restaurant salad

Oh how I love leftovers. They make gorgey gorgey salads.

After finally, FINALLY finishing midterms, I enjoyed a lovely celebratory dinner at Legal Seafood, where I had a gift certificate to courtesy of an unclaimed giveaway prize at my old office that I, the unpaid intern who organized said giveaway, was lucky enough to get. Along with a luscious glass of vino verde, I got the “simply grilled” arctic char (one of my FAVE fish, like salmon on crack and also sustainable!).

It and the accompanying sides, along with mizuna (which I’m obsessed with at the mo) tossed with oil and lemon juice made for a KILLER salad.

When you think about it, restaurants probably do a similar thing with lunch salads: “Hey Mel, we gotta whole bunch of fillets left over from last night. Let’s make a fish salad special!”

Okay, clearly fish, greens, and snap peas… but let’s focus on that interesting looking blob at 1:00.

JALAPENO. CHEDDAR. POLENTA. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh yesssssssssssss. I seriously need to get my hands on some polenta, because I’m sure this recipe would not be at all difficult to recreate, and it rocked my socks. Basically anything thick and corny and cheesy does (I’m also a big tamale fan!)

Finally, I was reunited with my <3

I know it seems like all I eat is yogurt but actually I’ve gone without for over a WEEK! However, yoplaits were on sale at Shaw’s, so I definitely restocked :D

close enough to taste

My last midterm (of the approximately 2920385720358 I’ve taken) is tonight! The end is so close I can almost taste it!

In the meantime, here’s what else I’ve been tasting:

 

I stuffed this butternut squash like I stuffed my brain with information.

1/2 cup white beans+ an ounce of feta+ crushed red pepper flakes into a pre-roasted 1/4 of a butternut squash= blissssssss!

For good measure, bliss was accompanied by another of my banana-pepita muffins. Still tasty!

I ended up opening the squash up down the middle like a book, and smooshing out the filling so everything got combined in this sweet and tangy and proteiny mess. It was aaaawesome.

The weather here is seriously blecch, too, so this was a good rainy day pick-me-up.

Soooooo in T minus 3 hours or so I will be DONE WITH MIDTERMS, and have some relative peace (til I have jury duty x_x- p.s. I enjoyed this article). I’ll be celebrating at Legal Seafood with Dreamy Boy. Good times!

hammie sammie

I must’ve liked yesterday’s lunch since I had the EXACT SAME THING TODAY. And I am not a meal repeater! Along with carrots, apple, and PB, I had a big ol’ sandwich.

There’s just something about big hunks of bread with a big hunk of meat inside. Especially now- I’m still studying for my ridiculously stupid amount of midterms, and I want food that will leave me fueled and full and satisfied and ready to go out and study for another bajillion hours (although I did squeeze in a workout today, HUZZAH!)

The meat in this was ham, which I generally don’t buy but I get the deli ends at Johnnie’s cause they’re in small servings (usually 5 oz ish?) and cheap, both of which are perfect for a single student.

This particular sammie was greatly enhanced by the addition of TJ’s cranapple butter. Yummmmmmmmmmmmm ohemgee I’m completely obsessed with the stuff.

Dinner was a BEAUTIFUL DELICIOUS WORK OF ART and my STUPID CAMERA failed at doing it justice, as usual. Imagine this but not ugly:

 

On top: laughing cow atop Akmaks.

Center: Salad. The base was mizuna greens, which I bought on a whim at the farmer’s market and which I’m in LOVE with! Peppery and mustardy and awesome.

Mixed in, leftover steak (that was not bad despite having been horrendously overcooked. I credit a delicious marinade— for a large, 12ish ounce steak, 3 T red wine, 1 T olive oil, 1 T balsamic, 1 huuuge clove of garlic, crushed, 1/2 t black pepper, 1/2 t rosemary)

Bottom: more butternut “fries”! I basically lived on these last winter and am well on my way to doing it again!

eats, midterm style

I’ve decided the blog has really given an inaccurately healthy portrayal of my midterm dining.

I ate a burger and fries!

Syke, it was totally healthy- turkey burger (you know I have no objection to beef burgers from my nonstop bbqing this summer, but turkey was just what I had on hand- I made the patty with green onion and Sriracha and garlic powder and it rocked!) on TJ’s whole wheat British muffin. As for the fries?

   

Those would be hungry girl butternut squash fries! In general, Hungry Girl somewhat annoys me with their calorie obsession and complete lack of interest in nutrients. However, the method is EXCELLENT and the “fries” are DELISH.

Less healthy: canned soup.

I generally like to make my own soup- it has less sodium and it tastes better! However, midterms. And this was on sale…

Probably won’t get it again. That’s one serving, and I even beefed it up with extra beans. Still pretty sad looking, no?

Also part of midterms:

Yeah I drink two buck chuck! In my defense, that’s a REAL WINE GLASS! I paid a whole $1.10 for it at Goodwill!

Even less healthy:

My R.A. had GIRL SCOUT COOKIES at our meeting! Actually the dosido (or whatever they’re calling the shortbread one) was TERRIBLE. I don’t know if it was just old or they’ve reformulated it with weird oils or what but ick. However, the Thin Mint and the Samoa were as delicious as ever. <3 <3 <3.

Oh look, more cookies…

And… even more. I’ve eaten a LOT of cookies lately.

Finally, something with absolutely no nutritional value but enormous nostalgia and deliciousness value.

 

Mellowcreme pumpkins!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So every year my mother and I calls one another in early September and goes “… guess what I saw at CVS”. The response is usually “I KNOW I USUALLY BOUGHT SOME!” In this case, I called, she’d bought. Actually, she’d bought a whole bag. And then eaten the ENTIRE THING during one stressful day at work, hahahahahahahaha. My mom is awesome.

To avoid that pitfall, I did the noneconomic but sanity-preserving thing: portion control.

Candy by the pound is a beautiful thing.

Candy eyeball.

More crap nibbles by the pound.

Now I feel like I’ve been taking this disclosure a little far. In my defense:

Gorgey apple!

savory oats!

Oh. Em. Gee. Finally tried savory oats.

They rocked. My. World.

Orange You Glad I Made Squash Oats?

1/2 cup oats

1 1/4 cup water

1/4 of a butternut squash, roasted and scooped out

1 egg

1 wedge laughing cow

Combine oats, water, and squash. Cook on medium til all is absorbed. Top with egg, fried to runny-yolked perfection, and cheese, broken into melty chunks.

Sweet squash+ hearty oats+ oozing yolk+ melty salty cheese= OH. EM. GEE.

Also had a Dunkies latte on the way home from church :D

Starved+ undercaffeinated+ coupon for a latte for $1= happy me!

weekend meal and pepita meal

Do we call this “lunch” when I ate it at 4:00?

So as not to sound like a total crazy person, in my defense I ate breakfast at 10:30 after feeling a certain reluctance to get out of my warm toasty bed with my awesome Ian McEwan book. And then I kind of wasted time all morning (and waited for the rain to stop, which it did! Score) and then went to the gym and on a serious Trader Joe’s expedition.

Thus… “lunch” at 4. We’ll call it “weekend meal”.

Actually, my friend Liz freshman year had what she called “Sunday meal”. We’d stay out late on Saturday, making excessively poor decisions, and then Sunday sleep til… late. Kind of get it together in our rooms, frantically start doing the homework we blew off, and then… Sunday Meal. At about 4:00 on a Sunday. All your meals in a day in one, emphasis on carbs and cheese and all those lovely foods that would help ease the pangs of what looked suspiciously like hangovers… good times.

Anyway, back to my weekend meal:

FAB salad. I planned this in my head on the way back from Trader Joe’s: broccoli slaw, carrots, apple, and smoked turkey. Dressed with oil, apple cider vinegar, and mustard. YUM.

  And a killer diller combination: plain yogurt with a crumbled Lemon Zest Luna bar on top. Trust me, try it. Your taste buds will thank you.

And now for my project for the rest of the afternoon…

I know I made muffins just the other day, but can one really have enough muffins? Plus, I got creative!

Due to my current abundance of squash, I have an abundance of pepitas, adorable squash seeds that I have taken to roasting. However, one can only sprinkle them on so many soups, bowls of oats, etc. Soooo I thought “I should make a butter with them, like sunflower seed butter!”

But my blender couldn’t totally handle it, so I thought “hey, this looks like flaxseed meal! I should try using it in baked goods, flax-style!” Which I subsequently did.

Banana Pepita Muffins (so many cute words in 1 name!)

1/2 cup quick oats

2 T boiling water

1/4 cup flour (I used all purpose)

3/8 cup pepita meal, flax meal, seed meal, whatever (I ground up about 1/2 cup plus 1 T seeds, which yielded a little less than 1/2 cup meal)

1/2 t baking soda

1/2 t baking powder

1/4 t cinnamon

2 T vegetable oil

2 T milk

2 T plain yogurt

2 T sugar

1 ripe mashed banana

Pour water over oats. Stir, and set aside. Combine dry ingredients (flour through cinnamon). Combine wet ingredients (vegetable oil through mashed banana). Make a well in the dry ingredients, and add the oats (break up clumps first) and wet ingredients. Stir to combine, and drop into greased muffin tins. Bake at 350 for 22 minutes or so. Makes 5 smallish muffins.

I was thinking these could’ve been a spectacular failure as I scooped them into the muffin tin, but they were actually yummy! They get a really nice crisp top (I think this has implications for future cookie/bar recipes) and the banana was wonderfully ripe so there were wonderful melty sweet banana bits on the inside.

time warp

Sometimes I believe my body craves the nutrients it needs. Other times… my brain goes “BUTTERY BREAD CRUMBS!”

Nonetheless, I obliged. I try to be kind to my body.

I had ‘em, and I had ‘em in spades :D

I let the idea kind of evolve in my brain, and I decided what I really wanted was some kind of cheesy casserole.

However.

When one thinks cheesy casserole, the thought tends to invoke nightmarish images involving fifties housewives and cream of mushroom soup. Not appealing, and also not ingredients I ever have on hand. So I winged it with what I did:

Sweet onion, gorgey farmer’s market broccoli, feta, and leftover cooked brown rice.

So I melted some butter (1/2 t.?) in a pan, and sauteed up the onion (minced, about 3 T?) until it smelled nummy and scrummy. Then I added the broccoli (1.5 c?) and let that sautee awhile. Then I added the rice (one portion, cooked), about 1/4 cup of milk, and an ounce of feta cheese.

For the browned breadcrumbs, I wiped out the skillet, melted a wee bit more butter and, tbqh, added some of the roomie’s Progresso breadcrumbs. Lazy, not particularly healthy shortcut, but they were rockin.

Baked at 375* for 20 minutes. In what, you ask?

Seriously, were there some kind of award that was given for most creative use of muffin tins (and there really should be), I would win it.   What I should really do is invest in a ramekin…

The main thing was really just to have them in the oven and let the top crisp up. As you can see, I ended up just scraping them out of the foil-lined cups and onto a plate.

But jeepers this was tasty!

Cheesy, chewy, veggie-y, pleasantly crisped on top, and infinitely infinitely comforting in this hectic week of midterms and interviews and madness.

Thank. GOD. It’s the weekend now.