Full-Time Working Vegan Dinners

Not all dinners are fancy. With a new full-time job, I won’t even pretend. Sometimes I just eat spaghetti and sometimes my food comes out of the freezer. My iPhone camera is also kinda broken, so excuse the blurry photos. Need to find some time to get to the Apple Store and get the camera insides cleaned!

So, bringing some reality to the blog. These are some after-work leftover dinners, plus the occasional weekend feat!

I mentioned already that I’m obsessed with this potato carrot cheese. I add a tiny bit of cashew butter just because I have some leftover in the fridge and it is divine. I realized chopping veggies and throwing it together with the cheeze sauce and baking it yields pretty awesome results. Although it takes 45 min to an hour to bake, it’s not really much work. Just chop. Mix. Bake. Above is some cheesy cauliflower cheesy baked casserole with a quick salad.

I was visiting friends in Bonn recently and we went on a trip to Düsseldorf where there is a Japantown! How cool is that!? We hit up the grocery stores there and I scoured to find a ramen without fish in it. I found this one, and it was tasty, but I’m sorta afraid there was a translation fail as it tasted kinda fishy to me, which freaked me out by the end. Anyway, this was a really weird dinner. I slapped the extra cauliflower cheesy casserole between two tortillas, added some cilantro and hot sauce and fried it up. It wasn’t terrible, but not sure I’d do it again. At least I used up the about-to-go-stale tortillas and the rest of the casserole! You win some, you lose some.

More ramen with veggies and Sriracha added, Japantown made me obsessed. I will blog about Bonn and Düsseldorf eventually with full details, but I had the best ramen of my life there. Can only imagine what it’s like if I’d actually go to Japan.

Sometimes you just gotta eat some spaghetti with jarred sauce. I had some leftover vegan meatballs in the fridge I needed to use up, so I tossed it together and topped with nooch and rucola (thanks to my friend Erin for giving me the idea to just put greens on top of my spaghetti, it actually works!).

Okay this was freaking awesome. I used this recipe from Minimalist Baker. It turned out so much better than I even imagined, saying as I wasn’t especially in a soup mood, but wanted to use up the pumpkin. I toasted a vegan schnitzel and put it on top along with some sauteed kale from my window box. I used light coconut milk because I bought it accidentally without reading the label, but it seemed to make no difference so maybe I’ll actually buy light coconut milk sometimes. I thought the schnitzel on top might be weird, but it was awesome.

This was one of the first dishes I got obsessed with way back in 2006-07 when I first went vegan. It was my signature dish for awhile and I have fond memories of stuffing my face with it. It’s just shell pasta cooked and then tossed with spinach and chickpeas that have been sauteed in onion and garlic. I used to bake it instead, but I ain’t got time for that shizz now. I totally forgot about this dish, but then I had a can of chickpeas in the cupboard and it came back to me like an assault from memory lane. I added a bit of smoked tofu and nooch on top. Yessss. Back in rotation! Sometimes it’s the simple things.

This must have been a Monday because all I managed were to toast some frozen samosas in the toaster oven and eat them with ketchup and a salad with a quick mustard vinaigrette. Toaster ovens are magic, man. Any type of frozen veggie burger, schnitzel, or any frozen food that won’t slip through the cracks of the rack in the toaster oven, I just put it on high and toast for 10-15 minutes. No extra oil or anything (the frozen stuff usually has oil anyway) and it’s done, easy. These samosas weren’t so fantastic. Should figured that frozen samosas from the German supermarket wouldn’t be mind-blowing. They weren’t bad, but there was some weird spice in there that didn’t belong in a samosas.

So, even when you’re lazy and tired it’s possible to make vegan meals that aren’t totally boring! What are your favorite easy weeknight meals? I could use all the help I can get!