Dinner Plate #18

 

Things don't always go according to plan. But it's fine.

Here we have some maple Dijon tempeh (recipe from Watch. Eat. Learn.), mustard roasted cauliflower and broccoli (recipe from Veggies Save the Day--though that recipe presumes only cauliflower), and Greek lemon rice soup (recipe from Food by Maria) which was not intended to actually be soup, but was, this time, soup.

I had previously made this soup recipe, and, as you can see in my previous post, it did not become soup. I thought this would make a great side dish for the tempeh and roasted veggies, and it probably would have, except that it was, now, soup. Some internet sleuthing using the Internet Archive reveals that the original recipe has been modified to increase the amount of water since I last made it, so that explains that; oh, well, it still tasted good, even if it was a little weird to have it this way.

I didn't have enough cauliflower for the recipe I was using for that, so I added broccoli. It was delicious with the mustard glaze, too, though not very pretty. So ignore the seemingly charred bits of broccoli, and just know, it was good. But probably I'd recommend making the cauliflower recipe just with cauliflower in the future.

Because I had half a package of tempeh on hand, I needed to use it, and I cut down the original recipe to 1/4 of a batch for that. It was delicious, and also relatively easy. I would be happy to have it again, but I think it didn't really go as well with the flavors of the other things as I would like. It would go better with things like mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Oh, well. Now I know!

So this meal was not ideal, and I was a bit frustrated with it. I know the leftovers will work out for me because the soup will become less soupy and I can eat the other things in another configuration, so it's not a loss. But to make myself less frustrated, I whipped up the vegan version of a chocolate malt.

This is frozen banana chunks blended with soy milk, maca powder, cocoa powder, and some mixed nut butter. It helped!

In terms of pantry utilization, the malt was the primary means of doing it--given the maca, and also the cocoa powder which I seem to have purchased in absurd quantities--but the rest of what I made was really just designed to use things that I had in the fridge. I bought dill for that dill sauce you saw recently and I have so much dill. I don't know why dill is sold in bundles of that size. But I'm using it for now, and I enjoy the flavor of dill, even if it doesn't seem wintery (and theoretically isn't, though I suspect whenever I buy dill, summer or otherwise, it's probably been grown in a greenhouse). I'll either make it through the dill or I won't, but whatever happens, I'm still trying. And surviving!