I had a few objectives with this recipe:

• Gluten free
• Canola oil free
• Vegetarian
• Easily adapted to anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 calories
• Fewer ingredients
• Low grittiness
• Good taste

The ability to use the same powder/liquid recipe for both my wife and I was one of the key driving influences for this recipe. My wife needs about 1,500 calories to maintain her weight, and I need about 1,800 to 2,000 calories. Using the nutrient profile calculator on this site and the government calculator on the USDA site leads to a non-linear change to necessary micronutrients. This is most easily accommodated by using a multivitamin, but there are nutrients that are not contained in the multivitamin that had to be handled by some tweaking of the recipe.

The gluten and canola oil were easy to avoid, of course, and it's fairly easy to make recipes vegetarian (but, in my opinion, much more difficult to make them vegan and still taste palatable to me). I do have the option of using fish oil, but obviously that's no good for vegetarians (in fact, the fish oil capsules have gelatin in the shell, and so they're not even strictly pescatarian, which is my preference) ... it's just that the algal oil capsules are so expensive!

There are a few flavors of the NOW Whey Protein Isolate, and they have different nutrient content. I've attempted to take a "reasonable" average of the nutrient labels for the five flavors (this doesn't include the unflavored variety). Basically, I took the numbers from the Cookies 'n' Creme and Strawberry labels because they have the largest serving size (from which I decided, possibly incorrectly, that their labels would be most accurate) and averaged them. I also took the phosphorus and magnesium measures from the unflavored variety as representative of the amount in the flavored varieties, even though these nutrients weren't listed for them, on the basis that it's unlikely that NOW Foods removed those nutrients when they added flavors. We've tried the Toffee, Strawberry, Chocolate, and Cookies 'n' Cream. My wife prefers the Toffee, and I prefer the Strawberry. We both like the Chocolate. Note that the Cookies 'n' Creme flavor does NOT appear to be gluten free (although I can't see anything that would contain gluten).

Another option is to use the flavorless version of the whey and the flavorless almond milk (again, choose a low-calcium version), and either add your own flavors (e.g., LorAnn) or don't add any flavor (I haven't tried this, and I'm guessing that it tastes awful). You could also add fruit and make a smoothie. The flavorless whey is also cheaper, and you can buy it in larger quantities.

The brand of almond milk is important in this recipe if you want to stay within a good range of recommended calcium levels ... most almond milks have 30-35% calcium, which causes the calcium to go above the maximum recommended when scaling the recipe up to 1,800 or 2,000 calories.

Dispensing the MCT oil is somewhat inconvenient, but with one of these: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00INYDVMO?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00 I can simply add one pump for every 2.5 grams required.

Omega-6 was a pain ... adding a tiny amount of grapeseed oil is inconvenient (and difficult to judge), but I really didn't want to use capsules for it. Note that the alternative to adding oil is to take the grapeseed capsules. I bought this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VV21G4?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00, which I use to add the grapeseed oil ... one spray is 0.13 grams, which is convenient even for a single meal.

I am very pleased with the lack of grittiness - this took a fair amount of experimentation, including cycling through sunflower seed powder, almond flour, finely ground flaxseed, and finely ground chia seed. The omega-3 is in capsule form partly because of the grittiness of alternatives, but also because the non-algal vegetarian sources are sub-optimal.

I chose the women's 50+ Centrum for the multivitamin because most other multivitamins either have 18 milligrams of iron (which is too much for a lot of people) or no iron (which caused a deficit in the recipe). If you're not concerned about the high iron content then you can use Kirkland Signature Daily Multi and drop the added copper and selenium, which are (strangely) missing from the women's 50+ Centrum. However, the copper and selenium can be safely included even with the Kirkland Daily.

I chose parsley powder as a source of vitamin K as it doesn't seem to affect the flavor, and it seemed preferable to the alternatives (pills or liquids).

For choline I am using soy lecithin, although sunflower lecithin granules would be a reasonable alternative, or even choline bitartrate.

The "fewer ingredients" objective was clearly not met! I really don't like adding the MCT oil, but powdered MCT oil is expensive.