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.

Pasta Salad and Scrambled Egg

 This food was for a day that I didn't go to the office and thus didn't have a microwave, so everything could be eaten cold. As a midmorning snack I had scrambled eggs with fried cherry tomatoes and mushrooms. My lunch was my mother's pasta salad and a storebought mini-gazpacho. Everything was quite yummy!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Potato Stirfry and Tomato Soup

Hhhhmm, this was so nice. I made an Italian potato stirfry - not photogenic but yummy - and accompanied it by a tomato soup. The soup was a convenience product, but the recipes for the potatos and my snack - puff paste with a chocolate-nut-filling - were from a German cookbook with vegan Italian recipes:
Cucina vegana by Heike Kügler-Anger. I'm a big fan of hers and always recommend her books!

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.

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.

My difficult relationship with Spanish cuisine

First I would like to apologize for the fact that this post is not only longish, but also a bit of a rant...
Whenever I'm telling people abroad where I live, their reaction usually is: "Spain? How wonderful! The sun, the beach, the delicious food!"
I totally agree about the weather and the beach, but after ten years of permanent residence here I'm still looking for the delicious food. You see, Spain is not a great country for vegetarians. There are quite a few vegetarian restaurants, especially here in Barcelona, but the problem are all the other restaurants that have never heard of the vegetarian diet and the fact that eating out is such a big part of social life in Spain. In no-vegetarian-restaurants my only choice is often a green salad and a tortilla, which is okay, but just not great.
So I really don't appreciate the Spanish cuisine apart from Catalan bread with tomato, the already mentioned but a bit too omnipresent tortilla, gazpacho and the spicy patatas bravas.
A Catalan friend of mine argued that I can actually not judge the local kitchen for the simple fact that I would not try the 90 % of it made with meat/fish/poultry. And he somehow has a point, although I'm still wondering - do I WANT to appreciate a way of cooking and eating that is depending so much on cruelty against animals and shows so little variety of ingredients and ways of preparation? Do I WANT to appreciate a cuisine that does not take me into account?
Wanting to have an open mind, I finally bought this cookbook
http://www.amazon.es/The-Spanish-Table-Anya-Bremzen/dp/0761135553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395320575&sr=8-1&keywords=new+spanish+table
in the hope of finding interesting recipes that were in part vegetarian or easy to adopt. Hm, although it offers a huge array of dishes, it still did not convince me, but I will try to make some of the recipes and see if I can reconcile with the food of my "adopted country".
Here I'm starting with some very classic dishes. I made gazpacho (yummy!) and "meatballs" with tomato sauce, which seem to be very popular here. It's been a while that I ate real meatballs, but this version made of tvp tasted uncannily similar. The green stuff is my take on a typical Catalan dish - spinach with pine nuts and raisins. I used chopped dates because I'm not keen on raisins. I also tried to make an eggless version of the tortilla de patata, but it turned out more like latkes.
So, that's it. The subject of food here in Spain will probably turn up again, so stay tuned. :-)

Edit: If anyone can recommend any good cookbooks, magazines or websites for Spanish Vegetarian cooking, I'm very interested! I read Spanish and Catalan, no problem.

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.

Soup and Pretzel

For this lunch I brought a tomato soup with pumpkin, white beans and little dumplings. I accompanied it with a pretzel - a convenience product that I just put in the oven in the morning. My snack were little skewers with mandarines and pieces of fennel, marinated in a ginger-vinaigrettte.

Soup and Puff Pastry

Hm, lately my lunches start to look a bit frugal. I brought a soup with rice, leek and carrots, and pizza-like pieces of puff pastry with tomato paste and tomato slices.

Tomato Soup and Leek Pastries

For this lunch I brought a Mediterranean tomato soup that was absolutely delicious. I think the crucial ingredient was the spoonful of tomato purée, I really have to remember to add it in all my tomato dishes, it's just adds a much more intense flavour.
As midmorning snack and side dish I brought some vegetable pastries, which are becoming a real staple for me. This time they had a leek filling.
I also brought some radishes and a homemade "chocolate coin".

Lentil Soup and Quiche

The main dish of this day was supposed to be the Italian lentil soup with pasta, I only considered the homemade spinach quiche a side dish. But it turned out I didn't really like the soup and was happy to have brought such a big piece of quiche.
The snack are homemade energy balls with hazelnuts and walnuts.

Barley Soup and Fruit Salad with Couscous

For this lunch I made a big portion of soup with pearl barley and lots of winter vegetables.
I had a fruit salad with couscous as dessert.
My midmorning snack was a baguette with kohlrabi carpaccio.

Sauerkraut Soup

Wow, this lunch looks really frugal. It was nice, though.
The main dish is the sauerkraut soup that my family eats every year for Christmas Eve. It's not a regional or national tradition, just a family thing. The soup isn't the easiest thing to digest, but if you like sauerkraut and have the stomach for it, I highly recommend you try this delicious recipe:

Sauerkraut Soup for 2-3 people
60 g onions
200 g sauerkraut
150 ml tomato juice
750 ml vegetable stock
a bit of oil
salt and pepper
sugar
paprika powder
cayenne pepper
marjoram
thyme
parsley

Squeeze the sauerkraut to get as many of the liquid out of it as possible. Finely chop the sauerkraut and the onion. Fry it all with oil in a pan until everything is getting brown. You have to stir regularly and to have some patience - this needs time. Then put the kraut and onions in a stock pot together with the tomato juice and the vegetable stock. Add salt, pepper, sugar and the dried herbs. I can't give you any exact quantities, add a pinch of everything to taste, just go easy on the spicy cayenne! Bring to a boil and then gently simmer for about 20 minutes. The soup is ready when it has turned brown.

I brought along some homemade vegan buns with black cumin seeds, and an apple for second breakfast.
By now you have probably noticed that I'm not a big fruit person. I don't really like the sourly taste of many fruits, I find them messy to eat and perceive them as kind of cold. Which is strange, because I adore raw vegetables, which mainly have a similar texture (and actual temperature). So I have to trick myself into eating fruit by little details like this "apple puzzle". The apple is cut up carefully and then hold together by an elastic band. It still gets a bit brown inside, which you can avoid if you brush the pieces with lemon or orange juice, if it bothers you.

Vegan Bean Soup with Sesame-Cucumber Sandwich

On this day in November I brought sweet couscous for second breakfast in the office.
It's very easy to make: I added not only some hot water, but also a bit of orange juice and orange slices, sugar, cinnamon, sliced almonds and a tablespoon of margarine to the couscous. Delicious.
For my (completely vegan) lunch I had bean soup with a sandwich.
The simple recipe for the bean soup is from my mother: Boil diced potatoes in vegetable stock, then add canned beans of your choice (I had green, red and white beans), add salt and pepper to taste, ready.  I also added two sliced soy sausages to make it more hearty. This soup tastes even better after a day or two.
I used the delicious bread that I brought back after visiting my parents in Germany to make a sandwich with sesame spread and cucumber slices.