Low Bowl #34

 

Time for "good stuff in a bowl" again: spring mix salad (recipe from Cooktoria, veganized with Follow Your Heart non-dairy bleu cheese crumbles), some vegan chick'n pieces I found buried in my freezer that I do not remember buying with some green tahini sauce, and savory quinoa with veggies (recipe from All Recipes).

In spring, my blog patterns suggest, I often lose the momentum needed for use-it-up mode and just end up accumulating stuff again. So I'm going to hack myself with some more narrow focus than just pantry utilization, and focus on one area of the kitchen for a few weeks. For the next few weeks, I'm going to try to use things in my freezer. The other rules still apply: Anything I buy that isn't a clear staple food must be used all the way up, not just kept around.

So, yes, I'm adding bleu cheese crumbles to salads, but also I'm digging into the freezer to find things like these chick'n pieces. They're from a brand that now adds egg whites (Quorn), so I don't know when I would have bought them, other than it may be possible I was saving them in there out of the feeling of losing options. They definitely didn't have egg whites in the package I had. So long as they were in the freezer, I theoretically had the option of using the chick'n pieces. But there are other chick'n pieces, and I don't really use chick'n pieces very often anyway. I need to overcome my irrationality. The chik'n was easy to prep--it's a microwavable variety--and though bland, the sauce really helped matters. Plus, in a bowl like this, nothing is meant to be the star of the show, and it was truly fine.

I made the quinoa just out of a desire for variety. I could have cooked quinoa any number of ways, but for some reason I went to look for a recipe. I think the recipe uses too much olive oil, but otherwise, it was pretty good. It's also not really a star of the show type dish, but works well with other things, and because it had different flavors than the other things, it contributed well.

The salad was less exciting than I'd hoped, but it was still pretty good. If I'm going to enjoy the change in the weather at all, I should probably be eating more "spring" foods like spring mix, though spring mix is available year round, grown in a greenhouse in a neighboring state. At least it isn't subject to tariffs!

All in all, a successful effort. I look forward to a fun freezer utilization focus! My freezer is overstocked with some things (like homemade muffins), so I expect you'll see those in a journal entry, but it's also full of odds and ends from a lot of things I cooked when the weather was cooler. In this season when it doesn't get hot enough to force me to turn on the air conditioning unless I do something foolish like simmer a soup for hours or turn on the oven, I'm especially grateful for that homemade convenience food.