Random Meals #14

It is now warm, far too warm to think about baking. It is hard to want to eat at all, let alone cook, in weather like this. But I am doing it anyway. Here's how it's been going for my most chaotic of series, with 5 breakfasts, 5 lunches, and 5 dinners I made with what I had over the past few months.

Breakfast

Sometimes the classic things are the most delightful, right? So here we have a fruit salad (pineapple, mango, strawberries, and blueberries) with a hash brown patty, toast with margarine, and a veggie-JUST Egg scramble. I tried a new-to-me margarine I won't be buying again, because it does not melt easily, but which wasn't inedible so we'll be seeing it for a little while. Live and learn.

More classics: Field Roast maple apple sausage links, a hash brown patty, toast with margarine and strawberry preserves, and a bowl of fruit (kiwi, mango, and banana). This time I stuck the toast back in the toaster oven after I added margarine and the stuff melted, so I at least know how to handle it now!

I had a bit of silken tofu to use up, so I made a little cup of chocolate tofu mousse, which I had alongside a grain coffee soy latte, an orange, and a slice of avocado multigrain toast with tomatoes. Random, perhaps, but absolutely delicious. (This was the last Cara Cara orange for me for the year.)

Wanting to focus on using things in my freezer, I spotted some vegan sausage crumbles and some frozen biscuits, and that, of course, is the basis for breakfast. I made some sausage gravy, realized toward the end that it needed way more soy milk, and gave up and had this sort of creamy sausage topping on the biscuit instead. You know what? It was delicious, like a whole new thing. I might even make it again that way, who knows?

My freezer also had some potato bites, which I'd largely forgotten about. So I had some of those with a tofu scramble and toast. There isn't much to say about this; it was delicious, as I knew it would be. The potato bites, being potatoes, are of course a wonderful accompaniment to a scramble.

Lunch

A mishmash of leftovers for lunch: Italian red peppers with tomatoes and onions, Italian fusion tofu, brown rice, sweet and sour cauliflower, and green beans. Somehow, this worked, in spite of being Italian and Chinese flavors at the same time.

This is an absolute classic: Peanut butter and strawberry preserves sandwich on toasted whole what bread, Cara Cara orange slices, and Fritos. It had been way too long since I'd had a PB&J, and this one did not disappoint. Something about PB&J goes so well with Fritos, too!

And here we have some kale salad, a hummus and veggie wrap (I added some more pickled onions), and potato bites with a creamy mustard sauce for dipping. (It was just vegan mayo and mustard; I didn't have the wherewithal to make honey mustard, though that would also have been good.) This was perfectly satisfying.

Here, I mixed leftover broccoli soup with cooked macaroni and melted some vegan cheese shreds into it, then topped it with Bac'n Bits and had some veggie nuggets on the side. This was fine; nothing special, but not everything has to be special.

You've seen all this stuff  before, but here it is in bento form: Shredded wheat crackers, parsley hummus, cucumber salad, carrot quinoa salad with broccoli sprouts, and sweet and sour potato salad. This was virtually perfect as a midday meal!

Dinner

I made my usual default (spicy peanut butter ramen) with a soupy variation, because this time I added the peanut butter, gochujang, brown sugar, and soy sauce to the water I was cooking the noodles in. As always, I added scallions. This truly is the perfect meal when I'm barely making it through a day, and it's always so comforting, soupy or not. I'll probably make the soupy version again, though, especially on days when I don't think I've managed to drink enough water.

This was followed, naturally, by spicy peanut butter ramen in the more traditional-to-me, saucy version. It was wonderful.

For a low-appetite evening, I had leftover cream of celery soup with a savory zucchini corn muffin I had in my freezer. These things went well together.

I had leftover stuffed leeks, rice, and yogurt dill sauce, plus half an avocado in the fridge. It was a perfect avocado and it was calling to me, so I cut it up and put it on top of the rice and leeks. This was delicious!

I was just not in the mood for much of anything one hot evening, and the only thing that appealed to me was cobbler. So I made a stovetop strawberry cobbler. I had that with some whipped coconut cream and soy milk for dinner. Of all my randomness, this may be the most random, but I wouldn't bat an eye at eating something like this for breakfast, so why not dinner? It was pretty good, but I think cherries or peaches work better in my cobbler recipe.