Brave New Food

Hm, strange new stuff today. First things first - I dreamt about my main dish the night before. It is boiled black quinoa arranged in layers with combinations of fried vegetables (pumkin, bell pepper and carrot for the orange layer, tomatoes, bell pepper and red beans for the red layer). I loved recreating in reality what I had seen in my sleep, but the taste was just so-so, so I don't think my dream was the presage of a big carreer as a famous chef...
I also brought an interesting dessert, it is an orange "pudding" made with orange juice + a bit of sugar that I boiled with agar-agar. Not bad, I might make something like that again.
My midmorning snack was a bagel with fried vegetables.

Mashed Potatoes and Company

Finally a bigger lunch again. I had homemade mashed potatoes and two soy sausages, accompanied by fried cherry tomatoes with a touch of garlic. Yummy! My midmorning snack was a sandwich with a sauerkraut filling (shown open) and some radishes.

Soup and Pretzel

For this lunch I brought lentil soup and a pretzel. The most interesting thing was probably my midmorning snack - sweet quinoa cooked in orange juice with dried fruit and nuts.

Lentil Soup and Nut Bread

I feel like such a bad blogger, lately I'm just not in the mood to prepare nice lunches for the office, and I often buy something.
For this day I just made a lentil soup and nut bread with lentil spread (so I could empty the jar) and grated courgette. I still had a storebought carrot croquette at the fridge in the office.

Canneloni and a Sandwich

For this lunch I tried something new, a vegan recipe for canneloni with a vegetable filling.
I also brought a cereal bar, bread with tomato paste and avocado plus some raw kohlrabi. I just love kohlrabi and was so happy to find some at an Indian (Pakistani?) shop. They also had a lot of other strange-looking fruit and vegetable, I suppose I will buy something new next time, it's always nice to broaden one's horizens.

Soup and Tomato Rolls

I finally had time to make a bigger lunch again. Here we have a millet soup accompanied by homemade tomato rolls. I just used my usual recipe for wholemeal rolls, but used a little less water, instead I added tomato paste and also some chopped dried tomatoes and dried fried onions. They turned out delicious, although the taste of the onion was more dominant than the tomato flavour.
As a snack I brought oven champignons with a filling based on bread and some raw vegetables.

Tofu on bread

Oops, another lunch with a sandwich. That was not what I had planned, I had made a bell pepper-tofu-filling that I usually use for pita bread, but there was none left, so toast it was.
I also brought a Mediterranean courgette roll, filled with dried tomates, an olive and an almond. Wasn't there a joke in an Asterix comic about the Romans eating a cow filled with pork filled with lamb filled with pheasant filled with hare filled with squab? Well, this would be the vegan version.
The smoothie that I brought as a snack (with grapes and kiwi, among other things) tasted a lot better than it looked.

Chili

Today I brought some homemade chili with beans, seitan, bulgur and potatoes. It was nice but turned out a tiny bit too spicy. I accompanied it by a pretzel-type roll.
I also brought my typical quinoa-salad as second breakfast. Maybe an unusual choice, but this one of the very few dishes that make me feel filled and satisfied during hours. And it's delicious, so what's not to like?

Tomato Soup and Microwave cake

I'm not super-original lately, I'm tired of trying out new recipes and often reach for my favourites.
Here we've got a Mediterranean tomato soup which I made because we had too many tomatoes and some leftover bread, which are both key ingredients for this recipe.
My dessert was a microwave cake. I tried this one for the first time because we just bought the microwave a couple of months ago. For this you mix some basic ingredients in a pot and put it in the microwave for two or three minutes. Mine has not turned out perfectly, it was a bit soft on the outside and hard on the inside, I'll see if I try this again.
My midmorning snack was delicious, though - I had toast rolls with a filling of (very finely chopped) fried pumpkin with pumpkin seeds and garlic. Yummy! I brought some radishes as well.

Mittwochsbox 9th of April 2014 - French Toast (and Pumpkin Gnocchi)

Today I'm participating again in the Wednesday blog-event by Mone from http://leckerbox.com/
This week's theme is breakfast, or more precisely a breakfast for celebrating the Easter days. I have to admit that I don't do anything related to religion on Easter, but I just love breakfasts in any form, so I still wanted to participate.
I made French toast, which interestingly is called "Arme Ritter" ("Poor knights") in German.
I wasn't familiar with this dish in my childhood and first heard of it when I watched the beautiful film "Kramer vs. Kramer" which I highly recommend to everybody, and in which father and son bond over preparing breakfast together (among other things).
French toast is usually made with eggs, but I substituted them by a mixture of ground hazelnuts and soy milk, an idea based on a vegan French Toast recipe from the wonderful German website
http://www.regenbogenkombuese.de/
I also prefer my French toast with salt and pepper instead of the sweet version.
And of course I also had lunch this day, this time there were homemade pumpkin gnocchi with blue cheese-sauce and a tomato salad.

Rice and Raw Vegetables

I had a gestalt-workshop last Saturday and had to prepare my food for the day fast. Fortunately I still found a container with stirfry-rice in the freezer, which I accompanied by raw vegetables, a pretzel and a banana.

Pasta with Soy Sauce

For this lunch I prepared one of my favourite recipes, pasta with fried vegetables and soy sauce. I improvised a little salad as a side dish.
My midmorning snack was nut bread with a tomato-radish-spread. I'm showing you one piece of bread without the spread so that you can admire the incredible texture. I made this easy and delicious bread myself following this recipe by My New Roots:
http://www.mynewroots.org/site/2013/02/the-life-changing-loaf-of-bread/
I also included two sweets in the photo. Lately I'm succumbing again to my "addiction" to sugar and sweets, so I thought I should document that as well and not only show you the healthy stuff I eat.

My Big Fat Greek Lunch

One of my boyfriend's uncles loves everything Greek, and the other day he gave me a package of delicious pita bread as a gift. I decided to create a thematic lunch around it. So I brought a vegan moussaka (on the right) and two vegan homemade spreads with the bread. I prepared skordalia, a potato dip, and mohamara (made of bell peppers and walnuts), which is actually more Libanese than Greek, but well. I filled the remaining space with raw cauliflower.

Couscous with Ratatouille

I prepared this lunch the night before and in a hurry, so I needed things that were easy and fast.
The main dish was couscous with a ratatouille sauce that was a convenience product, I just had to add vegetables and water.
I brought two different things as snacks - first little breadballs with nuts and seeds. They are quite simple - I unfroze a premade pretzel, cut it into pieces and covered those with the nuts, then I put them ten minutes into the oven - ready.
The strange white thing in the photo is a hardboiled egg. I usually don't eat many eggs, but I had bought some Japanese eggformers some time ago and never used them, so I wanted at least to try them. It didn't really work (the egg should look like a star, not like a blob), probably because my egg was too small. I think I'll try again and then I might pass the shapers on to somebody who eats eggs more frequently, maybe my little niece.

Fried Bread and Aubergine

This picture might need a bit of an explanation. Below we have little skewers with pototoes etc. for my midmorning snack. I combined the rest of the ingredients for lunch - we have fried bread, fried aubergine (transported separately so the bread would'nt get soggy) and vegan tzatziki in a separate container. Mix everything together and - yummy!

Ethiopian

I love to eat at Ethiopian restaurants, so I want to try some typical vegetarian recipes at home. This was my first take:

I made injera bread, a dish of fried cabbage with potatoes and carrots, and a salad. The injera did not turn out tasty at all (I'll have to go on experimenting) and I was not keen on the salad either, but the vegetable dish was totally delicious.
I had been making this late in the evening and had not any ideas or strength left to make something for second breakfast, so in the morning I just grabbed some pieces of krispbread and brought along a bit of margarine and a piece of camembert cheese.