May 3, 2009

Best way to start the day! Spinach & banana smoothie and tasty black coffee in my favorite Minnesota mug.

Green breakfast smoothie:

Put in blender, in this order:
- 1-2 ice cubes
- 1 medium or large banana (or 1 1/2 small ones), broken into chunks
- about 12 oz of water (less if you don't have giant European beer glasses to drink this from)
- big handful of baby spinach leaves, maybe about 1 packed cup

Blend until smooth and fluffy, and drink immediately. Seriously, it tastes really good, but if you're afraid of pulp you're going to probably need a much stronger blender than the one I've got. Get over it -- the pulp is the fiber, and fiber makes your digestive tract happy!

Rice & beans salad, a la How it all Vegan. That's the first vegan cookbook I ever bought, it must've been senior year of college when I was first thinking of going vegan. This book has some gems, but the desserts are mostly not very good.

This salad involves short grain brown rice, black beans (or whatever other kind of beans you like), onion, red & green peppers, tomato, avocado, and a dressing of lemon juice, red wine vinegar, and a wee bit of cayenne. Delish, though it does make my mouth taste like onions for a really long time after. One day I'll have to try this with sauteed onions instead of raw.

Lunch 2.0: when I'm watching what I eat, I tend to eat like 5-6 meals per day, so "breakfast, lunch, and dinner" aren't really applicable. On the left here are the sammich fixins for this super-delicious sandwich. I won't call it the best sandwich ever (there is a particular sandwich that has earned this designation with me, but it's similar to this one).

I recently discovered these "sandwich thins" which are, yes, diet food, but they're the kind where you just get a smaller serving, as opposed to icky chemical replacements for real food. So, I've been kind of hooked on them because when I make a sandwich with this it's a little less filling so I can have a soy yogurt on the side and it feels more like a complete meal. This sandwich contains garlic hummus (spread thick on the bottom slice and thin on the top one), a handful of whole parsley leaves, a small sliced tomato, and a giant handful of broccoli sprouts. Plus a vanilla soy yogurt on the side.

True story: I've had a sandwich much like this one on most days since spring of 2005. That is when I discovered that vegans can have sandwiches too! What a revelation!

ADDED LATER:

Cut up pear and some PB2 for dipping (I'm not even joking around when I say that having real peanut butter in the house makes me a crazy person. For reals y'all.)

And yes, I eat all my meals by myself at my laptop. Well, it's not alone if I'm watching Rachel Maddow right?

OMGSODELICIOUS. This was a part of my final exams time mass food preparation, which though technically useful and productive, is actually a manifestation of a psychotic level of procrastination.

Case in point: here is a sooo tasty plate filled with quinoa (red & white mixed), steamed broccoli and steamed tofu, topped with Trader Joe's soyaki sauce (so good). However, not pictured are the 3 single-serving containers of cooked quinoa and the 4 tubs of cleaned, cut up and portioned out broccoli and cauliflower in my fridge. Oh, and the 2 more servings of that rice & beans salad from this morning, and boatloads of other veggies that I bought in order to ward off the irrestistible urge to order greasy awesome but regrettable Chinese delivery.

I got a couple of these raw food granola-ish bars on sale at my favorite health food store a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday was the first time I got around to trying them. Today I had the other one, and both were really delish. Probably too expensive for all the time, but for a healthy-ish treat they are awesome. Several of my favorite food bloggers are into raw foods lately, which is really interesting to me. I'd written it off as a fad a few years back, but I'm warming to the idea of starting the day with raw foods. I usually try to eat only raw (actual fruits, veggies, and nuts, not processed stuff like this) until noon, and I've got it in my head that that's kind of essential, but I haven't really dived into the whole thing. We'll see if I have purchased a dehydrator and a Vitamix by 6 months from now...

Not pictured: post-gym snack of frozen edamame that I warmed up to room temp under some warm tap water and then topped with low-sodium soy sauce and a hefty dose of toasted black sesame seeds. It was a bit of a rush, as my tv shows were coming back from commercial.