Josie's First Quinoa

I'm trying to blog about our everyday food more because I enjoy seeing what others are eating on a daily basis. Usually, I will hit a couple vegan blogs before making dinner hoping for some inspiration or sometimes it just gets me in the mood to cook. Okay, really I decided I should take pictures of lunches to cover my butt because Rob comes home from work and there are usually dishes in the sink and now I can prove they aren't the same dishes from dinner. I did actually wash some, but then we just dirty them again.

Lunch Today:
Quinoa Puttanesca
Cheezy Smashed Potatoes
Fried Tofu
Pinto Beans
Apple slices dipped in almond butter (not shown)








Lunch is usually like this...a mishmash of leftovers. I made my usual Puttanesca sauce (except I added some carrots) last night over whole wheat pasta and there was just the right amount of sauce left over to cook up some quinoa and turn it into Quinoa Puttanesca. I had some potatoes waiting to be turned into Potatoes Boats, but I made Dema's "smashed potatoes" instead. Peel potatoes and cube, boil in water for 20 minutes, save cooking liquid (used 2 cups of it to cook the quinoa) to pour in while mashing (Dema loves to use the old fashioned hand "smasher") until desired consistency, add nutritional yeast for "cheezy" flavor, sea salt, and ground pepper (maybe some olive oil or Earth Balance). We don't usually have tofu two days in a row, but I had two packages of tofu in the refrigerator without an expiration date and that always makes me nervous so I decided to use it up (it smelled fine). Today I fried some of the tofu in Bragg's Amino Acids, minced garlic, nutritional yeast, and a tad of canola oil. I also baked half of it for Rob's lunch tomorrow and Dema had some plain (crazy kid). The pinto beans we soaked this weekend and cooked and I've been using them up all week.

This was Josie's first taste of quinoa and she really liked it. She ate a bunch of pinto beans and some potatoes, but the quinoa was her favorite today. The boys liked it all, but I almost lost my appetite since they were going over the things they learned from this year's Insect Fear Film Festival (they go for the displays and to touch the bugs and not so much for the films). Parker asked how spider's eat stinging insects without getting stung and Dema went into a pretty graphic rendition of how the spider could take out the stinger with its mouth...I'll spare you the details.

We had VeganYumYum's Easy Weekend Pancakes for breakfast because I noticed the recipe didn't have sugar or oil which is nice. I made it this morning in a bowl not a blender since I don't find it any easier to make it the night before, but I may have messed things up. I thought they were a funny consistency (almost rubbery), but the kids ate them and said they were good. I didn't get any since I didn't double the recipe. I used almond flavor where the recipe called for 1 tsp of extract and for some crazy reason we have like four containers of almond...see I'm trying to use it up Rob! I think next time we make pancakes I'll go back to the Joy of Vegan Baking recipe we love and maybe add some almond flavor. Off to search for vegan recipes with lots of almond flavoring.