Mekana

The lazy person’s guide to good food

Food, Photos | July 6, 2010

This past week, I was lazy and relied on easy-to-make, not-from-scratch meals. HOWEVER, the frittata and the flatbread from this post, along with possibly sushi (which I learned how to make from my Japanese friend’s mom), comprise part of the menu for next week. Or the week after. Or the week after that. Or maybe next year or next millennium. It’ll happen.

In the meantime, I’m going to share with you how to make yummy food with limited resources (because motivation and energy are resources some of us don’t really have):

Breakfast

Mix together plain yogurt (I used Dannon) and granola (I used the Cascadian Farm Organic cinnamon raisin kind). Add blueberries.

Or, if you’re super healthy like I am, eat a few chocolate chip cookies (see the snack section below) and call that breakfast. Shh. Don’t tell anyone.

Lunch

Heat up tortillas (I used some generic kind) and cooked/premade chicken breasts (I used…I forget which kind — I know, so helpful). Put chicken in tortillas. Add lettuce, salsa (I bought a pound from the grocery store deli area where they have premade stuff — it was on sale for $1.00/lb), and cheese (I used Kraft Mexican taco cheese, which is just cheddar and asadero cheese with taco seasoning).

You don’t have to stop at tacos if you’re hungry, like I always am. Add cucumbers and the same salsa and chicken to lettuce for a simple, healthy salad (the one pictured above). Or add cucumbers, grape tomatoes, and your favorite dressing (I use basil parmesan vinaigrette) to lettuce for a slightly less healthy salad.

This time it’s an “or,” not an “and” (i.e., this sushi isn’t from the same day as the tacos and the salad) because c’mon, even I don’t eat that much. Go to your favorite inexpensive sushi place. (I went to the local Japanese supermarket — the same place where I usually get nigiri or spicy shrimp rolls. The picture above is futomaki, which I ate in addition to spicy shrimp rolls that look exactly like the ones I linked and, therefore, aren’t pictured again. Futomaki’s actually the first kind of real sushi I ever tried!)

Dinner

Go to an authentic Szechuan restaurant for lunch and order a dinner-sized portion of spicy fish. Get your (inevitable) leftovers boxed, take them home, and use them to cook more fish. (Optional: Add bamboo shoots and enoki.) Eat the fish in addition to rice and vegetables (not pictured).

Side note and important public service announcement: Szechuan spicy is the best kind of spicy. It’s spicy and numbing at the same time, so you get the flavor, but it doesn’t make your poor little taste buds hurt so badly that you cry. It does make some things taste weird afterward (for example, I thought the spiciness made water taste sweet and sour at the same time, and one of my friends said it made water taste like sand, but he’s just crazy), but you can’t have everything.

Snacks

Use your favorite chocolate chip mix (I used the Nestle kind that comes in a huge box — yes, I know this goes against the golden rule of cookie baking, or whatever, but I’ll make cookies from scratch next time eventually, I promise) and bake cookies. Mmm.

Mmmmm.