At the beginning of this year I started watching the amount of calories that I consume and have lost a lot of weight by doing so. My calorie target is about 1450 (you can find yours and track calories by going here). I generally allow myself about 300 calories for breakfast 300 for lunch and 500 for dinner which leaves me with about 300 calories for various snacks throughout the day.

On top of that we recently decided that we should be vegan during the work week in order to avoid the crazy amount of free food offered at work. I have zero willpower when it comes to free pizza and cake on a semi regular basis and Wes will just eat anything in front of him. Going vegan during these days limited my regular breakfast options since I had to cut out yogurt (soy yogurt is awful!). Here enters evol burritos. Their Tofu & Spinach Saute burrito is delicious, vegan and are exactly 300 calories.  Perfect, right? Yes…except for the fact that they are $2.99 a piece. I don’t mind spending large amounts of money on food but after reading the ingredients I realized I could make similar burritos for much cheaper.

This isn’t going to be a pretty or particularly inventive post but I thought I would share this epiphany with the masses so you can make your own super cheap, customized, amazing burritos. You can just make them assembly line style and then freeze them for a quick breakfast later. I made 8 but you could easily make them on a larger scale, it took me about a 20 minutes to make 8.

My burritos were made with the evol burrito in mind but using what I already had. All I had to buy was the tortillas ($4), cilantro ($1) and saran wrap. I feel a bit bad about the saran wrap but it’s really the only way to go for breakfast burritos, it keeps the burrito together and makes it easy to grab out of the freezer on the way out of the apartment in the morning. Tofu had been on sale at Safeway the week before for $1 and I only used half a container for these burritos. So basically I made 8 burritos for less then the price of 2 evol burritos.

My burritos kind of have a curry/samosa sort of taste which is what I was going for since that’s how the Tofu & Spinach evol burritos taste. However, you can make these with anything, the options are endless. If you are ovo-lacto vegetarian you could make these with eggs (or egg beaters for a lower calorie option) and cheese instead of the tofu. You can make them spicy with chilies you could make them savory with soy breakfast sausage. You could even wrap up leftovers and make them for a quick lunch or dinner type of burrito. Evol has lots of options that might provide some inspiration.

Here’s what I used:

• half a large container of tofu (pressed, diced into small pieces) tossed with about 2 T nutritional yeast and about 1 t curry powder
• Leftover taco filling (soyrizo, black & pinto beans, canned tomatoes, onions)
• 1 1/2 c frozen spinach
• small amount of cilantro
• salsa that was leftover from a lunch meeting
• 4 small potatoes (cubed & tossed with a bit of olive oil and baked at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes)
• 1 package of 8 Smart & Delicious low carb, high fiber tortillas (only 80 calories per tortilla!!) I lightly toasted them on each side using the burner on my stove

Assembly:

I stacked all the heated tortillas on a plate. I lifted the top tortilla and put a layer of saran wrap below it. I put a small amount of each ingredient on the tortilla in this order:

• about 7 small potato chunks
• 2 heaping spoonfuls of taco mixture
• 5 or 6 pieces of the tofu
• sprinkling of frozen spinach
• sprinkling of cilantro
• small dollop of salsa

The amount of each ingredient you’ll need will vary based on the size of your tortillas and what you want the end result to be like. Want it to be more hearty? Add more potatoes. Want more veggies? Add them. My first few burritos were slightly overfilled and were harder to roll up, experiment until you get the feel for the right amount. Pretty self explanatory from here but once you get the all your ingredients on the tortilla simply roll it up like…well…a burrito. Then wrap the saran wrap around the burrito. Repeat process until you run out of tortillas.

I stored mine in a large tupperware type container to prevent freezer burn but a freezer bag would also work.

It seems that everyone has their own method of rolling up burritos some much more effectively then others. I worked at Del Taco briefly when I was 16 and learned how to fold them pretty well there. Here is what I do: Place your ingredients near the top of the tortilla (as shown above) fold the sides in slightly, then roll the full side towards the empty side tucking that small piece of tortilla that is at the top under your filling as you roll. I hope that makes sense…

Voila!