Mushroom Korma

Mmmmmm this was good. I cooked it last night and kept the left-overs to reheat today for lunch. Unfortunately I forgot to take photos yesterday when it was looking lovely on a plate, and today I took the tub over to a friend's kitchen and ate it without thinking so no pictures.

I was pretty proud; I have never been very good at cooking for flavour - I would just heat a food item up to a safe temperature and combine it with vaguely complementary food items and eat them. Now I'm considering what flavours go well together and adding spices and stuff and it's great!

Tomorrow's lunch will hopefully be quaesadillas, or at least wraps, as I've bought Tex Mex dip and carrots and tomatoes and still have some mushrooms left over. Just need to buy the wraps...

Bentolicious

Although I haven't been blogging about my own lunches lately, I have been reading a lot about other people's! I love the idea of bentos for children's lunches and I'm really keen to do something similar for myself, although since I spend most of the day in my room and rarely have to take a packed lunch anywhere, I probably don't need to invest in a huge selection of different boxes and dividers (but boy do I want to!).

That said, I did just order a pair of egg moulds so that I can shape boiled eggs into cute shapes before eating them. I just couldn't resist!

Today's lunch is a back-to-basics, lots of nutrition type lunch to get myself going again. Peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches in delicious seeded bread, a small amount of side salad (it's going off, not a lot of it is edible any more) and some cherry tomatoes. There's also a boiled egg, unfortuately just egg-shaped as the moulds won't arrive for 12-24 working days. I think they're being delivered from Japan by carrier pigeon relay.

As you can see, the salad looks rather sad - I discovered my fridge was too cold so in addition to being out of date it was also frozen. I picked out the least miserable leaves and had to throw the rest away.

The amount of food waste I produce horrifies me, and I do my best to use up left-overs and only buy what I know I'll eat. You can probably see that the sandwiches are missing the bottom crust, because there was a bit of mould on it and I felt it was better to cut it off and not waste half a loaf than to throw the whole lot out. I've transferred it into a box in the hopes that it will be more air-tight and less liable to go mouldy than the bag. A good half of the loaves I buy end up going mouldy before I finish them, because the supermarket (the only supermarket in the town centre) doesn't sell half loaves. In a student-heavy town, it amazes me that there is one small supermarket, one of the corner-shop types rather than a full-sized one, and that it caters for families more than individuals despite the fact that a good 60% of the town's population are students. Grrr!

I'll come down from my hobby horse to note the juice in the bottle - I managed to break another glass a few days ago, so I'm now on the look-out for some more sturdy tumblers.

Lunch will soon be back on the menu!

So the reason I started this blog was in a desperate attempt to give myself another motivation to eat lunch - hunger and health wasn't managing it alone.

Unfortunately I have been busy, even busier than usual, busier than ever before, for the last two weeks and I haven't had time to eat lunch. I haven't really had time to sleep - I think the most I've got is six hours and I normally can't function without nine. So that hasn't been great.

However, yesterday a marathon of work paused briefly and I seized the opportunity to clean my room - I can see my carpet again! And today I got back from lectures to a disgusting, vomit-type smell, so I abandoned the reading I'd been planning on doing and washed up dishes. For an hour. Considering that most of my crockery is currently being used as props for a play (don't ask), that is a long time to be washing up. But now everything is clean and back in the cupboards, so for my lunch I had...

a Cup-a-Soup. Because I haven't had time to shop for any food.

I'll get there eventually!

Pasta salad leftovers

Last night I cooked pasta with a sauce made from chopped tomatoes, carrot, mushroom, onion and garlic, and it was the first time that I've actually been happy with a sauce I've made for pasta! I fried the garlic and onion for a long time before adding anything else, which I think helped a lot, and then fried the mushrooms in with them so that the flavour was literally everywhere.

Anyway, there was a fair bit left over today so I've eaten it for lunch. I was so hungry that I'd almost inhaled half the bowl before I remembered to take a photo! It doesn't look like anything special but it's anothe step on my cooking journey :)

Comfort Food

First lunch of the uni year! It's nothing complex, just mushroom soup in a mug, bread (bit past its best but it was massively reduced), half a tomato out of my fridge :D, orange quarters and a banana, cherry and walnut muffin my mum baked. The pink juice is summer fruits and barley, my favourite.

It's great to be back at uni and I've got a fridge and a huge cupboard in my room which is being my pantry. The kitchen is right next door and a great size. I'm happy.