A Vegan, A Vegetarian, and an Omnivore Walk into an Apartment...

...and I realize I have to cook for all of them! My two housemates and I have been settled in our new place for about a month now, and it's finally starting to calm down. All done with moving and furnishing, we're getting comfortable in our new jobs and have learned how to get along pretty well. Last night my poor dead computer was finally revived (a new DC adapter just needed to be soldered on), and now I can share with you some of the dishes we've shared since the start of the summer.

Cheesy parsley polenta with roasted asparagus and walnuts. This was before the vegan moved in!

As was this simple potato soup with rosemary! Basically, imagine a thinner chowder with big ol' potato slices. I actually made this the night before moving into the apartment officially, when these few ingredients were all I had left after a month of letting them peter out!

Yum-- here's a recipe I followed pretty closely from it's original here. I reconstituted my chickpeas dry in the bag rather than using a can, but they were really good and very sherry flavored! I served it with roasted mustardy potatoes and steamed broccoli. Those of us who do not eat fish just had the rest.

Chickenless soup! Is there anything better for an unseasonably cool day than home made bread and nice golden chicken soup? There is if you don't eat meat. I made up some vegetable broth with vegetable stubs and trimmings I'd been keeping stored in the freezer, and to it I added a couple handfuls of wide, ribbon-y egg noodles, cozy kidney beans, and green spinach ghosts. It was really good.

This was also made before our vegan became vegan-- he was just a vegetarian at this point still. After Jordan and I came back from swimming at the pool after work, we threw in this quick but filling cheddar and spinach quiche with roasted asparagus. We used an entire bag of spinach (minus the few leaves I'd been nipping from it for the last couple days for lunches) in the quiche-- they really are one of the easiest ways to sneak lots of veggies to someone who would probably ordinarily not eat a whole lot of them! And since the only other ingredients were 5 eggs, a splash of milk, a bit of onion, salt, and pepper (plus, of course, the crust), it's a very cheap way to feed three people. It held up very well to being eaten cold out-of-hand the next day in my lunch, too!

Dinner from a couple nights ago was good for all of our dining idiosyncrasies. We made burritos with rice and a black bean/corn/roasted tomato blend, lettuce, lime, caramelized onions and red peppers, hot sauce, colby-jack cheese, and sweet-and-spicy chicken. We could assemble our own using just what we liked.

Here's my dinner-for-one last night. Garlicky parmesan faux-risotto (made with orzo rather than rice), pan seared lemon pepper salmon, and steamed green beans. I'm a bad vegetarian because I still eat seafood (and honestly would eat free range/grass fed/blah blah meat as well if it weren't so expensive). This was a very nice meal.

And look how nicely it packs up in my bento lunchbox! I've really enjoyed using this box to bring lunch to work with me. It was shockingly small when I got it-- not quite as long as my hand-- but if you pack it like it's meant to (i.e., cram as much as possible into all the space), it's a perfect amount for lunch. Plus, taking leftovers in it is so much easier than using a traditional lunch bag. This box has two layers, so in the top I usually pack smaller nibbly things or sweet stuff to end my meal. With this particular lunch, my top later had a small peach split in half with the pit removed, drizzled with just a little honey, with dried cherries stuffed in the pit's hollows, and surrounded with raw almonds to fill up space. There's a lid for this top section that seals very tightly to keep all the little bits in place.

And last but not least:

Home-made chewy granola bars with almonds, dried cherries, and semisweet chocolate chips. I want to tweak the recipe a bit before talking more about them, but they are honestly rather good. Sometimes granola bars from the store can seem overly sweet and dessert-ish to me, which is kind of jarring first thing in the morning, but since these are made by me I can control the sweetness and enjoy the fact that I'm eating a bunch of whole oats and fruits and nuts. Also: even the chocolate in these is vegan (not milk chocolate), so we can all enjoy them. 

This was just a sample of some of the things we've had together so far in the last month. I'll be sure to update more regularly now that my computer (the only one that can read my camera's memory card) is fixed. See you back here real soon!