The B's - Bowls, Blueberries, Bread, and BUSYINESS

Long work days (9-10 on average, but this week will be ~13 hours) limit our cooking creativity and cooking time... Our cookbooks, like Veganomicon and Soy of Cooking books are starting to collect dust! Hopefully work will get better and we'll have more time to try some of those good looking recipes! While we are cherishing each minute of relaxation and free time we do have, we've been only cooking quick meals or planning ahead. What kinds of nutritious meals do you all prepare during BUSY times?

Our recent favorite meal has been rice BOWLS - they're versatile and chock full of good veggies. Simple, yet elegant. We've been loving red rice with it! The first rice bowl this week was with edamames, carrots, scallions, mushrooms, bell pepper, garlic, and Bragg's. The next day we enjoyed the rice bowl with an addition of orange sesame dressing, crunchy water chestnuts, and a gold nugget squash (creamy, like a cross between a summer squash and an acorn squash). Just mix all the veggies and goodies you want with rice in a bowl and dig in with a big spoon! :)


More "bowls" ahead, only this is a sweet treat - Coconut Bliss Vanilla Bean ice cream with fresh local peaches and cranberry orange granola!


For breakfast, we soaked extra thick oats overnight with hazelnut nut butter and some milk. Then we added frozen banana slices and fresh local blueberries and heated it for a heart-warming healthy breakfast! The BLUEBERRIES here are to die for; we've been buying 1/2 flats for really cheap and freezing them to stock up for the winter.


It's really convenient and cheaper to bake homemade BREAD/rolls and freeze them for the week. We made wheat rye garlic rolls (some wheat flour, rye flour, garlic, and herbs), which olive oil always goes well with. (By the way, we've been chugging our current olive oil - from Italy! It is to die for.)
Other baked goods we made this weekend were guava jam biscuits and ginger spice biscuits. Our grocery store had all natural, no sugar-added guava jam -it tastes so tropical and delicious on bread, we might as well put some jam in the bread!

We recently enjoyed Fat Free Vegan Kitchen's paprika potatoes with local red potatoes. We added more tomato paste, omitted the saffron, and cut down the oregano. We, of course, drizzled olive oil and nutritional yeast on it. It was good served warm with steamed broccoli, as well as eaten chilled like a potato salad. Thanks Susan!

Lastly, here is a pic of our grocery finds, including the guava jam, red rice, and gold nugget squash. There are two new chocolates we've discovered - mango chili and cacao nibs with nutmeg. They're both sweeter than we like (we like extra dark chocolate), but the nutmeg one reminds us of eggnog spice, and the mango chili has subtle notes of tropical coconut sweetness with some heat.
Hope that your lives aren't as busy as ours....we need your encouragement and energy to get through this upcoming week! We're thankful for Farmer's Markets and a vegan's favorite B's - Blueberries, easy meal Bowls, and Bread.

Best wishes, LK