Random Meals #3

Here it is again: Five breakfasts, five lunches, and five dinners made up of whatever I had on hand at the time. I think what we learn from this is that I eat a lot of toast at breakfast and a lot of potatoes at dinner! I can't help it. I'm a carb person.

Dinner is also the meal I have the least energy to prepare most of the time, so these dinners are especially random. But hey. It is what it is. I hope this gives you some sort of inspiration, in any case.

Random Breakfasts

This one looks more purposeful than random, and it was one of my favorites. Orange juice, JUST Egg scrambled with mushrooms and peppers, avocado toast (of the purest kind--just avocado with salt and pepper), and leftover mango-blueberry crumble. It's times like this I wish I had more than the internet to impress with my food.

This was another savory-and-sweet combo, with two very different toasts. One has lemon-dill hummus and sauteed vegetables with fresh dill. The other has cashew butter and sliced banana topped with a mixture of hemp seeds, chia seeds, and cacao nibs. This was a nearly perfect meal.

One morning, I made a kale smoothie with kale, soy milk, cinnamon, almond butter, a frozen banana, and a couple of Trader Joe's mini mango mochi because I need to use the mochi up somehow and I'm averse to just eating them. It was fine in the smoothie but it also gave me pause, in that I am apparently now hiding frozen desserts in kale to make them edible! Who am I?

In any case, my smoothie accompanied an English muffin with the two halves treated in two different ways: One with margarine and jam, the other with Miyoko's cream cheese, a strawberry, chia seeds, and a drizzle of rice nectar. Both were good; no complaints. (For full disclosure, I got the idea for the strawberry chia seed one from the Wooden Skillet). Also bonus points to me for figuring out how to make sliced strawberry look attractive on an English muffin. I often get very haphazard with my fruit placement, but this worked.

When I was in my early adulthood, one of my favorite meals, any time of day, was a pancake with butter and syrup with a side of scrambled egg, on the same plate so the syrup got into the eggs. I have long ago stopped eating anything like that. But I remembered it when I put all this stuff together on one plate: I have here a lone leftover chai spiced pancake with a homemade cherry-almond topping, a couple of Jack & Annie's maple breakfast sausages, and a JUST Egg scrambled with spinach. Nothing ran into anything else but I found the flavors really complimentary, somehow, in the same way that my syrupy scrambled eggs used to make me feel.

I forgot how little a single JUST Egg is if you don't add vegetables to it; I probably should have scrambled two here! But in any case, this breakfast was avocado toast with spinach, mushrooms, and tomatoes; a scrambled JUST egg, and half a Cara Cara orange. This was really good, even if my JUST Egg does look like a weird little lump of goo this way.

Random Lunches

I don't know why, but I'm more likely to eat a packed salad than one I make at home. I think it may be that I'm more likely to pack one than to make multiple courses for a meal at home. In any case, this is a pretty basic salad (romaine, tomato, cucumber, and red onion) with bac'n bits in the little chick cup and homemade vegan ranch in the Monbento sauce cup. I had it with leftover penne in a creamy sauce with kale, red pepper, onions, and veggie sausage crumbles. Good, but you'd already seen the penne and I figured it wasn't worth a whole new post about it.

More packed leftovers you didn't really need to see again as a standalone post: Barley pilaf with carrots and peas, a slice of Field Roast's Celebration Roast, and zucchini and red pepper saute.

For a lunch at home, I'd decided it had been way too long since I made the tofu and smoked almond "ham" salad from the Booming Platter, so I whipped some up for a sandwich on multigrain-and-seed toast with a bit of extra Vegenaise and some lentil crisps. Is this ham salad? No. But it has a wonderful texture when you combine the finely chopped almonds with crumbled tofu, and the seasonings make it utterly addictive. It's not a pretty sandwich filling by any stretch of the imagination. I once tried adding some beet juice to make it pink and it was all wrong, so I never did it again; this is just supposed be a brown-beige thing. You can make it prettier with sliced tomato and lettuce, but I didn't have the energy for that on this day.`

You've already seen something very similar to this in a "what I ate in a day" post: Berries, a cherry-chocolate energy bite, some non-dairy cheddar triangles, cucumber slices, off-brand Ritz crackers and some of that tofu-and-smoked-almonds "ham" salad from the batch I made for the sandwich you see above. A lovely lunch, if slightly redundant!

More redundancy: Leftover pasta salad with apples, chocolate, and peanut butter. A basic meal, but delicious.

Random Dinners

Is there anything more soothing than spaghetti and meatballs with Parmesan cheese and garlic toast? (Vegan, of course.) I hadn't had this in a long while but it's definitely one of my favorite meals.

Here's a really random dinner: Potato salad; a JUST Egg scramble with Yves veggie ham, spinach, onions, and shredded Daiya cheddar; and a slice of toast with margarine. I had made the dill potato salad with plans to have it with canned baked beans, but by the time the potato salad was ready to eat I just wasn't in the mood for the baked beans and wanted something more savory (my baked beans were sweet). These things don't really go together but I enjoyed my meal.

You know how, sometimes, in the Before Times, we had potlucks? And we'd go grab stuff and put together some very odd combinations that somehow just worked? Well...I had leftover spaghetti noodles, leftover peanut sauce, leftover potato salad, a single leftover mock crab cake, and a little bit of tartar sauce and I figured, what the heck. Why not put them together? Although this does look extremely unappetizing, this was so good. Just don't tell anyone if you come home from work on a Friday night, stare down your fridge, and decide to go rogue. Nobody has to know what brown-and-beige concoctions you scarf down. Unless you blog it for the world. (Shh. It's our secret.) This one is definitely the most random of the random meals in this compilation.

Here's a basic, redundant meal for you: Nuggets with homemade ranch, mashed potatoes, and green beans. (All vegan, of course.) This is the kind of thing I eat when I have leftover mashed potatoes and the nuggets are calling to me from the freezer.

And...more nuggets, with more homemade ranch! This time with pizza snacks. I am slightly embarrassed to say how delicious this was. It is beige, it is junk food, and it is glorious. 

Thanks for coming along with me in all my randomness!