Quick lunch lentil salad

There's no picture today because I just engulfed the salad, but I will share this quick and easy recipe I threw together today for my lunch. I found myself with an excess amount of lentils after making the lentil and rice pilaf from this month's vegetarian times. Paired with some pre-shredded carrots and some parsley that the Jar was kind enough to cut for me this morning, this salad is a pretty quick and easy throw together for lunch.

Ingredients:
About a cup of lentils
Small handful of chopped parsley
1/4 cup or so shredded carrots
1-2 Tablespoons soft-ish cheese (I used blue because that's what we had but goat or feta would have been delicious)
Balsamic vinegar, olive oil, garlic powder and salt and pepper to taste.

Mix together salad ingredients in a lunch-ready container and whisk together vinegar, oil, and seasonings in separate bowl. Combine and enjoy!

Microwave Dinner

Tonight the Jar and I had these "Refried Bean Poblanos with Cheese" for dinner. We picked up some Poblano peppers at the farmer's market (Wegman's never has a good pepper selection and the ones at the farmers market looked and smelled soo good).

We made a few substitutions in the dish - I used regular white rice instead of boil in bag rice, at the end Jar put them in a pan to melt the cheese and to char the peppers a bit, and we served them with sliced avacado, sour cream, and hot sauce. They were quick, easy, and delicious. A delightful new way to enjoy poblanos.

Herbs

A few weeks ago I picked up a packet of chive seeds and a packet of basil seeds. I wasn't expecting much; we've tried unsuccessfully to grow herbs in our last few apartments. Luckily, our new place has much better light and outside space for the plants.

They've gotten quite impressive over the last few weeks (thanks to a lot of rain).



Special note to GarbageVan fans - the above pot was rescued from a nearby dumpster shortly after moving into our new place.

Pan Roasted Herbed Vegetables in a Tomato Basil Sauce over Penne (aka Weekly Spaghetti)

The Jar and I have two dishes that we eat every single week: burritos (as previously mentioned) and tomato based pasta (referred to as spaghetti). The reason why we started planning our meals week by week was actually that we found ourselves eating pasta far too often. It's delicious and requires little work (especially if using a canned sauce).

For this week's pasta we had fresh zucchini from the farmer's market, a red bell pepper, and sweet onion. I (inadvertently) cooked the veggies at a high heat for a few minutes and this resulted in a nice roasted texture. The veggies are seasoned with a generic Italian seasoning that we inherited when some family members moved away, but is essentially oregano, basil, and rosemary.
The veggies were then cooked with jar tomato sauce and served over penne.

Burritos

We have burritos once a week for dinner. They're quick, they're delicious, they're flexible. While there are a variety of different ways to make vegetarian burritos, I prefer mine without fake meat or bizarre vegetables (broccoli should never be in a burrito).

My favorite burritos contain:

• tortillas - the ones you have to cook yourself are the best
• beans - canned or otherwise
• sour cream - I absolutely love Organic Valley Lowfat
• hot sauce - Cholula is my all-time favorite (I once considered buying a 1/2 gallon...)
• salsa
• cheese if you want
• avocado if you have it

Bagels on the Mount

I love bagels. New Jersey is a great place to find good bagels, but Middlebury, Vermont is too, as this very old student review of the Middlebury Bagel and Delicatessen says. I'm particularly fond of the both the spinach bagel and the dill & cheddar bagel. YUM.
We packed up bagels (for the Jar and I) and a donut for Livia when we hiked Mt. Abe.

Yogurt

I've always wanted to make my own yogurt and finally got around to trying it this year when I found myself in possession of copious amounts of free time. Yogurt making doesn't take that much involvement; just dump milk into a pot and heat it up until it bubbles, then let it cool, and stir in some starter yogurt. It just me takes forever to heat up the milk because I don't want to burn it. A Saturday spent lazying around the house with a good book is the perfect time to put on a pot of yogurt to cook.

I've been using the recipe from this NY Times article. Whole milk makes delicious yogurt, skim milk makes a little too runny, but 2% works out just fine (although it isn't nearly as decadent as the stuff made with whole milk).
Here's a picture of my most recent batch:

Breakfast Burritos

I'll be posting this week about our recent trip to Vermont.

The first thing I wanted to share is something everyone else may know about but I just discovered: homemade breakfast burritos.

I've been aware of the ones you can get at McDonald's for a long time, but never bothered to try them (when I was eating meat the lure of the Egg McMuffin was too much for me and now I don't go to McD's very much).

I didn't photograph our breakfast burritos, they look pretty much like a burrito but with egg in them. In Vermont ours consisted of a single layer of egg, cooked omelet style, topped with sliced fresh peppers and tomatoes, sour cream, cheddar cheese, and a few dabs of sriracha sauce.

The ones we had this morning were essentially the same but without tomatoes and with a little onion. I've been known to eat nothing but different types of burritos for dinner for an entire week, so I'm quite excited to have the option to have nothing but burritos for breakfast as well.

Van's Road Trip Lentil Salad

Just a short post today as we run off for a fun weekend in Vermont.

The lentil salad that I got at Bon Appetit last week inspired me to make this salad. I have made the lentil salad from the "Great Healthy Food for Strong Bones" cookbook*, but Jar doesn't like it quite as much as I do, so I decided to make it a little different, borrowing heavily on the suggested dressing from that book.



Ingredients:

• about 1/2 a bag of dried lentils (I used Goya because they're cheap)
• a 2 inch log of goat cheese
• 1/3 of a sweet onion
• 1/4 green bell pepper
• 4-5 baby carrots
• 1 tomato
• olive oil
• balsamic vinegar
• mustard powder
• garlic powder
• mustard powder
• dash of paprika
• salt + pepper

Method: Cook the lentils in plenty of water until tender - about 15-20 minutes. Immediately crumble in the goat cheese and stir it around until it melts. Put the onion, bell pepper and carrots in a food processor if you have one and process until smooth. Otherwise chop finely. Seed and chop the tomato. Add all veggies to the lentils. For the dressing mix together (to taste) the remaining ingredients.

*for those of you interested, this is an awesome book. I got on sale at the used bookstore in Cleveland, and it looks like you can find it on Amazon for about a dollar. Just read "strong bones" as "lots of cheese." :-)

Oral Surgery Diet

No photos today, just a brief documentation of some (mostly) delicious food that I've eaten since losing the ability to chew with my front teeth last week.

Immediately after the surgery the Jar took me to get a bunch of prescriptions filled and we grabbed some lentil salad and rice pudding at Bon Appetit in the Princeton Shopping Center. I had never been there before and found it to be a delightful (if not pricey) place. The best part of the lentil salad was the goat cheese chunks, the worst part was the big bits of red pepper, which I would normally find delightful but couldn't eat just yet. The rice pudding was incredibly delightful and made me reminisce about the now defunct Pudding on the Rice in Provo. (If any readers out there would like to start a rice pudding cafe, please do so near my neighborhood!)

After settling in to my new post-oral surgery life we made a trip to my favorite grocery store (Wegman's) and loaded up on instant mashed potatoes. Yes, I know I could have just made mashed potatoes but I was craving the salty deliciousness and small amount of work required from the instant variety. We stocked up on other predictable items like a giant jar of applesauce and instant pudding.

The two things that got me through the last week with some semblance of nutrition were smoothies and oatmeal. Having oatmeal at breakfast (thanks Jar!) provided a nice start to my day, especially in the few days after surgery when I would wake up groggy and swollen.

Smoothies consisted of some combination of the following: frozen strawberries, frozen peaches, fresh cherries, fresh blueberries, banana, yogurt, and orange jucie. I managed to make an outstanding number of these smoothies and mixed up the ingredients enough to keep it interesting.

There you have it - a detailed description of most of what I've been eating in the last week. Man, I love how easy the internet makes narcissism.