning, not blog-worthy, but satisfying and delicious (with some cheese, freshly ground black pepper, and spinach). No doubt some Americans eat too much protein, but trying to get your day's protein entirely from sources less dense in protein per calorie can be a challenge.

Mix it up.

Microwaveable turkey burger kit (school lunch):

Pre-cooked turkey burger, cheddar cheese, black pepper, 

homemade whole-wheat English muffin/bun, tomato slices, bed of spinach.