Random Meals #5

Although I love sharing my more deliberate meals with you, I also find it fun to bring you these round ups of the daily sustenance I put together out of whatever is around. There are some issues with evening lighting I hope you'll forgive for the random dinners, and I'm confident that you will recognize some repetition here, but that's what makes this an authentic journal of my life in food, after all--I eat leftovers and repeat favorites, just like any sensible person does.

Breakfasts

Here we have some yogurt with berries and granola alongside a bagel with JUST Egg and veggie sausage. It's a basic, delicious meal that sustained me for a long morning.

Here's the best use of leftover potatoes ever! I made some quick hash browns with onions and red bell pepper, then sauteed some mushrooms, and finally warmed up a frozen vegan sausage patty and scrambled up some JUST Egg with chives. As breakfast goes, it really doesn't get much better. I had no bread, so I could not have toast, alas, but otherwise? Perfection.

I had some leftover mashed sweet potatoes, so I made a quick breakfast bowl with those, some granola, and peanut butter. But the star of this breakfast was my kiwi-grape smoothie! I will have a recipe for that one to share someday, because it was uncommonly good, if a slightly odd shade of light olive green you don't expect in a smoothie. A handful of spinach will make it vibrant and shouldn't do anything to the flavor, but I will let you know after I run that experiment.

This breakfast bowl is a base of leftover rice cooked with tomatoes and green chiles (a shortcut Mexican rice, basically) that is topped with some non-dairy Mexican-style cheese shreds, a JUST Egg scrambled with onions, bell pepper, and mushrooms, and a veggie sausage patty. Though this was hard to eat because cutting the sausage patty was difficult when presented this way (note to self to put future iterations of this on a plate), it was really good and satisfying. You'll notice this is a much less photogenic version of another similar breakfast bowl I shared recently, too.

A classic I hadn't had in a long time: Peanut butter and jelly oatmeal with bananas. There is something so comforting about this porridge. I love the way the peanut butter and jelly melt down into it, and I love the way the bananas add extra sweetness. I cooked the oats in soy milk for extra protein and creaminess. I could eat this for any meal of the day, but breakfast is the most common.

Lunches

The bento version of a meal you'd already seen: Homemade naan, zucchini "hummus" dip, spinach, tahini dressing, and a white bean-cucumber-tomato salad. To eat this, I mixed everything in the container on the right for one big salad, and dipped the naan into the zucchini dip.

The next day, free of naan but not of the other things, I packed lentil crisps, a sliced plum, and a tortilla wrap filled with zucchini "hummus" dip, spinach, white bean-cucumber-tomato salad, and tahini dressing. It got soggy by lunch but it was still delicious.

A lunch at home: a sandwich and chips, how original! I had whole wheat bread spread with Vegenaise and filled with romaine lettuce, red onion, Spanish olives, dill pickle slices, Violife American cheese, and Yves bologna. I don't know if I've ever put Spanish olives on a sandwich but I will be doing that again; I loved their little intermittent bursts of saltiness.

Another leftover-heavy bento: Here I have some cheesy quinoa-broccoli-mushroom casserole, some prepackaged baked Mediterranean-style tofu, and apple-cucumber salad. The salad is a recipe from Nourish that I would definitely make again. It's super simple and yet unexpected. It was a great way to take advantage of apple season.

Leftovers again, but with a fresh salad: The salad is romaine, cucumber, tomato, yellow bell pepper red onion, black olives, Bac'n bits, and homemade ranch. There are a few slices of leftover sausage pizza to go with it. This is kind of perfect for a lunch; I couldn't ask for more.

Dinners

A perennial favorite: Frito chili pie! It has Fritos (of course), Hormel vegetarian chili, Daiya Mexican cheeze shreds, tomatoes, red onion, black olives, romaine lettuce shreds, and some Tofutti sour cream. Delicious.

Spaghetti and meatballs with garlic toast. Does this turn up in every iteration of the random meals series?

Here's another favorite but we haven't seen it in a while: Mashed potatoes and Gardein "turkey" cutlets with gravy and a side of peas and carrots. Though this isn't really that much of a lazy dinner, since I made the potatoes and the peas and carrots, it's a good compromise between my aversion to effort and my need for something homey and fresh. It looks a bit sad and dingy because it's edging into winter and it was pretty dark when I took the photo, but it was wonderful in real life.

Yet another beloved easy dinner: Refried beans topped with some Daiya shreds, avocado mashed with salt and lime juice, long grain rice cooked pilaf style with a can of diced tomatoes and green chiles (i.e., cheater Mexican rice--you saw some of this leftover at breakfast in this post), and a warm flour tortilla. Delicious and easy!

Here we have some more leftover sausage pizza (one slice got a bit injured when I cut it, but it's fine), a little bit of leftover vegan ranch I'd made, and a salad based on stuff I had in the fridge--in this case, romaine lettuce, some cucumber, clementine segments, slivered almonds, and a bit of ginger poppy seed dressing I'd made a while ago and needed to be eaten. I am slowly discovering that I like salad, but I need to vary my salads and make them more exciting than the standard garden salad I tend to make if I'm making a salad. This was a nice meal. (I didn't eat the pizza and salad lunch on the same day as the dinner, incidentally; I am careful, most of the time, not to eat the same meal for lunch and dinner.)

Looking this over, I think I've been eating pretty well! I love how much I've been exploring salads lately. Do you have a favorite easy salad?