Random Meals #16

Sometimes, it just makes sense to eat what's there, whatever it is. So here are five more breakfasts, five more lunches, and five more dinners from the realm of "just eat something." I hope it helps! This is often a popular installment, but I don't necessarily show quite as much variety as you might want--lunch was really all about the sandwiches. But they were different sandwiches! So maybe that is good enough? Let me know.

Breakfast

Made from things I had around--I'll do my best to explain! I had orange juice mixed with some leftover strawberry kiwi Snapple (which is way too sweet for me to have alone, but I had been given at a work meeting with boxed lunches), clementine segments with some leftover canned pineapple chunks, toast with homemade plum chia jam, and a veggie sausage from my freezer.

Some days, when the struggle is real and you haven't made it to the grocery store, breakfast gets creative. Here I have some Mexican rice I cooked in my slow cooker on the basis of what I already had in my fridge and pantry, which I then topped with sliced avocado, some folded JUST Egg, scallions, flaky salt, and fresh-ground black pepper. This may have been random, but it was delightful!

This is here mostly because the photo turned out so terribly: lemon poppy seed pancakes with blueberry syrup and mango. I had the blueberry syrup left over from something else. It goes really well with mango; I highly recommend the combination!

A pretty standard breakfast, really, but I made it out of what I had after not being to the store for about a month: Avocado toast with hemp seeds, an Impossible sausage patty, tater tots, and ketchup.

This is actually one of my most standard breakfasts: grapes, clementine segments, a double blue peppermint moon milk (recipe from Moon and Spoon and Yum, which I make on repeat), and toast with cinnamon peanut butter, bananas, and cacao nibs. I really enjoy breakfasts that are some variation on toast, fruit, and a latte; I have them often!

Lunch

As I said above, somehow or other, as rarely happens, it seems like all my random lunches this time fall under the category of stuff on bread. Well, is there anything more friendly to the random meal than a sandwich?

I was exhausted and this made sense to me at the time: A split garlic Tuscan roll with one side with vegan mayo and cherry tomatoes and the other with avocado and cherry tomatoes. I had this with a soy milk latte to get more protein. It somehow worked for me!

An easy bento: The end of my Yves veggie ham (RIP, Yves, we'll miss you!) on some multigrain-and-seed bread with lettuce and vegan mayo, halved cherry tomatoes with a tiny cup of flaky salt, some veggie straws, and leftover cucumber poppy seed salad. This was good! I think the tomatoes were my favorite part.

I was even more excited about this lunch, though very similar--I had a sandwich with veggie ham, non-dairy cheese, lettuce, and vegan mayo on a garlic Tuscan roll (one of my new favorite things), veggie straws, and some chocolates. So good.

Sandwich season continued with veggie sticks; hemp-and-non-dairy-yogurt ranch dip; Field Roast mushroom-lentil slices on whole wheat bread with vegan mayo, cucumber, and arugula; and sliced Fuyu persimmon.

More sandwich stuff I happened to have: I toasted some multigrain-and-seed bread, then added Vegenaise, sliced tomato, some romaine lettuce, sliced red onion, sliced dill pickles, and slices of some Nasoya ginger tofu. With that sandwich, I had some veggie sticks (of course).

Dinner

I had some leftover sweet and sour veggies from when I made sweet and sour meatballs but no more meatballs, so I put that in a bowl with rice and a chopped up JUST Egg patty. It was kind of meh, so I added a generous amount of sriracha and it turned out okay!

A classic that's not so commonly seen here these days: Frito chili pie. My lazy version almost always uses Hormel vegetarian chili and non-dairy cheese, plus whatever else seems good--here, avocado, tomatoes, red onion, and black olives. It was great.

Would it be a random meal round up without peanut butter ramen?

And here's another classic: Spaghetti with (Impossible) meatballs and a raid-the-fridge salad (romaine, bell pepper, red onion, black olives, broccoli, and a homemade creamy lemon parsley dressing). I have little to say about this other than it always seems satisfying!

We end on one of the most random of random meals, which I will have a hard time explaining, but I will try. First, I started with some leftover Kaizen Spanish rice. I topped that with some homemade cheesy blended broccoli soup and stirred it up. I added a generous amount of Tabasco sauce. I then poured myself a little bowl of broken blue corn chips, which I used to dip into the soup-and-rice thing. Is it weird? Yes. But it was also kind of delicious.

Here's to random food!