Random Meals #7

What have you been eating lately? Here is another assortment of 15 random meals--5 breakfasts, 5 lunches, and 5 dinners--that I've had in recent months. A lot of this is just leftovers, re-envisioned. But you seem to like to look at my leftovers, so here is what I did with some leftovers!

Breakfasts

I eat some variation on this for so many meals: Fruit salad with whatever fruit I have available, a Cafix and soy milk latte, and a muffin. This muffin happens to be a double chocolate zucchini muffin.

I had some leftover tofu scramble and an inexplicably strong craving, so I made a breakfast burrito with the scramble, some hot sauce, and Daiya cheddar. Alongside that, I had some easy breakfast potatoes with orange bell pepper and onions. Maybe nothing too colorful, but it was delicious.

Here we have some sweet potato, apple, and kale hash served with a veggie sausage patty and some JUST Egg scrambled with some finely chopped onions. I adored this. It made me happier than a meal has in a very long time!

Sometimes, I just don't want to have to think. So a bagel with a veggie sausage patty, a folded JUST Egg patty, some non-dairy cheese, and margarine really hits the spot. On impulse, I added spinach to this one for some greens. Spinach is great to add to things, because the flavor doesn't overpower anything. I had this with a cup of orange juice-and-cider. The cider is from one of those packets that bears no actual resemblance to apples. If you add a cinnamon stick and orange juice, though, it's pretty good. I'm slowly making my way through a box of the stuff, and I doubt I will buy it again. But this breakfast saw me through a morning well, and I'm grateful.

I used to travel sometimes. What a fantasy. But really! I used to go places! And when I went places, I used to carry oatmeal packets, in case hotel or bed and breakfast meals left vegan me in the lurch. But given that now I...don't go places, I decided I should just eat my oatmeal packets up. They're going to go bad eventually if not. So here we have a packet of apple cinnamon instant oatmeal that I cooked in soy milk and then topped with leftover roasted sweet potatoes, some cinnamon-and-brown-sugar apples I made on the stove, and a generous spoonful of peanut butter. This was a pretty great breakfast. Packet oats are very different texture experience than the oats I usually make, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Lunches

Straight up leftovers, but this was so good: pasta with beet sauce, smoked tofu, spinach and mushrooms, and carrots.

Here's something a bit similar: Macaroni and homemade non-dairy cheese, a TVP stuffed red pepper half, steamed carrots, and zucchini and yellow squash. Leftovers are often my jam, and this was great.

This was just an assortment of stuff I had: Some blanched broccoli, leftover roasted sweet potatoes, mango and avocado with chili powder and lime juice, and some chickpea salad.

This was a pretty basic "the stuff was in the fridge" lunch, but still delightful--plus this time you get to see the lemony herb dressing with my asparagus and potato salad veggies that I showed you recently all naked! There is also fresh pineapple, cubed smoked tofu, and halved grape tomatoes, along with a little chicky cup of flaky salt. This was a really satisfying lunch, if pretty simple.

Low-key lunch at home on a lazy Saturday: A Tofurky and Daiya swiss sandwich on whole grain toast with sliced tomato, romaine lettuce shreds, some dill pickle, and vegan mayo and an experimental lemony yogurt cucumber salad with fresh mint. The salad was okay but nothing too exciting. The meal as a whole was very satisfying, though.

Dinners

I recently re-made my mock tuna casserole for the first time in a long time. I originally gave the recipe here, alongside dreadful photography. However, it is actually really delicious! I might make a few changes to it now that I have more experience, but even so I enjoyed this thoroughly. But it is hard to make it look attractive served up on a plate, so you're looking at a full casserole dish.

Just some leftovers the day before a grocery shopping trip: White bean salad with avocado, tomatoes, and cucumber; potato salad with chives; and Triscuits with a bit of Daiya Swiss cheese. I really enjoyed this with a cup of herbal tea.

This is a classic when I have some rice to use up: "Egg" fried rice (it's a folded JUST Egg cut into chunks) with sriracha mayo and sesame seeds. Is it pretty? Not very. But it's really delicious!

This might have made it to its own post, but for the lighting being so terrible because I was cooking later at night than accommodates photography. But here we have my own recipe for pastina pilaf (still probably my favorite among the recipes I've developed), a version of maple-glazed tofu that tasted good but looked a bit weird, and skillet zucchini with mushrooms (recipe from Diethood). The mushrooms I used were just plain sliced white mushrooms and I think that was the fatal flaw in this, because they really needed cute little button mushrooms, which would have cooked down a bit differently and been less watery. Don't get me wrong. None of this was bad and I enjoyed my dinner. But when I was going for aesthetics, this was not my greatest achievement. So here it is.

It had been too long since I'd made a raid-the-fridge soup, so I tried a new version of one with a cornbread muffin from my freezer. This soup consisted of some onions and celery sauteed in vegan butter, to which I then added minced garlic, finely chopped mushrooms, and finely chopped broccoli. After that had cooked a bit, I added lemon juice, veggie broth made from bouillon, nutritional yeast, Italian seasoning, and a basic cashew cream. After that had simmered a bit, I added some leftover carrot rice and adjusted my seasonings (it really just needed seasoned salt). I garnished my weirdly sludge-like-but-delicious soup with some parsley. Some of the very best soups come from whatever random things I have in the fridge--the most random of my random meals!

Here's to finding a way to take care of ourselves, however it looks!