the best lunches

The best lunches are spent with people you like!

Alone meals < With Friend Meals

Now that Steve and I are both on student schedules, lunches are the best mealtimes for us to meet up Tuesday-Thursday.

Arriving at his place is fun and unpredictable. Sometimes he has an adorable appetizer waiting for me.

 

These were absolutely delightful stacks of sliced banana, peanut butter, a shredded wheat piece, honey, yogurt, and a blueberry on top.

 

As for the main course, it typically involves rice, beans, and veggies cooked in some manner. And by usually I mean always. This particular day, those items went into tuna tacos. Odd but good. Particularly good with Cholula atop, and kale chips on the side.

The best pictures in Steve’s apartment are taken next to the glass door… but it means you get really intense carpet texture in your shots. Nonetheless, the food looks good.

 

And Steve’s latest obsession is oven-baked sweet potato fries (yum) with a condiment of mayonnaise mixed with sesame-oil-enriched Korean hot sauce. YUM YUM YUM!

True story: I may claim to love to cook but I think I actually hate it, because I am always soooooooooo grateful when Steve makes meals for me. And they are always soooooooooo delicious. And his kitchen is walled off from the rest of the apartment and I only wander in and out while he cooks which meaaaaaans… I don’t have to know how much butter he uses.

Friday I met up with my best friend Lydia for lunch. It was a fun if slightly woeful lunch, since Lydia’s skippin’ town to go up to the frigid North. Her boyfriend, and a buncha great opportunities are up there… but I will miiiiiiiiss herrrrrrr!

Anyway, we went to Sweetgreen, where they make you salads the size of babies. It was a beautifully sunny, if depressingly cold, day.

Let’s see if I can remember everything this contained:
- base of kale and baby spinach
- roasted broccoli
- roasted teeny cubes of sweet potato
- cherry tomatoes
- almonds
- baked falafel, which was kee-razy good. If any of you are fortunate enough to have tried the chickpea two ways at Cava, it tasted like that. Crispy outside, heavenly light and olive-oily innards.
- carrot-chile dressing

 

Came with their outrageously delicious whole grain bread. PERFECT bread (in my opinion): dense chewy crust, puffy bubbly slightly tanger center.

Hosted a farewell dinner for Lydia on Saturday. Didn’t feel like documenting with fun pictures (see “will misssssssssss herrrrrrrrrr”, above) but the meal was EXCELLENT.

- Steve’s pico de gallo
- homemade plantain chips (just so-so, didn’t use enough oil)
- kick-ass enchiladas: cooked up soy chorizo (Lydia’s a vegetarian… and it’s DELICIOUS) with some veggies (a little onion, lotsa mushrooms, green pepper) and browned everything all up. Then added diced sweet potatoes (!) and water and cooked down til tender. Meanwhile made this incredibly easy homemade enchilada sauce. For some reason I have always been intimidated by making enchilada sauce and was thisclose to buying a bottle at Trader Joe’s til I read the ingredient list, scoffed at the various sugar derivations and nasty oils and artificial whatsit, and decided to make it myself. REALLY easy, REALLY good. Anyway, so into my pan went whole wheat tortillas (too big, oops!) wrapped around that great filling with that great sauce and a whole buncha cheese on top (Steve was in charge of shredding!) Spectacularly delicious, actually
- Mark Bittman’s fruit crumble. Apples as the filling (used a mix of sweet, tart, and sweet-tart, per some authoritative article about baking with apples I read a million years ago). Used the citrus-herb variation of the topping, which involves large amounts of citrus zest, ground coriander and black pepper (!) along with a stick of butter. How could it not be glorious?