Brown Rice & Vegetables

Today's lunchbox contains a mixture of both storebought vegan food items and some homemade stuff. As you know, it's difficult to cook from scratch all the time, and that's where all of the new vegan friendly items that you can pick up at basically any grocery store now come in so handy. I guess that's one of the things that I am trying to demonstrate on here. It's not difficult to eat vegan. When you have time to cook something delicious, that's good. I love sitting down to a nice home cooked vegan meal, and I love opening up the lunchbox to find yummy home cooked vegan food. But whenever you find yourself short on time, or you just don't want to eat the same thing for lunch that you just had for dinner, that's where prepackaged vegan food can save you. It's everywhere now.

Today, I am relying on Amy's Brown Rice & Vegetables for my main course. There's lots of brown rice in there, I even think there is quinoa, along with lots of vegetables and tofu. It has this yummy sesame and tahini dressing on it too. It's very delicious and filling. I always like to keep a few of the vegan products from Amy's Kitchen in my freezer for the times when I just can't decide what I am going to pack for the next day's lunch. It's kinda' funny because whenever I think about brown rice & vegetables I always think of the restaurant scene in that movie "Showgirls". I don't know why they didn't like their brown rice & vegetables because these are yummy.

I threw in a salad of baby greens and tossed a little carrot on top there just for a little color. I couldn't decide which salad dressing I wanted, or if I just wanted to whip something up, when I spotted a bottle of Brianna's Poppy Seed Dressing in the fridge. Now, I'm not the one who bought this, but I remembered that I used to LOVE this stuff. I started to not even look at it because I figured it was not vegan, I mean, it looks like it's cream based. But I picked the bottle up and read the ingredients and lo and behold the stuff IS vegan. Who knew? I'm really excited now because this stuff is awesome on fresh peaches. Mmmmmm... can't wait to bring that for lunch.

And to finish off today's lunch, I brought a bunch of Ritz Crackers to eat with some homemade Roasted Red Pepper Hummus that I made. I make this stuff all the time and I absolutely love it. It's not an "uncheese" recipe per se, but I think that it tastes just like some type of cheese spread. Actually, I have spread it on bread before and eaten it as a pimento cheese sandwich. To make it, I just dump the following things into the food processor: 1 can of drained chickpeas (save the juice in case you need to thin it out at the end), juice of 1 lemon, 1 tsp. salt, 1 Tbsp. minced garlic, and 3 Tbsp. Tahini. I mix it all up real good and then just start dropping in roasted red peppers until it turns the color that I like. It looks just like cheese spread. I pause a lot and taste it along the way until I get it just the way that I want it. But it's really easy to make and takes all of 5 minutes. I almost always have some of this stuff hanging out in the fridge for snacking.

Well, I guess that does it for this week. Thanks for checking in and I'll see everybody on Monday.

Have a great weekend!