Cooking for the Week

Share:

I’m sure I’ve talked about cooking for the week over here before. It’s my best defense against ordering Green Sprout after a long day, and it’s something I look forward to on the weekend. On Saturday or Sunday, I just love spending a few hours making a couple of batches of food that I can use to pack lunches and heat up quick dinners for the week. Usually, it’s one or two dishes, and I was really happy with the dishes I made this week!

Pictured up there is Mujadarra, a lentil and rice dish packed full of awesome fried onions and diced eggplant and green pepper sauteed with garlic, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. I didn’t have the five onions that the Mujadarra recipe I used was asking for, so I just used the two that I had on hand. It was delicious! I will say that I had to cook my lentils and rice for an additional 15 minutes or so and add a bit of water. It was great topped with soy yogurt and a little hot sauce!

The Mujadarra has been great this week. It’s lovely on its own, packed in my lunch as a cold salad (like in the picture to the right), and it’s versatile, too! For dinners, I’ve been mixing in a bit of cauliflower or broccoli slaw, microwaving long enough to heat everything up, and topping with a little olive oil and nutritional yeast. Since this isn’t heavy on the lentils, it takes well to the cheesiness and tastes like a whole different dish. Perfect!

Vegetable Husband was rich with eggplant this week, so I made one last dish using more of the eggplant. I’d been wanting to make my own baba ganouj for a while and finally got around to it this weekend! I sort of mixed things up based on this baba ganouj recipe from Epicurious. We didn’t have any tahini or lemons, so I changed things up a bit:

Approximate Baba Ganouj

• 4 small eggplants, halved lengthwise
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup sunflower seed butter (any nut butter would do here)
• 2 garlic cloves

Preheat oven to 375°F. Generously oil rimmed baking sheet. Place eggplant halves, cut side down, on sheet. Roast until eggplant is very soft, about 45 minutes. Cool slightly. Using spoon, scoop out pulp from eggplant into strainer set over bowl. Let stand 30 minutes, allowing excess liquid to drain from eggplant.

Toss the garlic into your Magic Bullet or food processor to chop, then add the rest of the ingredients and whizz until smooth!

I’ve been using this as a sandwich spread. It’s great on nutty whole grain bread topped with arugula!

Share: