Quinoa Salad with Lemon and Soy Dressing

There comes a day every summer where you realize that you really really need to start taking care of yourself. I call it the Day After the Canada Day Long Weekend. This weekend usually involves more booze, bbq and nachos than any one person should be consuming over a three day period. There's only one way to make up for your transgressions: eat nothing but salad for a week while watching weight-loss reality TV. And exercising. Obviously.

Ingredients
1/2 cup raw, drained quinoa
a handful of baby spinach
1/4 cup dried cranberries (DO NOT OMIT, this MAKES the salad. You can also replace with sultanas, or sweet fruit, or fresh berries)
2 hard boiled eggs

Dressing:
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup lemon juice
1.5 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp each finely chopped fresh chives and mint


Let's do it!
Put the eggs in a small pot and cover with water. Put on the stove on high until the water boils. When the water boils, cover and put the pot aside for at least 10 minutes. The eggs will be hardboiled after this time.

Put the drained quinoa in a slow cooker and add 1 cup of water. Turn on.

Lunch it up!
I had the dressing in an airtight container, the quinoa in another, and everything else together in yet another container.

To eat, chop up the egg and arrange with the spinach and cranberries on a plate. Top with quinoa and top that with dressing.

Like I said, you do not want to skimp on the sweet stuff (dried cranberries or fruit), otherwise this will be a soul-suckingly boring salad. Enjoy!

Egg and Bacon Salad Sandwich

If you have high cholesterol, you should really not make this sandwich. Everyone else, prepare for deliciousness!

I don't have a photo of this sandwich because when I ate it, I was super hungry and just couldn't take the time. Sorry. But it looks exactly the way it sounds.

Ingredients for 2-3 servings
4 eggs
2 slices of bacon
1 tbsp sweet relish
1/2 tsp grainy mustard
1/4 minced onion
1 tbsp mayo or more
Optional: Minced celery, capers, any other veggies you may have laying around that you want to use up.

Let's do it!
Put the eggs in a small pot and cover with water. Put on the stove on high until the water boils. When the water boils, cover and put the pot aside for at least 10 minutes. The eggs will be hardboiled after this time.

Heat up a pan on medium high and put the bacon on it. Turn over when it starts getting curly. Cook until crisp, then lay on paper towels to drain. When it's dry and cool, crush it up into little pieces.

Peel the eggs, chop them and put them in a bowl along with everything else. Mix well, taste and add more mayo, salt, ground pepper as needed. Put between two pieces of bread (whole wheat, preferably) with some lettuce or spinach or whatever.

Quick note: The best way I've found to peel eggs is to crack the egg all around the middle of it (the top being the narrow part, the bottom being the wider part). Peel away the middle, then pull the two remaining halves apart. You may need to rinse the egg after. There's also this method but every time I try it, I feel like I'm going to explode my ear drums.

Yayyyy!!

Chick'n chicken salad

I really wanted to have some nice Asian-style chicken with my salad in an effort to slowly wean myself off the bad eating I've been doing lately. I mean, grilled chicken is pretty good for you, right? So what if it's a thigh piece and you don't trim ANY of the fat off?

Ingredients

1 chicken thigh, bone removed
1/4 cup Japanese soy sauce
1 tbsp honey
splash of sesame oil

2 handfulls baby spinach
some white onion, thinly sliced
some cabbage, thinly sliced
1/2 a tomato, cut up
1 hard boiled egg

Your choice of dressing. I used 1:1 white vinegar and veggie oil, which was kind of gross, even after I squeezed half a lime into it. I mean, I was still able to eat it and all, but it wasn't as awesome as I'd like. Next time I'm using vinegar and olive oil. That always seems to work.


Let's do it!
Chicken: Put the soy sauce, honey and sesame oil in a shallow dish and stir. Taste and adjust to your liking. Place the chicken in the dish and poke some holes in it with a fork. Let marinate for at least 15 minutes.

Grill on a panini press (if you're lucky enough to own one) for about 15 minutes.. I really wasn't keeping watch. Maybe 10 minutes? I don't know. I pierced it to make sure it was cooked all the way through. If you don't have a panini press, you can bake in the toaster oven at 350ºF for 15-20 minutes, or fry on the stove. Let it rest on a cutting board for about 15 minutes or cool enough to handle. Slice into... slices.

Egg: For perfect hardboiled eggs, cover the eggs with cold water in a small pot. Put the pot on the stove on high, uncovered. As soon as the water boils, turn off the stove and cover the pot. Let it sit for 10 minutes.

I'm certain you're smart enough to put the rest together. I put all the veggies in a dish with the spinach, and all the meat in another dish while transporting to work. The salad dressing is applied at the very end so it doesn't get all mushy.

Basic fried rice

Fried rice is another one of those recipes that use up all the leftovers in the fridge. All you really need is rice, soy sauce, veggies, protein and oil. You can have an endless amount of combinations. I have yet to make a combination that tastes bad, but that doesn't mean this recipe is infallible. Think before you mix. If I'm using leftover meat, I won't use any meat that's got a sauce on it. In terms of veggies, I had a cucumber in the fridge, but thought it might not mix well with the other flavours. Plus, cooked cucumber? Gross.

Ingredients
3 servings of cooked rice, cooled (preferably overnight)
1/2 onion, diced
1/2" slice of ginger, peeled and left intact (Unless you like eating ginger)
2 dried Chinese mushrooms, soaked in water, stems removed and diced. Water reserved
1/4 tsp shrimp paste
1 egg, beaten
1 serving meat (I used frozen smoked sausage), diced
1 tsp light soy sauce (or more, to taste)
Optional: any other kind of veggies or meat you have diced. I tossed in some chives from the garden, though green onion would make more sense.

I'm sure there's some kind of science around why you want the rice to be old and cold. I don't know it, but it's a tip I got from my brother and it seems to get good (i.e. not mushy) results. If you're not using brown rice (and why not?), you can rinse it after it's cooled, to rinse out any residual starches.

In terms of the dried mushrooms and shrimp paste, they're not completely necessary, but I find that they really elevate the dish from rice that's fried to FRIED RICE. Both can be found in an Asian grocery store (but not the Asian area of any grocery store that I've been to) or on the internet. Shrimp paste smells like rotten shrimp, but is a fantastic addition to a lot of Asian dishes.

Let's do it!
Heat 1 tbsp of oil in a wok on medium heat. Pour in the scrambled egg and let sit until it's mostly cooked. Turn it over to cook on the other side. Slide out of the pan and chop it up into 1" x 1/2" slices, or diced, or whatever you want. Put aside.

Throw the onion and ginger in the pan. Saute for about 4 minutes, until the onions start to soften. Throw in the other veggies (mushrooms, and whatever else you have). Cook for another 3 minutes to meld the flavours. Add the meat and cook for another 3 minutes.

Turn the heat up to medium high and throw in the rice. Stir fry it. Mix 1 tbsp of mushroom water, the shrimp paste and soy sauce in a bowl until it's blended well. Add it to the wok and mix everything well. Add the egg. Taste the rice. Is it salty enough? If so, you're done. If not, add a bit more soy sauce.

That's it!

Donburi... type thing

The problem: Leftover rice and other stuff in the fridge
Difficulty: Don't want to make fried rice, despite being Chinese and that being my most common fallback.
X-factor: Don't need to make lunch for husband, so I can be as crazy as I want with this.
Solution: Donburi, or a variation thereof. A Japanese dish that is basically a bowl of cooked rice with some other food served on top of it.

This was a favourite of mine in college, where I could get a vegetarian donburi from the food court that would fill me up for about $5. Rice, soup, protein, veggies, how can you go wrong?

Ingredients
Cooked rice
1 tbsp Organic red miso paste
1 tbsp mirin
1/4 c Japanese soy sauce (yes, there is a difference. At home I have four kinds of soy sauce. God only know how many my mom has.)
2 raw eggs
Raw spinach (or field green salad mix, which is what I had in the fridge)


Let's do it!
Boil maybe 2 cups of water on the stove. Mix the miso paste with some water in a bowl until it's blended, then add to the boiling water. Add the mirin and soy sauce and simmer for maybe 5 minutes. That's pretty much it until you get to work.

Lunch it up!
Pack the soup in a non-spill container, pack the rice in another container, and the greens and raw eggs in yet another container. Yes, this is another lunch that will bring ridicule from your workmates, but it will smell/taste delicious and they'll all be jealous. So there.

At work I boiled the soup in the microwave, cracked the two eggs in and covered it for a few minutes. Then I cooked the rice in a bowl, threw the greens on top, then threw the soup on it. A real donburi doesn't have this much soup at all, but whatever. I wasn't going to throw it out.

Diagnosis
Not the best thing I've ever made, but not the worst. I think it might need some tweaking in execution and ingredients. Spinach would have been a better choice than field greens (which were mostly lettuce. Soupy lettuce = gross) and the rice should have been cooked more. The soup was okay, but it was too sweet (I actually used a ton of mirin, best use 1 tbsp or adjust the sweetness at home, which is not what I did). I will make this again, but maybe not be so haphazard about it next time.