Post-Exam Brunch

One final down, two to go!

I always reward myself with a soy chai tea latte before/after an exam. 

Saxby's coffee has a vanilla almond milk option, my new favorite ☺️

UGH FINALS

Finals have been destroying me these past couple of days, and will continue to for the next week and a half. Haven't had much time to post, but now that I'm sitting in my linear algebra class bored as usual, I thought now would be a good time to write another one.  I haven't gotten nearly enough sleep to function properly so some things might sound a little dumb, but here it goes ---

One of the best and most underrated food combinations that I learned from my mom is avocado, soy sauce, and lemon juice, the latter split evenly half and half over the avocado.  It's seriously scrumptious. As always, I add a little bit of chili flakes to add a kick. It looks so beautiful in my flowery bowl 😙🌸

My meals recently require zero culinary skill to put together - instant noodles and bowls of rice, granola bars, apples, or stalks of celery with dressing.  A little sad, but considering that I've been living at the library, it's hard to put together anything else.

On the bright side, I have a dinner date tonight! As a vegan-vegetarian duo, there's really only one or two places to go to unfortunately... 

Hearty mid-day hangover food

Having only one last weekend before finals is a great excuse to go waaaay too hard on the weekend.  In preparation for the coming weeks of stress and lack of sleep, it's also important to stay heathly and keep your body at it's best..

So the morning after, I wanted to be really hydrated (tea and apple cider yum). Of course I need my fix of greasy and filling, so I reached for my polish flavored tofurkey wurst. And lastly, to wipe out the morning-after alcohol flavor in my mouth and replace it with something fresh - an orange.

I'm pretty sure I ate the same bruch for the next two days too, until I ran out of the sausage.. 

Awesome sauce pesto

On a whim at the grocery store I decided to invest in some pesto making ingredients. Warning: they were not cheap.

One package of fresh basil was about $3, and the bag of walnuts was about $5.  On the bright side, I was able to make about 3-4 servings worth of pesto, and still have most of a bag of walnuts left for banana bread muffins (will post pics later) and as toppings for my salads.

I tweaked the recipe below slightly, because I only had about 2 cups of basil, but stuck to it for the most part.

Once again, my trusty blender came in handy!

And the finished product:

Here's the recipe I used, which I found on this website:

http://hellyeahitsvegan.com/basil-walnut-pesto/

4.0 from 1 reviews

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Basil Walnut Pesto

Prep time:  5 mins

Total time:  5 mins

Serves: about 1 cup

 

Ingredients

• 5 cups loosely packed fresh 
• 
  
• basil leaves
• ½ c walnuts, toasted and cooled
• 3-4 Tbsp olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 Tbsp nutritional yeast, optional
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp salt

Instructions

1. Pulse walnuts in a blender or food processor for a couple of seconds.
2. Add remaining ingredients and blend until mostly smooth.
3. Adjust seasonings as desired.
4. Serve at room temperature, or refrigerate in an air-tight container until serving.

Notes

As is, this recipe makes a thicker pesto, best for spreading on warm, crusty bread.
Use more olive oil and salt if you’ll be using your pesto as a sauce on pasta — I recommend serving it over fettuccine with artichoke hearts and halved, roasted grape tomatoes.

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Kale, Spinach, Banana Smoothie

After I go on a run is one of the times when I'm feeling my best and healthiest. 

So why stuff my face with gnarly greasy food? I try to always reach for my trusty handheld blender (the purple thing in the background of the pictures) and whip up a smoothie.

It's incredibly easy to make any type of smoothie. Normally the ingredients I use are as follows:

1 banana

1/2 cup frozen fruit

Dab of honey

Just enough almond/soy/rice milk to cover everything

Sometimes half a scoop of women's protein powder, I use one called Aria from Trader Joe's. (I realize now that it's not vegan, and has some milk ingredients in it)

Then you blend it up for a great post-workout recharge!  These are also great first thing in the morning when I'm not really feeling eating solid food.

After my run on this particular day, my paleo roommate and I discovered that we each had a whole bag of frozen kale that we had forgotten about in the freezer.

Since I had run out of frozen fruit anyways, I just put in a bunch of kale and some spinach leaves out of my salad bag along with the banana, and blended that right up.  Turns out the almond milk and banana covered up any sort of bitterness from the leafy veg's. The outcome was this beautiful green jem, that tasted really good! 

Heaven is a place in Georgetown

Last week I went made a trip down to our beloved capital, Washigton D.C, to turn in my visa application to go back to India this summer. Unfortunately I missed the cherry blossoms!

But a random guy gave me a bouquet of flowers while I was eating lunch outside at Trader Joe's... 😋

I did get the chance to go to Georgetown Cupcakes, the store featured on the TLC show by the same name. This was my third time there (don't judge me), but my first time going as a vegan.

They have two awesome vegan flavors, Apple Cinnamon, pictured below, and Carrot Cake. Seriously, their cupcakes are amazing, I highly recommend waiting in line to get one. It's also really cool that they make vegan cupcakes. I'll def be going back to try the vegan carrot one some day!!

College-Style Vegan Hamburger

This is a meal I made that was extremely quick and easy. One thing I keep on hand for those quick meals are vegan Boca burgers and Tofurky sausages. They're both somewhat expensive when compared to regular meat ones, but for just over $1 a patty or sausage, that's maybe $2-3 a meal once you're done with all the preparations.

These are the Boca burgers I got from my friendly neighborhood Pathmark. I even think they were on sale, cuz really, who eats vegan burgers anyways.

I just cooked one of these babies up along with a side of green beans ($3 for a massive bag from Trader Joes), chopped up half a tomato and tore off some lettuce, and Voíla! A full burger meal that was very filling and delicious.

Oh I should also mention I don't have burger buns, so I just used that whole wheat bread I had in my cupboard (hence the 'college-style')

Altogether it took only about 5 minutes to whip up, cuz I didn't wanna miss the movie Bridesmaids showing on TV!!

An awesome vegan meal for one!