Insulated Jar & Sides #52

 

Look at me with my mad food prep skills! Well, sort of. Maybe just my mad eating leftovers skills. (My more likely version of food prep! I'm too spontaneous in the kitchen to prep more than about one day ahead, mostly. But one meal can lean into the next.) Here we have a yellow squash and peppers sauté (recipe from Taste of Home), mini farfalle and spinach in a cashew-sweet-potato-based cheddar sauce (thinned with almond milk this time), and cubes of It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken's recipe for brown sugar and mustard glazed tofu. 

The pasta stayed warm in the jar for my car-based solo picnic, but the other things had cooled to room temperature. This set is not the best if you want your food to stay hot, but I knew everything in it was going to taste fine at room temperature, so it was okay. I had this with a cup of hot ginger tea, which is great for staying warm, though on this day by lunch it was about 40 degrees out so pretty cozy in my car with my blanket, coat, hat, etc.

I only made the recipe for the squash because I have so many peppers and this is the season of my life in which I must put peppers in everything. (This particular neighbor has an uncanny way of finding when I have just acquired a big package of something and giving me more of that thing; she's the same one who gave me a five pound bag of potatoes when I had just bought one of my own and I treated you all to potato-everything season.) But it was pretty, with the yellow, red, and green, even though the green does fade the second time around.

I had actually run out of the first round of this mini farfalle in cheesy sauce and made more of it because I loved it so much, but I added spinach to help use up the bag of spinach I have before it heads to unfortunate places. I adore this pasta with and without spinach and I think I am forever hooked on this sweet potato-cashew cheddar sauce. It is so good.

The tofu is ostensibly like ham but it didn't work out that way for me, really; I think it's because you cook the entire block of tofu at once instead of cooking slices, so it stays pretty soft. I think it's a really delicious recipe, mind you, but I have had more promising versions of tofu ham that were a lot more ham-like, like this pineapple-glazed tofu ham recipe that has you filet the tofu into two thinner blocks with tons of surface area. I might try that technique with this recipe sometime, if I make it again.

Being on site is hard; being off site is hard. Work is hard. But we knew that. This day was made harder for me because when I came home the water was shut off and had been, my neighbors said, for at least 7 hours. There was some sort of problem in a neighboring building. But I think I managed my feelings about that pretty well, which is a good sign. And I have water again.