Random Meals #10

Using stuff up mode is good for random meals. This compilation spans quite a while; I guess I've been less random over the winter (or, more likely, the lighting was too bad a lot of the time to show you the food--you'll see some bad lighting here anyway).

As usual, I hope this is helpful to you to see--how things can be pulled together, pretty or not, and do the job when we're not that interested in doing anything more involved. One foot in front of the other until things get better is sometimes the only way we can manage, and that's okay. For these five breakfasts, five lunches, and five dinners, I muddled through. It's kind of nice to pull it all together like this as a reminder that even in the worst of times, I can take care of myself, somehow.

Breakfast

Sometimes, as I get to the end of the week, I'll need to figure out what to do with odds and ends. This may make for some weird breakfasts, but I usually still enjoy them. Here we have some leftover maple chili glazed tofu with leftover braised green beans and potatoes along with some multigrain toast spread with margarine and peach preserves and a soy-grain coffee latte (Pero, in this case). This was a pretty good way to start a day.

This was a meal under similar circumstances. I had one serving left each of gochujang mushrooms, Korean carrot salad, quick-pickled cucumbers, and steamed white rice. So I threw it all in a bowl with a folded JUST Egg and called it breakfast--and it was one of my favorite breakfasts I've had in quite a while!

This stuff both goes together, and doesn't, but it was fine in courses: Apple slices with chocolate sunflower seed butter, a grain coffee latte, and Thai sriracha toast.

This was a "use what's in the fridge" breakfast of toast with margarine and strawberry preserves, tofu-aquafaba scramble, and a vegan sausage patty. It was absolutely delicious; I've rarely had such a lovely meal. But because I've made that tofu-aquafaba scramble before, it goes here rather than in a "breakfast ideas" compilation. I can't be giving you the same ideas repeatedly! (Or maybe I can but I have irrational rules in my head about my blog.)

Here, I have some leftover banana cornmeal pancakes, tempeh sausage, and some tea with soy milk. There is maple syrup on the pancakes, but they soaked it up so all you can tell is that they got a bit shiny. Just trust that they tasted amazing.

Lunch

I had a small amount of chickpea salad left over from a work event--not the smashed kind, but the kind with carrots and cucumber in an herby dressing--and the ends of two loaves of bread, so why not make a sandwich? I toasted the bread and spread it with some vegan mayo, then sandwiched it around the salad. On the side, I had some potato chips. This was actually pretty amazing; I would definitely recommend it, if you're ever in a similar situation.

Sometimes, you just have to eat something. I had barley chickpea risotto in my freezer, veggies I'd strained out when making red wine gravy, an a slice of non-dairy smoked gouda. Put it all together and you have a weird-looking mixture that actually tastes pretty good if you heat it up and get the cheese a bit melty. Hey, a packed lunch isn't always a work of art...

And sometimes packed lunch is stereotypical. Here I have some jalapeno-flavored puffs, a veggie bologna and non-dairy cheese sandwich, and some dark chocolate.

Occasionally, I do better with leftovers than with the original! This is a bento very similar to one you've already seen, and it's the same salad, and the same cucumber sandwich, but this time I put Dijon mustard i the dressing and added half a clementine and some dark chocolate as a desert. Plus, I think the plating is prettier. But fundamentally, it is the same meal, which I enjoyed the first time around, so there was no surprise that it was good this time, too!

A recovering-from-an-injury meal: Refried beans, Banza chipotle "rice," Tofutti sour cream, a non-dairy quesadilla made from Wegmans plant-based cheddar shreds, avocado, and some homemade salsa. This was fine, nothing exciting, but perfectly serviceable.

Dinner

I probably would have shown this to you elsewhere, but the lighting was awful and so was the photography, so I thought it would go better here. This was, however, a making-do-with-what-I-had kind of meal, with RightRice basil risotto, some veggie sausages cooked with tomato and onions, and peas and carrots. To make this, I used my last roma tomato, my last two carrots, and the last bit of peas in my freezer. You'd think I planned this, though, as well as it all went together!

More bad lighting! Here we have a snow pea-and-carrot salad, Korean cucumber salad, rice with everything bagel seasoning, vegan nuggets in a sauce improvised from equal parts soy sauce and sweet chili sauce, and ketchup-pepper stir fry. It was good! I made this just because I had the ingredients available. It wasn't a special plan or anything.

Sometimes, the leftovers combine themselves in a way that was better than anything I come up with on my own. This was one of those times. I have some leftover turnip and white bean patties with mayo for dipping and some leftover RightRice mixed with leftover cooked spinach and onions and a bit of leftover cashew-based cheese sauce. So good.

Here we have the end of my "tuna" salad made into onigirazu with my last bit of sushi rice and my last nori sheet, served with a half an avocado I had in my fridge and the end of some snow pea and carrot slaw. This was basically just a "what's in the fridge" meal, but it worked! I added some sriracha mayo to the tuna to make it a bit different and it was delicious.

So many of these compilations include me saying this, but oh, well, I'll say it again: I was having a profound struggle and thus I made ramen. This one has a sauce of peanut butter, soy sauce, brown sugar, gochujang, and some vegan mayo mixed with some of the ramen water, and there are ramen noodles, carrots, and broccoli in the bowl. I topped it off with some folded JUST Egg from my freezer. I ate a comforting bowl of spicy noodles and lived to tell the tale another day.