Rice Salad

A simple cold meal for a hot summer day: A salad with rice, cucumbers, tomatoes and macadamia nuts, little apple-coconut pancakes and grapes.

Quinoa and Samosas

Today's lunch is my beloved quinoa salad by Poor Girl Eats Well, only that I used peas instead of the usual edamame, because I hadn't any left. I also brought homemade samosas and a smoothie with apple, melon, kiwi, orange, thickened with oatmeal and almonds.

Just Pasta

Sorry for the absence - I was away for a couple of days.
Here we have nothing new or fancy, just plain old spaghetti Bolognese, although with tvp instead of meat.
I also brought some grapes and little homemade spinach tarts as a snack.

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.

Thai Curry and Vegetable Pies

 For this lunch I made a kind of thai curry with curry paste and coconut milk. I used whatever vegetables were at hand. I'm quite proud of the rest of my stuff - a mango lassi made of soygurt and canned mango (quite okay) and those cute little pies. I just cut out circles of puff pastry, put them into a muffin mould and added of filling of finely chopped summer vegetables and tomato paste. Those looked cute and tasted fantastic, I think I did a good job!

Fideuà

For this lunch I tried to make "fideuà", a Catalan dish that's basically a risotto but with pasta instead of the rice. Not bad. I also brought a dessert, something that I have eaten when on vacation camp as a teenager - quark with tangerines from the can and a lot of vanilla sugar. That's really nice and easy to make for a big group of hungry kids. In my case I used vegan "quark", I just poured vegan yoghurt in a sieve and waited until it had lost some liquid.
My midmorning snack were homemade waffles and some cherries.

Fried Rice and Potato Chips

A big lunch, I had fried rice with omelette strips, little skewers with pineapple + papaya as dessert and homemade potato chips (from the oven) with ketchup as a midmorning snack.

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.

Couscous and cabbage

Nothing new here. For this lunch I brought couscous with a vegetable sauce, I added some chickpeas for extra protein. My side dish was an Ethiopian cabbage-potato-mix.
As second breakfast and snack I had little turnovers with a feta-leek-filling and a banana.

Tabouleh and Leek

Today's dinner has a kind of Oriental vibe. I brought a container with tabouleh (an Arabic couscous salad) and a Turkish dish of fried Leek. My midmorning snack was a fruit salad with some nuts and seeds

Aburage and Strawberries

On this day I made aburage, Japanese tofu pockets filled with sushi rice. They were accompanied by a side dish of marinated champignons with cherry tomatoes. My snack / dessert was very strawberry-ish - I not only brought some berries, but also a piece of puff pastry filled with marzipan and homemade strawberry jam.

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!

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.

Pasta and Muesli

When I made the spinach quiche the other day, I had some leftover tomato sauce, so I added some corn and courgette and used it for this pasta dish. I brought some grapes as dessert.
My second breakfast was crunchy muesli with soy yogurt.

Pasta with Aubergine Pesto

What a pity that this lunch looks so colourless in the photo. Well, it actually was.
But nice though. I brought pasta with aubergine pesto and a kohlrabi salad. The dessert were pieces of tangerine with chocolate, an idea I got from Pinterest. My chocolate wasn't very liquid and just wouldn't stick, so instead of dipping the pieces into the chocolate, I kind of spread it on the slices with a spoon.
My midmorning snack was a bagel with vegetable filling - basically pureed white beans with finely chopped vegetables like a carrot and leek. So tasty!

Cabbage with peanut sauce and mashed potatoes

This lunch contained cabbage with peanut sauce and mashed potatoes and a handful of grapes as dessert. My midmorning snack were ricepaper rolls filled with this wonderful salad from Poor Girl eats well:
http://www.poorgirleatswell.com/2011/07/recipe-quinoa-edamame-sweet-pepper-lettuce-wraps.html
Delicious, one of my all-time favourites!
I separated the sticky rolls with pieces of carrot.

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.