Interlude: Random Meals

Sometimes, my meals are just...fuel. I still try with them, but they don't deserve their own posts. I decided to put them here in case they give anyone else any ideas. These are not posts of pretty food. They're just food: five examples each of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners--15 meals for the worn out, tired souls out there who just need to eat something.

Although most of my breakfast compilations have primarily sweet breakfasts, my everyday random breakfasts tend to be savory lately, so I suppose if that's more your thing, then this is for you!

Random Breakfasts

Random meal number one: A Hilary's maple breakfast sausage, some clementine segments and kiwi in a lime poppyseed dressing, and a rice cake topped with almond butter and mini chocolate chips. When it's the day before grocery shopping day, you just eat what's there! I had one kiwi, one clementine, one sausage, and the end of a jar of almond butter, so this is what it became.

Meal number two: I'd found a new recipe for chickpea flour scramble I wanted to try and it turned out really weird, but I made the best of it with avocado, a hash brown patty with ketchup, and some orange juice.

A third random breakfast: Here is a Wegmans Don't Be Piggy breakfast sausage patty, some avocado-mushroom toast, and a square of baked oatmeal with pears, bananas, and walnuts. This was more food than I really had an appetite for and I should have just chosen two of these things rather than all three, but on days like that I usually just eat my breakfast and then ruin my appetite for the rest of the day. Sigh.

I was so excited when JUST Egg turned up at the store again after a long drought, and it happened to be the store where I can get English muffins without dairy in them, so of course that necessitated a breakfast sandwich (which also has margarine and half a slice of Daiya American cheese on it). I had some kale wilting in the fridge so I made it into a kale-orange-banana smoothie, a not-too-sweet one with ginger and almond butter in it, too, with a splash of soy milk. I quickly concluded that next time I made this smoothie it would need more banana and maybe some orange juice because it was a bit too earthy for me, but I enjoyed this breakfast anyway.

This last random breakfast was a veggie sausage patty, leftover cauliflower scramble (you saw the first round of that in a recent breakfast compilation), indecisive toast, and orange juice. I didn't know whether I wanted a sweet or savory toast so I cut my slice in half and made both, one with margarine and jam and one with avocado and tomato.

Random Lunches

A random lunch you haven't seen: A deconstructed veggie BLAT (bacon, lettuce, avocado, and tomato--veggies kept separate to avoid making the bread soggy) with some homemade pumpkin soup I made from the end of a can of pumpkin puree. It didn't really go together, but it was good food. I just had to eat it in courses rather than together.

Random lunch number two was leftover pizza with a raid-the-fridge salad (iceberg lettuce, cucumber slices, shredded carrot, black olives, and Bac'n bits) served alongside a homemade vegan ranch-style dressing that I used for both the salad and the pizza. I loved this, but you didn't need to have a whole post dedicated to that pizza again.

Similarly, there wasn't a need to make a new post about the adzuki bean curry I made, but here it is again with a Cara Cara orange for lunch.

This one was pretty straightforward: apple slices with superseed peanut butter (I added a bit of essentially all the seeds I had on hand to some crunchy peanut butter--hemp, sesame, sunflower, pumpkin, and chia) and a pasta salad made from leftover broccoli soup and mayo mixed together with some seasoned salt as the dressing for farfalle, olives, peas, shredded carrot, and a finely chopped scallion you can't see here because it was just the white part. It was good, nothing special, and got me through another day.

You've seen something very similar to this so there was no point in showing it to you as a dedicated post, but here we have edamame salad, Cara Cara orange slices, white rice, cranberry meatballs, and some steamed carrots.

Random Dinners

Not so much random, as redundant: Frito chili pie! This one is made from homemade chili, and in addition to the mandatory Fritos and (Violife) cheddar, there is Tofutti sour cream, black olives, and finely chopped scallions. This is one of my favorite meals in general so there should be no surprise that it has shown up a lot!

I used the rest of the mozzarella I'd made for the pizza with homemade vegan mozzarella balls you saw above in some lasagna, which also had a tofu-cashew ricotta, a chopped up Tofurky sausage, and some peppers, mushrooms, and onions. It was a very rich lasagna--I got about five or six servings out of this loaf pan served with sides of veggies and garlic toast--but delicious. My one complaint I might have was that it wasn't saucy enough, but that one is just because I ran out of sauce. This time I knew to spread out my mozzarella before baking, and doesn't it look like it melted in? It didn't actually melt, but it looked melty, anyway!

I had some leftover mashed potatoes with no leftovers to go with them, but I wasn't in the mood to cook, really, so I stuck some nuggets in the toaster oven and steamed some broccoli and carrots. I then decided I wanted a dipping sauce and mixed up some Tofutti sour cream with various seasonings (lemon juice, salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, dried dill, and dried parsley). It was enjoyable, if basic.

A clear-the-fridge fried rice makes a good random dinner. This one is a pineapple-ham fried rice made with the very end of some Tofurky ham, veggies, JUST Egg, pineapple, soy sauce, and leftover basmati rice. I topped it with scallions and black sesame seeds. It seemed to need something, but it was a perfectly serviceable meal on a Friday night after a long week.

One of the ways I handle an excess of broccoli stems is to make this broccoli soup, but it rarely has many florets in it when I make it and therefore just looks like a vaguely speckled cheesy soup. It tastes pretty good, but I really make it because the leftovers are a great beginning for a casserole or a pasta sauce. You've seen references to this soup a lot, but I don't think I've ever shown the actual soup. On the first day, I just eat the soup with croutons.

I kind of like showing you these random meals! Do you want to see more of this sort of thing? Let me know!