Pasta and Seitan

Today's lunch features some good old friends - pasta with vegetarian bolognese, a reuben sandwich with seitan, some raw bell pepper as a snack and a yogurt.

Soup and Corn Muffins

Here I've tried a new soup with cauliflower and pasta from an Italian cookbook. I accompanied it by homemade corn muffins.
My midmorning snack were fried skewers with seitan, mini bell peppers and cherry tomatoes.

Polenta and Pumpkin Goulash

 For this lunch I brought polenta with pumpkin goulash, I still had to urgently use a piece of pumpkin and found this recipe on the internet.
I also brought a little container for a mushroom-tofu filling for my second breakfast - I bought rolls a the bakery before I went to the office.
As an afternoon snack I brought these incredible healty-looking cookies and some early cherries my mother-in-law gave me.

Pizza and snacks

This looks like a sad little lunch, but it was actually quite okay. I had pieces of premade pizza and a little container with two soy sausages and some mini-bell peppers filled with tomato-potato-salad. Yummy!

Quinoa Stir-fry and a Bell Pepper Side Dish

For this day I wanted to do something with quinoa and looked around on the internet until I found a recipe for a vegan quinoa chowder. I did not want the soupy consistency, so I made it as a stir-fry instead. As a side dish I prepared some fried bell pepper with garlic, almond flakes and soysauce. My midmorning snack were cucumber sandwiches.

Mittwochsbox - 12th of March, 2014: Mexican

Today I'm participating in my first blog event, I'm really exited! On two wednesdays a month Simone from the German blog http://blog.leckerbox.com/ invites everybody to show a lunchbox about a theme she proposes.
This week it's Mexican cuisine. I already had a Mexican lunch with my standard dishes not long ago, and I did not want to just repeat all those typical variations on tortillas and avocado (although they finally make an appearance...), so I did a bit of research.
It's not easy to find authentic vegetarian/vegan Mexican dishes that are a bit different, so I ended up chosing some ideas inspired by Mexico on the German website http://veganwelt.de/ .
On the right you have a potato stirfry and two mini bell peppers filled with quinoa on a bed of chimichurri champignons.
On the left you can see my midmorning snacks and dessert: burrito-"sushi" filled with homemade zucchini-salsa, seitan and avocado, two tangerines and sweet empanadas with pineapple filling.
So ... that's a lot of food. I'm not an ambitious person, but I always want to do things "right", so I might have overdone it a bit. At least today I will not have to buy a chocolate bar on my way home because I've run out of provisions!

Fried Quinoa with Kimchi and an Equally Exotic Dessert

This day I did again what you should never do and made three new recipes at a time. Don't try this at home, kids! I have to say that none of the three really convinced me, although I finished everything.
The main dish is this recipe of fried quinoa with kimchi:
http://mrandmrsvegan.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/home-cooking-kimchi-fried-quinoa/
I have to admit that I had never eaten kimchi before. I supposed I would probably like it , because I love sauerkraut so much, but it's really, really different and I still have to get used to it. The dish turned out totally okay, but I used too much sesame oil and couldn't really taste the rest of the ingredients, so that was probably not how it was supposed to be. I'll probably try this again at another point.
Then there's the dessert. This is sautauthig, the blueberry-corn-pudding of the Native Americans. This might not be a very unusual thing for you depending on where you live (Isn't the internet marvelous?), but believe me, for a German living in Spain it doesn't get much more exotic. It's not even very usual to find blueberries in the store, so when I spotted these, I just had to try something new. The dessert was nice, but, well, unusual.
And finally there are some stuffed mini-bell-peppers as a snack. I loved the idea of these, but will try another stuffing next time.