PlantYou's Carleigh Bodrug Shares a Glimpse of Her Budget-Friendly Vegan Shopping List

With New Year’s resolutions starting to become a reality, you may be considering making healthy switches to your eating pattern. This could mean adding more plant-based options into your meal rotation, or you may be starting your vegan journey as a permanent lifestyle change. But it can be a challenge to know where to start. 

That’s why we talked to Carleigh Bodrug, the founder and face of PlantYou, and asked her questions about how to incorporate more plant-based dishes into a regular routine. What stays on her shopping list? Where does she shop for groceries? What’s the first vegan copycat recipe we should try? Read on to find out the answers.

EatingWell: Do you have any shopping tips for those looking to transition to a vegan lifestyle, but they're not sure where to start with their grocery list?

Bodrug: Any time someone is thinking about going plant-based that has not previously been vegan or plant-based and just has no idea where to start, I always tell them—if they have an OK relationship with food—to take an audit of what they typically eat in a week. Maybe they start their morning with cereal, they have a deli meat sandwich at lunch and they might have pasta with meatballs for dinner. Then I ask them to think about how they can make simple swaps in those meals to be more plant-based. So for example, it could be as easy as swapping the milk in your morning cereal to a plant-based option, the deli meat in your lunch to be a plant-based meat or tofu and your dinner into a lentil meatball instead of a meatball. The reason for doing this is, I think a lot of issues that people have when they go plant-based is they go from 0 to 100 overnight and their entire diet is just flipped on its head. I always suggest that people go slow, make incremental changes and also build on the foundations of the food that they already love and the diet they're already eating by making those swaps and maintaining those familiar flavors that they like. 

When we talk about making a shopping list, the key to me to eating a healthy lifestyle sustainably and sticking to a plant-based diet is meal planning. Write out what you're gonna be eating for the week to start. This can be as simple as taking out a notepad and jotting down Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Here's my lunch and dinner plans or what I think I'm gonna be eating for lunch and dinner and then building out a shopping list from there. I always suggest that if you're wanting to eat healthier, when you enter the grocery store, these outer edges of the grocery store have all of the fresh food. Definitely starting in the fresh produce section, looking around at what you're wanting to eat, whether it's adding new herbs or kale or to your diet and then walking the edge and then going down the plant-based, sort of organic aisle that most grocery stores have is a great place to begin. But before any of that happens, you have to think about and have a plan for what you're going to eat or it's gonna be way too overwhelming when you enter the grocery store.

EatingWell: What are your favorite places to shop for groceries?

Bodrug: I'm almost embarrassed to admit this as a food blogger, but I love grocery delivery just because I feel like on a week to week basis, it can be very overwhelming planning out recipes, making sure that I'm getting the most affordable choices since I am buying a large amount of food to test recipes. So I'm a huge fan of Instacart. I typically choose whichever store on online grocery delivery, it will tell you which one has in-store prices. Whichever one has in-store prices on a given week, that's the one I'm shopping from. I'm in Canada, so you might not be as familiar with the grocery stores here, but one of my favorites is called Farm Boy. It's kind of like Canada's Trader Joe's. They have all of their own organic products, they have a lot of niche vegan products like vegan cheeses, vegan yogurts that are under the Farm Boy brand, so that's a fantastic grocery store.

EatingWell: Anything else that stays on your usual shopping list year-round?

Bodrug: Extra-firm tofu for protein, a can of beans—this could be chickpeas, white beans, black beans–depending on what I'm making that week. Our go-to greens are spinach and kale to make salads and to also add to soups and stews. And then I look at meals: Am I making pasta? Am I making something with rice? Am I making something with quinoa? Looking at the grains that I want that week and then additionally a sauce, so that could be purchasing marinara sauce, peanut butter, tahini, crushed tomatoes. Really, it’s meal planning and then building a list from there. But every week there's going to be some semblance of those items on a list.

EatingWell: Favorite snacks that help you stay satisfied throughout the day?

Bodrug: I'm a huge proponent of frozen fruit and frozen vegetables in general, but frozen fruit is fantastic for throwing into smoothies, especially in the warmer months where I will have a smoothie every day. A lot of people don't know this about frozen fruit and vegetables, but they can be just as healthy as fresh fruit and vegetables, especially if you live in a remote area where they're not harvesting that fruit or vegetable and bringing it straight to the grocery store. We will buy frozen berries, frozen peaches and frozen bananas almost every week to throw into smoothies. If I'm wanting a little pick-me-up, I'll make a smoothie and I'll add hemp seeds, chia seeds and vegan protein powder to it to make me more satiating as the hours go by. I also love fruit in general as a snack because when I think about the fact that something like a banana comes with a peel, it's like a pre-packaged snack!

EatingWell: For those looking to start eating more vegan dishes this January, what's a quick and easy dinner that comes to mind that they should try out?

Bodrug: Bolognese is the first meal that I ever veganized. And it was because I grew up eating and loving bolognese pasta that my mom would make. I remember when I went plant-based, I just didn't know how I would live without this meal to be quite frank. How I veganized it was by taking whatever vegetables I have in my fridge, and this is super customizable to what you have on hand. I like to make it with mushrooms, bell peppers, onion and spinach. And I'll throw all those vegetables in a food processor with lots of garlic and ground them into a veggie ground and then add that to a pan with some balsamic vinegar and spices. I’m a huge fan of nutritional yeast because nutritional yeast adds a real cheesy, umami flavor to vegan dishes. Add dried basil, saute that up and it will become a meaty mince. One tip to add even more protein to this dish would be to grind up a block of extra-firm tofu right into that mix and then add your favorite pasta sauce. You'll have a beautiful vegan meat sauce that you can serve over pasta or rice, and it's so delicious. I've been told by a lot of parents that their kids just eat this up and have no idea that it has a ton of vegetables in it. That's one I would highly recommend.

Get the Recipe: Vegan Bolognese