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.

"Dampfnudeln" and Some Snacks

This weekend we had friends over for dinner, and I'm bringing some leftovers to work today.  Here we have "Dampfnudeln", a kind of German bread dumplings that are cooked over steam. In Germany they are usually served in a sweet way, for example with a fruit filling and vanilla sauce, but I always follow a savoury recipe with cheese filling and tomato sauce.
My afternoon snack is a piece of the crumbly yet delicious homemade cake with nuts and pineapple that our friend brought as dessert.
I also prepared a sandwich with potato spread, dried tomatoes and avocado as a midmorning snack, accompanied by raw kohlrabi.

Rice with Spinach

Here we have rice with spinach and macadamia nuts plus watermelon gazpacho. I also brought a cereal bar as a snack and sandwiches with a filling of cheese and fried mushrooms with seitan.

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.

Potato Dumplings and Homemade Sherbet

Wow, this looks huge! I made "Schupfnudeln", which are a kind of potato dumplings from Germany, similar to gnocchi, for example. I made mine from scratch according to a vegan recipe found on the internet (most recipes contain eggs) and  fried them with chopped onions and bell peppers. They were accompanied by a salad with tomatos and avocadoes.
My midmorning snack were grapes and a sandwich with bell pepper paste, brie cheese, kohlrabi slices and fried onions. Everything tastes better with fried onions!
My dessert was something new and I'm quite happy with how it turned out - I made a peach sherbet by blending a couple of peaches with some sugar, freezing the mix and breaking it up with a fork from time to time. This first try hasn't been perfect texture-wise, but the taste was great.

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.

Midmorning Snack

I'm sorry - lately life is getting in the way with my blogging. I'm both working and playing hard, so I often don't have the time and energy to plan and prepare something blogworthy.
Here I'm showing you the snacks I brought to the office one morning - a sandwich with a tomato spread and slices of tomato, soy sausages, radishes and homemade granola-chocolate-bits.

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.

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.

Travel Provisions

I visited my family in Germany during the long weekend and could not get a direct flight, so I planned a lot of food for my morning on planes and airports.
I usually bring similar stuff, this time I had energy balls made of cocoa, dates and nuts, vegetarian pigs in a blanket, some cherry tomatoes and sandwich with a chickpea filling. Lots of proteins here!
I usually buy a bottle of water or a smoothie once I've passed the security check.

Lots of carbs

A big lunch with lots of carbs - just the way I like it! ;-)
I had spaghetti with soy sauce and fried vegetables as lunch, a sandwich with olive spread and some chocolate as second breakfast and sweet bulgur with orange slices and almond flakes as an afternoon snack.

Soup and Quiche

This was a big lunch and very yummy, I had pumpkin soup and a little leek quiche. My second breakfast was a simple sandwich with cheese, accompanied by yellow cherry tomatoes.

Salad with Asian Noodles and Toast Rolls

This was really nice. I had a salad with radish, bell pepper, champignons and Asian glass noodles plus a small side dish of cauliflower. The cauliflower recipe was from a book about Spanish tapas - I'm still looking for nice Spanish recipes, and this was really good.
The little snack box contained a collection of cherry tomatoes (a woman in the supermarket had asked me if those were plums) and toast rolls with homemade lemon pesto. Sometimes everything comes together nicely - just a couple of days ago I had read that it is easier to make these rolls when you put the toast in the microwave first, and then I found a packet of toast cut lengthwise specially for rolling. Of course after all this I had to try it and the rolls turned out really nice.

Dal and Potato Bhajias

A lunch with Indian inspiration - I had rice with dal and the potato bhajias from Linda Majzlik: A vegan taste of India. I brought some ketchup as a dip in the small container.
My midmorning snack was a sandwich with avocado and a red coleslaw.

Couscous and Burger

This looks absolutely huge, but that's because I brought a burger for second breakfast and packed all the ingredients separately. In the small container I had some homemade zucchini-salsa.
When planning my lunch, I had a look in the freezer and found this - a second portion of the African corn-stew that I already had weeks ago, this time with couscous. As a side dish I brought some edamame.

Turkish inspired

For this lunch I made a kind of Turkish mini-pizza. For the topping I used a recipe for lahmacun and substituted the meat by tvp. The lahmacun that I have seen in Turkish takeaways is more like a kind of wrap, but I my dough usually get hard and dry if I try to roll it out so thinely and then bake it, so I prefer to make it a bit thicker, like an Italian pizza.
As a side dish I brought big white beans in a ketchup-mustard-marinade, which were surprisingly delicious.
My second breakfast was a bagel with hummus and a grated carrot.

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.

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.

Leek Soup and Mushroom Sandwich

For this little lunch I prepared a leek soup with some soy milk and a sandwich with a mushroom-seitan filling. I brought two tangerines for second breakfast.