Meat-less Monday - oriental lunch!

In preparation for Meat-less Monday, I've been cooking up oriental vegan dishes. This is what my lunch looks like: couscous, spiced leek & turnip, lentils, and dolmas on the side (my favorite). Recipes coming soon!

How to make mini pizzas in 3 minutes

Got one hour between one class and another and you have to eat? But you really, really don't want to eat insta-noodles again, do you?

No worries!! There are healthier alternatives!

Here's how to transform whatever you have in your refrigerator into a delicious lunch.

#1. First, gather up all the ingredients that you have in your refrigerator.  I used a tomato, tomato sauce, tofu, and the rest of my whole wheat bread. But you can use an onion, bell peppers, zucchini, etc. Any  veggie will work.

Start by cutting your bread and placing the sauce on top (or olive oil, if you don't have sauce).

#2. Decorate your "pizzas" with the veggies that you have. Season with oregano, basil, olive oil and salt.

#3. Bake until your veggies are cooked. Voilà! Enjoy your meal!

Vegan picnic #2

More ideas for vegan picnic :

High in calories, sugar, and energy.

Apples keep well inside backpacks and during long stays. 

Eggplant, lettuce + tahini on wholewheat bread

Lasagna from Provence

Greetings from Provence!

Provence is known for its lovely lavender fields, olive-rich scented airs, and bouquets of sunflowers decorating the dining room table. From this sun-kissed region you also get recipes using its main produce : tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini. Since it's an ecological crime to buy these beauties in winter (they're stricltly summer-friendly produce) I'm using them as much as I can before winter hits.

One of these fabulous recipes with three simple main ingredients can be transformed into a lasagna. Mmm!

You'll need:

• Lasagna pasta
• A lot of tomatoes to make sauce from scratch (about 8) or you can do half from scratch, half with supermarket bought sauce like I did.
• An eggplant
• A zucchini
• An onion
• Garlic
• Herbes de Provence (optional)

Here's how to assemble the Provence Lasagna:

1) Preheat oven. Chop the eggplant and zucchini into round slices, not very thick. The thickness depends on whether you the razor-thin touch or leaning towards the chunky side. I went for chunky.

2) Lay the eggplant slices on a baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt and bake in preheated oven for 5 minutes. This will get rid of the bitter aftertase.

3) Dice onion, garlic and tomatoes. Sauté the onions and garlic in a pot with olive oil. When onions are transparent and garlic is golden, add tomatoes. Keep stirring until the tomatoes dissolve. Add salt and herbes de Provence.

Note: Again, I like my sauce chunky. I cut into realtively large pieces of tomatoes and I didn't skin them. If you want perfect, puree-like sause, skin the tomatoes and remove the seeds.

If you cheated and got supermarket tomato sauce, now is the time to add it to the onions and garlic. Add Herbes de Provence anyways and salt if needed.

4) Once sauce is done, lay it on the table next to the lasagna baking dish. Start assembling lasagna like this: first, cover the bottom in sauce so that lasagna won't burn. Lay a layer of lasagna pasta on top. Cover with sauce again. Make a layer of eggplant. Cover with sauce and pasta. On top of that, zucchini. Repeat until ingredients are gone. Make sure that you have enough sauce before laying down another layer of lasagna pasta - you don't want to leave it uncovered or it won't cook.

5) Bake in oven for about half an hour or until it starts to smell really good.

Enjoy!

Preparing for your vegan picnic

Hey guys!

Since I study environmental science, I get to go on a lot of field trips and I do a lot of outdoor sports with my friends. Every time this happens, I know that I'll have to plan my food in advance- mainly because there's not a snack-shop in the middle of your hiking trail. And even if there is, odds are that they will sell ham & cheese sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, chicken breast sandwiches . . . you get the idea. It's hard to sell fast snacks to a vegan.

But I have some clever ideas I've coined up over the years. This is one of my favorite: the roasted eggplant sandwich. There are many variations: you can dice the eggplant and fry it with garlic and fill your sandwich with that. This is the best, yummy alternative I came up with, but it has downsides. It's greasy with olive oil and it's not really nice eating garlic and not having a place to brush your teeth later. But it sure hits the spot, and can be eaten hot or cold.

Diced eggplant & garlic, served on pasta.

Another alternative is picking the roundest eggplant you can find at the supermarket, and slicing it so that you have a plump disk that is roughly the same size as a hamburger. Cut it a little thicker, though, as it will flatten.

Bake it for about 20 minutes with a sprinkle of salt. It will be charred on the outside, slightly gooey on the inside, and substitutes perfectly a hamburger/ham/meat option. 

Then add lettuce, mayonnaise, tomatoes, and everything else you like in your sandwich. I added black olives


to mine.

Other ideas for vegan sandwiches:

-Grilled bell peppers, roasted shitaki mushrooms with lettuce and tomatoes

-Shredded carrots & shredded beets with a hint of olive oil and salt on whole wheat bread

-Lentil or bean burger (this takes considerably more time. Best if made way before, and frozen for when it comes in handy)

Other ideas for vegan picnic:

-Pasta salad with diced celery, spinach, green beans

-Cold rice salad with diced carrots, cabbage and veggies

-Bean salad with chopped veggies

-Tabule

Hopefully I'll get to show some of my other ideas with pictures.

This is my baggy, all set to go spelunking. I added cashew nuts, tabule, peach and iced water in addition to my eggplant-burger sandwiches.

Bon appétit!