Potato Salad

I suppose I could call this "Official Salad Week". Basically it's too warm to eat anything else.
We have a salad with boiled potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumber and pumpkin seeds. My snacks for the day are a smoothie with grapes, an apple and an orange plus tofu sausages, mini cheeses and cherry tomatoes.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Baked Potatoes with Zaziki

This lunch was quite big and hearty. I had baked potatos + vegan tzatziki and a radish salad.
The most interesting thing was probably what I had brought for second breakfast, a huge portion of pasta frittata. Sometimes it's funny how ideas come up. Although I try to limit my consumption of eggs, from time to time I love some fried pasta with scrambled egg. The other day I came across a blogger who had served this same dish in a slightly different form - as a frittata, which is really practical as food on the go, because you can actually eat it with your hands. It was a real Duh!-moment.

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.

Asian

For this lunch I made potstickers, or gyoza, for the first time in my life. I really like to eat them, but I know only one place here in Barcelona where they sell a Vegetarian version, and it's far away from my daily routes. So I always wanted to make them myself but was discouraged by the idea of making the dough myself. But when I found premade dough in an Asia shop, I gave it a try. My filling consisted of cabbage and TVP, I first steamed and then fried them. They turned out quite okay, although I still have to work on the filling.
What I'm really proud of are the korokke, the Japanese croquettes, which were my second breakfast. I improvised a filling with potatoes, corn and peas and coated them with panko. If you ever want to try them (there a lots of recipes to be found on the internet) I really recommend to freeze them before you coat and fry them, it makes it so much easier to handle them and they don't fall apart.
I also brought some storebought tonkatsu sauce for the croquettes and spicy cucumber slices as a side dish.

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!

Spinach Pie

The other day I saw a picture of a spinach pie with a potatoe crust on Pinterest. It didn't come with a recipe, as it seemed to be a photo of a dish in a restaurant, so I improvised my own: I precooked the potatoes, sauteed the spinach with an onion and garlic and mixed it with silken tofu, adding a touch of feta cheese. It did not look as perfect as the one on Pinterest, but I was quite proud of it though, and it tasted really nice. I just ate a handful of radishes with it.
For my midmorning snack I brought a container of oat flakes which I ate with the soy milk I keep at the fridge in the office.

Nuggets with Puree

This is probably one of my favourite lunches, because it reminds me of my childhood. I had chicken nuggets then, tofu ones now, but apart from that, nothing has changed - nuggets, potato puree and a mix of peas and carrots from the can.
Yes, okay, all of these are convenience products, but they are food for the soul, and I love the fact that I can prepare this lunch in ten minutes.
Obviously I also brought a banana ask a snack.

Potatoes with Parsley Dip

This was a day with a lot of dipping. My main dish were cold, cooked potatoes with a parsley-mustard-dip and glazed carrots. Yummy!
For second breakfast I brought fried polenta bars and a tomato dip. I'm really not into polenta, I try it time and time again, but I just don't love it. I find it okay though with something that has a dominant taste like this garlicy tomato spread.

Seitan Taco with Spicy Potatoes

I think this taco was one of my favourite meals lately. I filled it with homemade courgette-salsa, avocado and fried seitan strips.
The potates are the Chilli Potatoes from A vegan taste of Mexico.
I brought pizza rolls as a snack. These are very easy to make, especially with storebought pizza dough. Just spread the dough, coat it with tomato purée and very finely chopped ingredients of your choice. You can add some grated cheese, if you eat it. Then carefully roll the dough up and cut it in slices, which you bake in the oven until they are golden. Ready!

Another Asian Lunch

Today I had fried rice with vegetables and omelet plus mixed vegetables fried with garlic and almond slices. For second breakfast I brought little vegan potato snacks that I had baked in the oven, with a bit of ketchup. Yummy!

Veggie Burger and Potato Salad

For this very hearty lunch I brought a veggie burger mainly made of kidney beans, based on this recipe:
http://thefigtreeblog.com/2013/02/best-black-bean-burgers.html
You can see that I also brought veggie slices for the burger. Not pictured is the toasted bread that I brought along instead of a bun (which is why I made a square pattie).
The side is a salad with mini potatoes, cherry tomatos, radishes and fried silverskin onions. I dressed it with a simple vinaigrette.
The container on the right has two vegetarian pigs in blankets for my second breakfast and a sachet with mayonnaise for the burger.
I also had cherry soy yoghurt for dessert.

A very German lunch

Now, this is a very typical German lunch - potato dumplings with gravy and red cabbage. I have to admit that the dumplings and sauce were convenience products, but I made the cabbage side myself.
I also brought vegetable skewers with fried bread as a snack.
Reality check: To get everything inside the containers, I had to shorten the skewers and cut the potato dumplings in pieces. Here is how the big container looked just before I shut the lid: