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Dal with Roasted Cauliflower, Aloo Gobi, and Basmati Rice

I’ve been meaning to write about packed lunches for months. Thankfully, Kris at Cheap Healthy Good has beaten me to it. In her One-Stop Shop for Work Lunch Ideas, Kris provides seven invaluable tips for brown-bagging it:

Plan ahead. This is where your grocery list comes in handy.

Prepare your food the night before.

No one wants to wake 20 minutes early so they can half-assedly slap a bologna sandwich together before the 8am train. Assembling an simple lunch in the evening will let you sleep longer AND increase the likelihood of a meal you’ll enjoy. If those nightly 10 minutes are too inconvenient, you can always …

Prepare your food in bulk. I’m a fan of freezing individual portions of dal, veggie chili, soup, and cornbread.

Don’t settle for sandwiches. Amen. Have I mentioned the joys of dal?

Use leftovers wisely. Hmm, dal anyone?

Pack snacks. I’m all over this: raw veggies, fruit, nuts, hummus, beans. And if you’re doing this to save money…

Avoid the 100-calorie packs, though, as they are the biggest ripoff, ever.

Invest in reusable lunchboxes and utensils. Good tupperware that does not leak is key. I’m sad to report that the Laptop Lunchbox, though cute, is a big sloppy mess if you pack anything liquid. Check out JustBento for an awesome supply of container ideas.

I can’t hold back - I’m a star when it comes to packed lunches. But I guess it depends on your perspective. I had one workmate who once looked at what I was eating and said, to no one in particular, “Huh, life of a vegetarian, I guess?” I think he was confused, but I was too happy in my bowl of chili to care. I hope you don’t mind me showing off a few of my favorite lunches from this past year:

Veggie sushi with Carrot & Hijiki Salad, Marinated Tofu Steaks, and Spinach Gomae

Veggie Chili with Roasted Okra, Cornbread, No Knead Bread, and Banana

Dal with Roasted Cauliflower, Aloo Gobi, and Basmati Rice

Marinated Tofu Steaks with Soy Dipping Sauce, Pearl Barley, Carrot & Hijiji Salad, Rocket Salad

Amaranthy/Quinoa Timbales with Green Salad, Roasted Veggies, and Shredded Beetroot, Pinenut and Cilantro Salad

Pasta Arrabiata with No Knead Bread, Cannelini Bean Puree, and Tomato, Rocket, Cucumber and Asparagus Salad

What are your favorite brown-bag lunches? Please share in the comments below!

One-Stop Shop for Work Lunch Ideas [Cheap Healthy Good]

I’ll be hosting the Vegetarian Carnival this week on behalf of Veggie Chic. Do you have a tasty recipe or interesting blog post you’d like to share? Then submit your entry by Monday, May 12th and we’ll consider sharing it with the rest of our hungry readers.

On a side note, Veggie Chic is looking for a new blogger. Interested? Read more about it here.

What’s a blog carnival? Click here to find out.

This afternoon I thought I’d whip together a quick lunch of the Guardian’s “fairly easy” tabbouleh salad with a few chickpeas. The plan seemed quick and painless: while I cooked my soaked chickpeas and soaked the bulgar wheat, I could let the food processor chop the parsley, and hand chop a tomato and some green onion. It should only take a few minutes (cooking time aside). But while I had chickpeas and the food processor going, I thought “why not make hummus“? This would require slicing veggies, which involved washing carrots, celery and cucumber. Tim added that we needed pita bread if we’re having hummus, so off he went to the store. Finally, after dirtying all the dishes in the house, I went to assemble the toubbuleh only to find that I had been soaking couscous, not bulgar wheat, all along. Disaster!

Yesterday I said to Tim, “now that working from home, I don’t imagine lunch will be more involved than what I did for work” (typically a salad I made the night before or leftover dal re-heated in the microwave). It didn’t take me long for me to get trapped in the kitchen.

Here’s the bottom line: I love cooking. Chopping vegetables relaxes me. I think it’s fun to think about different combinations of ingredients and spices. It’s almost an obsession (to which Tim would likely respond, “almost?”). The thing is, there isn’t always enough time in the day to cook elaborate gourmet meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner (and don’t forget about second breakfast). But I don’t have the money or the appetite for fast food or frozen pizza (though I do have a soft spot for the thin crust variety, but again, I can’t hold back from adding fresh-sliced onion and green pepper before putting the pizza into the oven).

John at Pick the Brain probably didn’t have me in mind when he wrote his post How to Prepare Healthy Meals Faster Than You Can Order Takeout. But just like the anti-chef can learn how to cook, food-obsessed folks like me can also learn that it’s okay to NOT cook fancy meals all the time.

For John, meat is a big part of his “slow carb” cooking regime; however, vegetarians can also just as easily learn from these three basic tenets:

• Stock up on food, such as frozen and canned foods that aren’t nasty, like frozen peas and tinned beans
• Prepare foods efficiently by learning a routine, cooking simple meals, and learning to multitask
• Embrace the microwave for defrosting frozen food, heating up beans, and cooking vegetables

Our freezer is a treasure trove of easy meals: I make big batches of dal and veggie chili and cornbread then freeze them in meal-sized portions.

Another great formula for a quick and healthy meal is beans + grains + vegetables. We often do puy lentils, which take about 30 minutes and are delicious enough just cooked with veggie stock. While those boil away, whip up some rice, quinoa or boiled potatoes (~10 mins) and steam some greens (~10 minutes to chop, wash and steam).

What are your quick and health cooking tips?

How to Prepare Healthy Meals Faster Than You Can Order Takeout

I like my dals with something refreshing on the side. Lately, I’m all about this salad, adapted from Das Sreedharan’s “The New Taste of India”, a fantastic cookbook filled with delicious vegetarian recipes from Southern India.

The salad takes a bit of chopping, but it’s totally worth it, both for its flavor, and for the rave reviews it gets everytime I serve it.

Indian Cucumber and Coconut Salad

For the salad:
1 cucumber, peeled and finely chopped
2 Tbsp desiccated coconut (or more to taste)
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 tomato, finely chopped
1 fresh green chilli, finely chopped
a small bunch of fresh cilantro (i.e. coriander), finely chopped
salt

For the dressing:
2 tsp olive oil
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 dried red chilli, halved
1/2 tsp asafoetida
~10 dried curry leaves
juice from half a lemon

1. Place all the salad ingredients in a bowl and set aside in the fridge.
2. Put the oil in a large frying pan with the mustard seeds, cumin seeds, red chilli, asafoetida and curry leaves. Turn the heat up to medium and wait for the seeds to start sizzling and smelling delicious.
3. When the mustard seeds begin to pop, pour the oil and seeds over the salad. Add the lemon juice and some salt to taste and mix thoroughly. If you can wait, cool in the fridge before serving.

The latest installment of McSweeney’s literary journal offers Reviews of New Food that won’t necessarily make you smarter, but will definitely make you laugh out loud.

Here is a snip from Steve DiPetro’s review of Morningstar Farms Veggie Breakfast Bacon Strips:

Prompted by a vegetarian co-worker, I took a bite of what looked like a child’s rendering of bacon. After catching the pieces that it broke into when I bit down, I foolishly threw them into my mouth. Now, I’ll give the mad scientists at Morningstar Farms a little credit: it tasted vaguely like bacon. It tasted like what an android that is trying to fit in with us humans would imagine bacon would taste like. When hidden inside a BLT, it might even work. Eaten alone in a dark editing bay, it did not work. Was my co-worker actually an android? How many more of them were there? Is this how their infiltration would be exposed? By me, here in this room, eating what feels like petrified carpet cushioning with a hint of bacon flavor? Did his eyeball just take a picture of me? It did. Why did I trust a vegetarian?

Read more Reviews of New Food (via Culinate)

Last night we were going to have friends over for an Indian feast. Then Tim got the sniffles and I got home late from work. Dinner was off but I was still primed for lentils and Tim’s cold called for some nourishing soup. So I tried out this recipe from the Guardian and dang was it tasteee. It’s made with ingredients I usually have around anyway, and I predict this will become a staple for quick, nutritious meals.

Another day, another lentil. Life is good.

Spicy red lentil soup with cumin and tomato

2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for serving
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1 litre vegetable stock
300g red lentils
400g tin chopped tomatoes
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 medium bunch fresh coriander
1 tsp cumin seeds, toasted and ground, to serve (optional)

Put a medium saucepan on a medium heat. Add the oil then the onion, garlic, coriander seeds and cumin seeds. Fry, without colouring, for five minutes. Add the stock and lentils, cover, bring to a low simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Add the tomatoes and cook for 15 minutes, until the lentils are tender. Purée the soup and season to taste.

Serve with a trickle of olive oil, a pinch of freshly toasted, freshly ground cumin, and a sprinkle of cilantro.

Our local blogosphere is a wise bunch when it comes to brekkie. Last Tuesday, MizFit listed her morning favourites such as cheese and chia seeds. In Japan, Chika of She Who Eats shares her morning menu of sashimi, rice and miso soup. Oatmeal is a common theme: Yan of DietHack thinks it’s the best breakfast for long-lasting energy, while Susan of the FatFree Vegan Kitchen gets to the point with this enticing recipe for apple-spiced steel-cut oats.

The statistics seem to prove what to many of us is already common sense: “breakfast is indeed the most important meal of the day”. Earlier this week, a new study on adolescents showed the direct relationship between breakfast and body mass index (BMI): the more often people ate breakfast, the lower the BMI. The study was conducted on youngsters, but the same goes for adults: in 2003, a Harvard study on 2,831 adults showed that people who ate breakfast every day were a third less likely to be obese compared to those who skipped a meal.

What’s so great about breakfast? Researchers think that breakfast helps stabilise blood sugar levels, which regulate appetite and energy. Eating first thing in the morning makes you less likely to be hungry during the rest of the day, and therefore less likely to hit the vending machine for an emergency Snickers.

To the rest of us, however, breakfast just tastes good. I remember my former roommate in Austin who spent her mornings curled up on the couch with a bowl of granola and the radio tuned to NPR. Along with hot coffee and slippers, breakfast is comfort as well as fuel. If only we always had time to take it slow.

Inspired by MizFit, I’ve made a list of our own quick and slow breakfasts here at casa de la hungry:

Quick breakfasts

• Oatmeal with rolled oats, grated apple and soy milk
• Boiled egg with raw nuts and a piece of fruit
• Bircher muesli
• Yogurt and fruit
• Black beans with cheese and salsa
• Mix and match continental breakfast. Choose from the following: boiled egg, yogurt, cheese, toast, beans, nuts, fresh fruit
• Smoothie made with protein powder (or tofu), frozen fruit, flax oil, and milk

Slow breakfasts

• Omelette, especially the one TIm makes with mushrooms and onions
• Six Grain Porridge
• Steel-cut oatmeal with grated apple, soy milk and most recently, flax oil
• Poached eggs on whole grain toast
• Scrambled tofu
• Any kind of egg with toast, grilled mushroom and tomato

Now I’m hungry.

• Link to Skipping Cereal and Eggs, and Packing on the Pounds
• Link to Breakfast is ‘most important meal’

The word “organic” is suppose to provoke a warm fuzzy local feeling. But most organic food on the grocery shelves are actually owned by kings of corn syrup like “Kraft” and “General Foods”. Good magazine has a chart that shows which companies own which organic brand. I’ll never look at a Boca Burger the same way!

Link to Buying Organic (via dietblog)

Tim and I both agree that this is the best batch of no knead bread ever to emerge from our oven. It’s a perfect balance of sunflower seeds, flax seeds, white and whole wheat flour. The nuttiness of the seeds and whole wheat is buttery and wonderful. The white flour gives the bread a spongy lightness. But everything really comes together with the crust. I coat the entire dough ball in olive oil (a delicious trick I discovered accidentally and is much more effective than Jim Lahey’s cornmeal technique) then sprinkle on a generous dose of sesame seeds.

Seeded Whole Wheat No Knead Bread

300g white flour
170g whole wheat flour
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup flax seeds
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
13g salt
olive oil
sesame seeds

1. In a large bowl combine flour, seeds, yeast and salt. Add 350 grams of water and stir. Add more water a little bit at a time and stir until the dough has the consistency of a shaggy ball. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest in a warm place for at least 12 hours, preferably closer to 24. The dough is ready when it’s about double in size and spotted with big bubbles.
2. Give the counter top and your hands a generous sprinkle of flour. Turn the dough onto the counter. Pull the dough at either end to form a strip. Fold this strip into thirds (like a business letter). Give the dough a quarter turn and fold in thirds again. I’ll refer to these folds as “seams”, i.e., “right now your dough is on the counter, seam side up.” Cover with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
3. Oil a large bowl with olive oil. Lightly dust the dough ball with flour and put it into the bowl seam side down. Cover with the plastic wrap and let sit for 2-3 hours. The dough is ready when it has more than doubled in size.
4. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When the dough is ready, remove the HOT pot and pour in a bit of olive oil. Swirl it around so that oil covers the entire inside of the pot. Now, take the bowl containing the dough and quickly turn it upside down over the pot so that the dough falls in seam side up. Cover the pot with a lid and bake for 40 minutes. Then remove the lid and bake another 5 or so minutes, until the loaf is browned and the sesame seeds are toasted. Cool on a rack at least 45 minutes before slicing.

The package claims that this loaf of bread is “enriched”, “whole-grain”, and “high fiber”, and yet the media keeps saying that bread is bad for me. So what’s the story? Is bread healthy or not?

That all depend on the bread.

World’s Healthiest Food has a compact article on grains, specifically those related to bread. It’s worth a quick read if you’re at all confused about the difference between whole grains and refined grains. Here’s an even quicker read:

Whole Grains

Imagine a grain of brown rice, barley or oats. A “whole grain” still has its “germ” and “bran”, the parts of the seed where nutrients are stored.

Refined Grains

Imagine stock standard white flour. This stuff has been processed (read: pulverised) to remove the bran and germ. The reason most packaged breads are “enriched” is because manufacturers synthetically put nutrients lost from the germ back into the bread.

What is the point of refining?

Whole grains are refined because the bran and germ can go rancid over time. This complicates storage and transport for food manufacturers.

How can I tell if I’m eating the healthy bread?

The easiest way is to bake your own bread using whole grain flour. If that is impractical, read the package closely, and look out for these dubious claims:

NOT Whole Grain

• “whole grain”
• “contains whole grain”
• “100% wheat”
• “made with whole wheat”
• “multigrain”
• “pumpernickel”
• “stone-ground”

My personal favourite for packaged whole grain bread is Food For Life’s Ezekial 4:9 Sprouted Grain Bread (look for it in the freezer section).

• Link to whole grain bread recipes
• Link to more information on whole grains at Wikipedia
• Link to the Effects of Refining and Enrichment on Wheat and Rice on Wikipedia
• Link to Grain Storage Guide at Recipe Tips
• Link to I’m confused as to whether grains are good or bad for your health at World’s Healthiest Foods