Laptop Lunches #73

Plain yogurt with a granola cluster mix with chocolate chips, almonds, and dried fruit from Archer Farms; two srawberries, leftover lamb kafta with apricot-mint sauce and some cherry tomatoes to fill the holes, and leftover "Cars" macaroni-and-cheese.

A few thoughts. One, the yogurt would not have been possible without the stainless steel condiment/sauce cups with lids I found at Ross a few weeks ago, so I'm really pleased with them. I'm not a really big yogurt-eater, and I'm always tired of it after half a "single serve" carton, so this takes care of that problem. (I think you could get about three of these cups from your typical carton of yogurt.) I just dumped the cups into the larger Laptop Lunches container and stirred the granola into the yogurt for lunch. (For those of you keeping score of my frugality, Yo Crunch! yogurt costs about 80-95 cents per carton where I am, and this version of mine ran me about 20 cents. So yes, it is possible to eat better than most grad students on a student budget.)

The lamb kafta was fine, just not quite what I expected--not enough of a lamb taste-- and ended up seeming like a super extravagant meal. Of course I have ground lamb in the freezer now and most of a package of dried apricots and some whole wheat couscous in the cabinet, and some parsley in the fridge for which I have other plans as well, so it wasn't exactly as if I spent all the money on six meatballs. But I did have to use an entire little packet of fresh mint for the sauce. I don't usually spend $1.79 on herbs for two meals! I should have waited until I got my container herbs for the warm season. I like to think that the mini-muffins I made out of that very black banana made up for the expense. In any case, the recipe came from a library book, Eating Well Serves Two: 150 Healthy in a Hurry Suppers. It's a fine cookbook, with lots of pictures, but not as good as my America's Test Kitchen ones. Then again, Eating Well gives me calorie counts, and with America's Test Kitchen I might not want to know...

The macaroni was on sale. I don't think there's an improvement over the original Kraft macaroni and cheese in the blue box in that genre, no matter how hard they try, but the shapes were a change of pace, anyway.

It wasn't until I'd finished packing this that I saw how veggie-deprived my lunch was, so I guess I'll have to make that up at dinner tonight.

Finally, a thank you to Cybele Pascal at the Allergy Friendly Cook for featuring my chicken salad lettuce wraps for this week's Allergy Friendly Friday. It's really rare that anybody calls a graduate student in the depths of dissertating "fun," and I'm glad to see I've entertained someone other than myself!