Vegan Monday: Week 3

Welcome to the weekly installment of Vegan Mondays! Today's vegan menu was Asian-inspired. Lunch and dinner were at least...

For breakfast, I had banana bread overnight oats. It was made up of traditional oats, vanilla soy milk, plain soy yogurt, banana, flax seeds, walnuts, coriander, and cinnamon.  This was one of my better combinations.  

I did not actually cook my lunch today.  I had Trader Joe's frozen vegan Pad Thai.  I must admit, this was one of the better frozen meals I have ever had.  As you can see below, the meal had rice noodles, carrots, and tofu, along with a tasty sauce.

 

After lunch, I headed to a conference for the afternoon at work.  There was a spread of snacks at the conference, but most of them were not vegan.  I ended up snacking on some vegetables: carrots, red bell pepper, and squash.  Unfortunately, I could not have the ranch dip or cookies. 

Dinner was my adventurous meal of the day.   I made myself some sushi with leftover ingredients from a few weekends ago when I made sushi with friends.  I'll blog about that soon I promise.  I made two rolls.  The first roll, pictured here, had cucumber and avocado.  The second roll had cucumber, avocado, and mango. I don't want to ruin my sushi post, but here is a picture of the roll before being rolled:

And after:

 

For dessert I am currently eating the rest of the mango from my sushi. 

Today's vegan experience was not as planned as the past two weeks.  I was out of town for the weekend and didn't have time to fully think through my meals.  Because of the lack of planning, my food was a little heavy on carbs and light on protein for my liking.  This is definitely a learning experience.

Pad Thai

One of my very first posts on easy dinners included Pad Thai.  Since that post, I have gotten more adventurous with my Pad Thai.  Initially I only used prepackaged Pad Thai sauces, but I have found a simple Pad Thai recipe that, as my boss puts it, has the perfect amount of tang.  Why has my boss tried my Pad Thai?  Good question.  At work we have a lunch club of about 15 coworkers.  Every other week, one member of the club cooks lunch for the rest of the group.  This week was my turn. As you can see, I made Pad Thai...and a lot of it. About half of the club is vegetarian, so each week the meal is either vegetarian, or has a meat option and a vegetarian-friendly option.  I opted to make mine entirely meat-free.

The first step to making Pad Thai is to soak the rice noodles according to the directions on the package.  While the noodles are soaking,  start preparing the rest of the dish.  First, scramble an egg (or two, or three, or four, depending on how many you are serving) in some olive oil.  Then, add in whatever toppings are going in your Pad Thai.  This time I used a yellow pepper, an orange pepper, a red pepper, frozen broccoli,  snap peas, onion, and edamame for some protein. I cooked these until they were tender.  Here's a close up of all the vegetables:

 

 As you can see, there were a TON of vegetables involved. After they were cooked, I needed to expand to my wok and largest pot to add in the noodles. 

 

After the noodles were added, I also added the sauce, made up of fish sauce, rice vinegar, and sugar.  The final step is to add in bean sprouts.  I love how bean sprouts give the dish that little bit of crunch. Finally, serve with some fresh cilantro and lime.

Easy Dinners

Here are three quick, easy dinners that I've made recently:

Pad Thai.  I used to think that I didn't like Thai food...until I tried pad thai. This is a rice noodle dish that you can add a variety of meats and/or vegetables to.  This time, I added shrimp, frozen snap peas (WAY cheaper than fresh), and onion. 

Before:

 

After:

 

The next meal was thrown together at the last minute with ingredients I had on hand:  sweet potatoes, frozen dumplings, and frozen snap peas (again). I simply followed the directions on the bags of dumplings and snap peas, and baked the sweet potatoes in the oven with a little olive oil and cayenne.

The sweet potato fries turned out so well I took a close-up.

Finally, one day last week I was too lazy to go to the grocery store.  (This is not an unusual occurrence.) I didn't have much in my fridge, just eggs and spinach. I found some orzo in my cabinet and decided to make something out of it.  First I boiled water to cook the orzo and sauteed the spinach in olive oil with some garlic and onion.  Then, I scrambled the eggs in with the spinach mixture.  Here it is: