ECO Lunchbox Three-in-One #109

 

Still challenging myself on this no spend week, here I have a remarkably successful lunch: Peanut butter and apple slices, a no-bake quinoa cookie, and an improvisational quinoa salad.

This used up the end of a jar of peanut butter, so I get bonus points for that!

The friends who were moving gave me apples and carrots, so I was stocked with those.

And we have double quinoa! So we have the cookie, which is from a recipe from Simply Quinoa, and the salad, which was...from raiding my fridge.

First, the salad. I made a dressing of canola oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, and chili garlic sauce. Then I microwave-steamed a chopped broccoli stem, shredded a small carrot, and chopped up my last scallion. I mixed all that stuff up with my leftover cooked quinoa and some roasted sunflower seeds, then topped the result with black and white sesame seeds. This was delicious. I would make this again, probably, on purpose!

The cookie is more quinoa (both in cooked and flaked form), with other things like cocoa powder and maple syrup. You're meant to freeze them, which I did, but packing it like this meant that it had thawed to a kind of lump of sticky stuff at lunchtime. Delicious sticky stuff, but not really a portable cookie. Oh, well. We tried!

This is a layered protein-style lunch, but my calculations show it had just under 20 grams of protein, so I think that was pretty good! (Please consult your own doctor about your dietary needs, though, obviously.)

I have tagged this as gluten free, but if you make this, and need to avoid gluten, make sure your soy sauce is gluten free. Many soy sauces contain wheat, and are therefore not gluten free.