Monday, April 21, 2008

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?

10 comments:

LizNoVeggieGirl said...

Hooray for being able to have a "breakfast foods galore" celebration-weekend, while Andy is away ;0) Everything looks delicious!

Hope you ARE still able to have a relaxing weekend! :0)

Vaala ◪ said...

I haven't managed to have a relaxing weekend in ages either. I reckon we need another weekend to recover from the weekend!

Oh, and by the way the food looks delicious. I've never had french toast before so perhaps I should try that.

Anonymous said...

I love your tortilla filling! I must try this, I have all the ingredients on hand. =)

Bianca said...

That seitan looks amazing!

You know what's weird...I noticed that we have almost the same answer to the question about choo-choos and duckies on our profiles! I said something about a lower carbon footprint too! Great minds think alike! :-)

JENNA said...

Bravo to you for cooking all this wonderful food for yourself! It took me awhile to do that for myself when Peter goes out of town and now I love cooking special meals for one.

Your seitan looks fantastic also!

Alicia said...

That thing with the relaxing weekend is just a big fat lie. I have a long to do list every weekend, and it's never enough time (and it's not even fun stuff). But at least you had great food to keep you going! Everything looks amazing, but the chickpea-corn-etc salad got my eye :-)

Leng said...

That's too bad you didn't like the sprouts. How did you cook them? They look really yummy especially sitting on that plate of rice and sweet potato rounds.

Lori- the Pleasantly Plump Vegan said...

i like that Fronch Toast recipe from VWaV way better than any pre-vegan french toast i'd had before. we use this pecan bread from the farmers market that has cinnamon in it and it is soooo good.
i hope you get a more relaxing weekend soon!

the little one said...

If you have any brussels sprouts left over, I'd strongly recommend the Dijon Mustard Brussels Sprouts recipe from La Dolce Vegan. It is awesome!

Vegan_Noodle said...

Ugh, grant applications... = no fun!! At least you treated yourself to some brain boosting food along the way! And I had to laugh at your breakfast grinch comment, my husband is the same way!