Pasta with Pesto, Green Beans, and Potatoes

I had originally planned to cook a dish using the Vegetarian Butcher’s chicken pieces last night, but by the time my mother and I got back from a trip to IKEA it was already pretty late and I didn’t feel like preparing anything elaborate. I decided to save the chicken pieces for a different meal and flipped through one of my cookbooks. Then this recipe caught my eye:

The Linguine with Pesto, Potatoes, and Green Beans from The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen are delicious, but also super quick to prepare – you just boil the veggies and pasta in one pot while making the pesto, mix together, and serve! Just what I was looking for. It’s a simple dish, of course, but the potato added an interesting twist and it was the perfect dish to eat outside during the warm October evening we had.

I’m off to visit my cousin in a few minutes, but I’ve already done most of the prepping for my next MoFo meal. Hope you all have a lovely day!

Salad & Pizza in the Garden

I think I already mentioned on here that we had a pretty crappy summer with loads of rain and not nearly enough sunshine. Needless to say, it was a welcome surprise that the first days of autumn actually turned out to be very pleasant; yesterday my boyfriend and I even spent the afternoon at the beach (No swimming, though; too many jellyfish :( I did bring a cookbook to do some MoFo planning and it turns out my boyfriend would like me to try out all pancake and waffle recipes from 500 Vegan Recipes this month. Not a bad idea…) Today was equally gorgeous, so my parents and I decided to have dinner outside in the garden. I made the pizza dough from Nonna’s Italian Kitchen and the tofu ricotta from Veganomicon, so all we needed were a few fresh veggies to make a yummy summery meal.

My pizza had fresh tomato slices, tofu ricotta, sautéed oyster mushrooms, marinated artichokes (I found these at Xenos and they’re so much better than the canned artichoke hearts I usually get!), sliced red onion and arugula. I know I’ve said it before, but this pizza dough is the best! It’s easy to work with and makes for a delicious chewy/crispy crust. I haven’t always had good results with whole wheat pizza crusts, but I always use a cup of whole wheat flour in this recipe and it works beautifully! I actually prefer the crunchy texture it give the crust. Now all we need is a pizza stone and I’ll never want restaurant pizzas again!

We’d made salads while waiting for the pizzas to arrive, and they were almost as delicious as the pizzas themselves. My plate had mixed lettuce, fresh tomato, red onion, tofu ricotta, some of those delicious artichoke hearts, and the Classic French Vinaigrette from the Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen. The dressing was quick to whip up and made a tasty addition to our salads. We also drizzled a little onto our pizzas.

I hope to  be back with more summery eats tomorrow. Got to enjoy those sunny days while they last!

Fennel Salad and Two Lunch Boxes

One of my goals for VeganMoFo was to pack more interesting lunches for myself, so here’s a picture of what I had yesterday:

From left to right: lettuce with chopped apple and green olives, thinly sliced carrots with slivered almonds and parsley, three stuffed vine leaves (from a can), grapes, sundried tomatoes, avocado. Everything got mixed up a bit after I carried the box around in my bag for a while, so next time I’d like to try to pack all the components even more tightly, but this made for a tasty salad lunch!

This morning, I made a recipe I’d wanted to try for a while: the Fennel, Orange, and Black Olive Salad from The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen. I used only half a fennel bulb for a smaller portion of salad and used mandarin oranges because those were the only kind I had. It was very simple and pretty good! I love fennel but I’d never had it raw like this. I took most of my salad with me in my lunch box today:

Along with the salad, I brought a sandwich of whole wheat bread with an Alpro apple filet and ketchup. I usually prefer to eat the Alpro burgers when they’re still warm, but I needed something to pack in my lunch box and I had one leftover apple filet left that had to be eaten. It was still pretty tasty, but I probably wouldn’t make it like this again. I put some lettuce in the middle of the box (under the grapes), because I hoped that would prevent the dressing in the salad from leaking into the bread, but I still ended up with a soggy-edged sandwich. Oh well, this wasn’t too bad for a quickly packed meal!