Weekend grub

Remember my lament about living with a breakfast grinch? Well, since I’m home alone I’m taking advantage of my weekend mornings and having breakfast foods galore. I started the brunch extravaganza this weekend with Fronch Toast, from Vegan with a Vengeance (with the addition of some cinnamon to the batter, because that’s how I roll). This really brought back memories of my pregan days; it really is good. I used a big bakery hot dog roll, which I left in the fridge overnight to dry it out. I realised after soaking the bread slices in the batter that I should have sliced it before drying it out—the outside was nice and crusty but the inside got a little soggy.

I spent my Saturday writing a grant application, which, if you’ve had any experience with, you will know it totally sucks. For instance, I’m expected to provide a brief methodology of the research, an abstract of my two planned conference papers, and justify 9 separate budget items, all in 10 lines of text. And those ten lines are weighted at 25% of the total application. To keep me nourished for all that fun, I made a nice big lunch.

I made a chickpea, corn and tomato salad. Instead of combining it all with mayo, I used a mixture of avocado, apple cider vinegar, tahini and rehydrated wakame. I put the salad into a tortilla, and it was interesting and tasty.

The salad kept me going through the tedious process, and some wine helped to ease my frustrations. In the afternoon I tried my hand at boiled seitan for the first time. Despite the long boiling time, there is really very little hands-on time. But texture-wise, I think I prefer baked seitan.

A late afternoon bike ride worked up my hunger for dinner, so I turned some of the boiled seitan into ‘Jerk Seitan’ from Vegan with a Vengeance, and served it with a side of coconut rice and veggies sautéed in the jerk sauce. Even though it’s getting a bit chilly here, this dinner tasted like the tropics.

On Sunday morning I rode to the markets and stocked up on produce for the coming week. While I was there, I saw some fresh-looking Brussels sprouts, so I grabbed them. I’ve tried them once before, when I was very young, and they were frozen and boiled and not very nice. But I’d noticed a recipe in VwaV that intrigued me, so I gave it a try for dinner. Since I had the oven on, I baked some sweet potato rounds with just a touch of sea salt. Leftover rice rounded the meal of quite nicely. The Brussels sprouts verdict? I liked them okay, but I didn’t think they were fantastic.

After a day of reading, transcribing, gardening and cleaning house, at about 8:30 Sunday night I remembered that I signed up to bring food to the postgraduate morning tea this morning, so I quickly threw together some ginger biscuits. Two didn't fit in the container, so I had to eat them...

I thought weekends were supposed to be relaxing?