Okay, this isn’t a recipe, but rather, an (obviously unpaid–haha!) endorsement.

James and I made our bi-weekly trek into town this week and, though we’re not really Costco-type folks, in a misguided moment, James renewed our membership, so we had a walk-through. Now, Costco is a strange and wonderful place, but, holy crap, is their produce ever creepy: none of the produce is local, and it’s all packaged in the least environmentally friendly way possible. They actually had plums packaged in plastic moulds (imagine clear, plastic egg cartons).

Very weird.

The experience reminded me of the first time I shopped in a Dublin supermarket, where every single piece of produce is packaged in styrofoam and plastic wrap.

We did manage to find a few bargains, however, and we also scored a twelve pack of MorningStar Black Bean Chipotle Burgers, which turned out to be the bomb-diggity!

So when we arrived home, I marinated  some sliced portobello mushrooms in my universal marinade and grilled them. And I tore off a few small boules of my no-knead bread for buns and sprinkled them with sesame seeds (check out the picture below for how brilliantly the buns turned out!). I picked some fresh butter lettuce from the garden, sliced some tomatoes and onions, and then panfried the burgers and topped them with a sprinkling of Daiya vegan cheddar.

The result was a rather marvellously decadent-looking burger that was all vegan! And the best part: it was DELICIOUS!!

Oh, and our best Costco bargain was a 10-kilogram bag of flour for just over six bucks!! Later that day, we were in Thrifty’s in Courtenay and I wandered through the bakery and noticed a loaf of bread that looked EXACTLY like one of my healthy loaves:

And beside it was a loaf that looked like my white loaf:

To my great pleasure, each loaf was priced at $4.99!! And knowing that my own loaves cost about 26 cents to produce, I felt quite smug!