There’s a saying: When life gives you lemons, make brownies.
I think it’s something like that?
I hope I’m right, because it’s a saying I live my life by.
When you find yourself home alone on your birthday: brownies.
When your friend’s crazy ex-boyfriend is making her life miserable: brownies.
And when you’ve overdosed on coconut and still have half a batch of lemon curd left: brownies.
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Could these be breakfast? Yes. But I like to eat them for dinner.
Before Nate and I lived together, I prepared a lot fewer meals. Dinner was often Thai takeout or a “salad” (a.k.a. a big pile of raw veggies, no dressing, that I ate with my fingers). I’m not entirely ruling that out as a dinner option as the weather gets warmer, but things are a bit more civilized around here these days. However, there is one of my “single” dinners I’ve been missing lately: Scrambled eggs.
Scrambled eggs with goat cheese, avocado and salsa was my favorite weeknight dinner for a while last year. It eventually slipped off my radar – there was the vegan thing, and then the fact that Nate expresses zero enthusiasm for scrambled eggs – and before a few weeks ago, I hadn’t made it in quite some time. I’ve since welcomed it back into my life, however – this time for good. And in my efforts to make it into more of a cohesive meal (one that I could actually serve to others rather than just eat by myself standing up at the counter), I turned it into a burrito.
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At first, I wasn’t going to post about this meal. I started out following Grab a Plate’s lentil salad recipe for dinner one night, but turned it into something slightly different when I didn’t feel like making yet another roasted red pepper dressing. It came out amazing, but I still thought maybe I didn’t need to blog about it.
Then Nate went back for seconds. And in case you didn’t know, that is rare enough to qualify a recipe as blog-worthy 100% of the time.
So here we are with this weeknight lentil salad. It fits the mold for what I’ve been making so often this spring (grain or green + roasted vegetables + sauce or dressing), but with one thing that sets it apart: To me this feels very much like a recipe rather than a loose set of suggestions (the opposite of my usual salad posts)… because I wouldn’t change a single thing.
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This was originally supposed to be a soba noodle salad.
The other day at work, I got really fixated on making one. I just knew it would be perfect with the various leftover veggies lurking in my crisper. I wouldn’t even have to go to the store! Major success.
Then I got home and found we had no soba noodles. Major failure.
So I went to the grocery store. AND THEY ALSO HAD NO SOBA NOODLES.
What. The. Hell.
So back home I went, dug wayyyy to the back of my (very deep) cabinet, and pulled out some ramen noodles. Cha-ching! Salads with ramen noodles are totally a thing. I know because my mom and grandma make one, and that makes them official. And also delicious. A few minutes later, I was digging into this!
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If I’m being perfectly honest, these are deadly.
Not like the “I filled yours with poison” kind of deadly, but rather the “you probably shouldn’t make three test batches of these if you have to be in your bathing suit on a Mexican beach in a week” kind of deadly.
Oh, the things I use this blog as an excuse for.
My mom is definitely shaking her head at me right now.
So yes, this is how I’ve been balancing out my salads lately.
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