My Favorite Quick Lunch When I'm Working

I love food.  I eat really slowly, comically slowly.  Even when I think I'm wolfing something down, I'm still always the last one to finish.  

I work for myself, and when I'm in the middle of a workday I want to throw together lunch very quickly. Fast usually means pre-packaged and bad for you, which I'm not inherently opposed to.  But I don't want to eat something that's going to leave me feeling hungry, or, worse, make me crash an hour or two later.

Here's my favorite fast lunch for when I'm working.  It's quick and easy to make, really flavorful, and it satisfies me until dinner.  Bonus points for it being vegan and healthy!

ARUGULA + AVOCADO SALAD

Makes one big salad you can eat while you're working on building your empire.

• Tear up a bunch of arugula leaves into a big bowl. Like two big handfuls.  I love arugula.  You can substitute any hearty leaf, just skip iceberg or kale.

• Dice up a small avocado.  I'm not afraid to eat an entire avocado. You can do half if you want.
• Mix up the dressing:
  • Take out a small bowl and pour in a tablespoon or two of olive oil or grapeseed oil.
  • Pour in about an equal amount of balsamic vinegar.
  • Add about a spoonful of stoneground mustard.  It needs to be fancy mustard, not the yellow hot dog mustard.  
  • Stir up the dressing.  Stir it pretty fast.  The tartness of the mustard offsets the sweetness of the balsamic vinegar and binds it with the oil.
• Pour the dressing over the arugula and avocado.  Yum.
• Optional, but recommended:
  • Sprinkle a handful of walnuts into the salad. I just bust them up into smaller pieces with my fingers.
  • Shake some dulse flakes in.  Dulse is a sea vegetable, and the flakes give a slightly salty and tangy taste though it's not very strong. It's rich in vitamins, minerals, trace elements and iodine, which all sound like things I don't eat often enough.  Shake a whole bunch on there.
  • Add a bunch of nutritional yeast. The yellow flakes are popular with vegans because they taste slightly like cheese or nuts, but not really because they're flakes.  I personally really like the way nutritional yeast tastes.  It's full of B-complex vitamins and all 18 amino acids, which sound like things I don't eat often enough.
  • You can grind some fresh black pepper over the top.
  • Today I added in some chopped up chives from my garden.
  • If your taste buds are super fancy, drip a few drops of truffle oil over the top.
• Mix it up and eat it while writing a blog post about your lunch.  Hopefully it will drive traffic to your website.  The blog post, not the salad.

I'm growing arugula in my garden so I was able to pick all the fresh arugula I needed for my salad today.  I'm feeling very smug about this.

Does this salad sound good to you?  If you try making this salad, let me know!

Prickly Pear Harvest

As I've mentioned before, I'm a bit obsessed about making stuff from whatever grows in our backyard.  Our neighbors have a giant cactus that is a foot or two taller than me and the top of it grows over into our yard.  My neighbors Dolores and Lorenzo are very sweet and sharing, and they also never go into their backyard, so I figured I could take some prickly pear fruit without them minding too much.

A few months ago, I harvested a few batches of fruit.  Did you know that prickly pear fruit is also referred to as tuna?  It makes me laugh every time, as a vegetarian, to think I'm eating tuna.  

I don't have a photo of our neighbors' tunas, but they looked like the yellow orange one in this photo.

First of all, it's pretty dangerous to harvest these fruits.  They have tiny hairlike spikes that hurt like &#^@ when they bore into your skin.  Gardening gloves were no match for the insidious spines.  My sweetheart got some heavy duty thick vinyl gloves from the hardware store so we could safely handle them.

I wanted to try making Prickly Pear Syrup to put in to my famous margaritas.  I experimented with different ratios of sugar and water, but I didn't like the taste of the pear with too much sugar.  I wanted to keep some tartness, and since I could add sugar later on when making the cocktails, I eventually bypassed sugar altogether.

My recipe for Tart Prickly Pear Syrup:

1. I use 4-6 fruits per batch of syrup.
2. Once the spines are rubbed off, I rinse the fruit, slice them in half (while still wearing the gloves) and scoop the pulp and seeds out with a spoon directly into a pot on the stove.  
3. I turn the heat to medium-low, just enough to heat them so they start breaking down.  They don't need to bubble and simmer. 
4. The key to bringing out the tartness and flavor is to squeeze in a half to a whole lemon or lime into the pot.  Either one worked well.
5. Keep an eye on the pot so the contents don't burn.  You may need to add in some water, maybe 1/2 cup or a cup.  I like a thicker syrup so I only add water as needed so nothing burns.
6. Periodically mash the pulp with a wooden spoon, to help it break down and liquefy.
7. When the pulp is mostly broken down, taste the mixture and see if it needs some sugar or citrus juice.  Trust your tastebuds, you can't do this wrong.
8. Take the mixture off the heat and let it cool.  Once it's cooled, pour it through a fine mesh strainer into a jar, and discard the seeds and pulp.

The jar of syrup kept in the fridge for a month or two.  I left one jar longer than that, and it started to mold.  Just keep an eye on it!

To use the prickly pear syrup, add about a tablespoon into your cocktail recipes, or add it to sparkling water, lemonade, whatever seems right to you.

Now that it's spring, I've noticed that the cactus is going crazy with new growth.  

Are these new paddles, or new tunas?  Anybody know?  I can't wait to find out!

Rich in roses

When we moved in to our house late last summer, the entire backyard was overgrown and neglected.  My sweetheart is industrious and loves getting outside, fixing things and nurturing greenery.  He hacked away everything that was dead and dying in the yard, probably half the overall volume, and I waited over winter and wondered who might want to come back in the spring.

Well it's spring now, and we have an old-fashioned rose bush that's taller than me.  

So far, all the plants have come back with gusto.  They all seem delighted to have gotten some much-needed attention.  Sometimes I can feel fearful of getting rid of old stuff, but when I watch how these plants respond to being pruned, it inspires me.  Clip away whatever isn't growing, so there's more room to bloom.

Our old-fashioned rose bush is blooming like mad!  I can see her from my bedroom window, and every time I see the small pink blooms, my heart sings.  I feel rich in roses.  

The witchy part of me always wants to utilize the beautiful growing things in our yard.  We never use pesticides and only fertilize with the compost we make ourselves, and I always research what's safe to consume.  Lately I've been googling what I can do with these phenomenal roses.  

I've made two batches of rose water.  Here's a great video showing the method I used.

I'm drinking some rose petal tea as I type this.  Here's the simple method that inspired me.

I'm going to make some rose simple syrup this evening.  Here's the recipe I plan to use.

There are so many blooms, and just as many buds waiting to break open.  I feel like I want to capture what the roses are saying, and make room for more blooms.

Have you made anything from rose petals?  Any other recipes I should check out?