Lunch « Eat Love Cook

Posts filed under ‘Lunch’

Veggie Thursday – Roasted Butternut Squash

One of the tastiest and easiest ways to get a quick side of veggies prepared is to roast them, as I’ve written about before. This is especially true for vegetables that have a nice, sweet flavor of their own, like the ubiquitous butternut squash, which has lately been bandied about in food magazines and TV shows as the perfect winter vegetable. Roasted butternut squash, which you can thrown in to the oven without much of a fuss as you go about your other baking, added a perfectly light side of vegetables to my Thursday dinner; I can also see it being a good complement to heavier meat dishes like tandoori chicken or a roast loin of pork. Plus, this is a veggie that is chockful of vitamins and minerals that will help you brave the chill.

The butternut squash has a subtle flavor reminiscent of pumpkin (and from what I read, it treated interchangeably with a pumpkin Down Under), which gets concentrated through a nice long roast in the oven. To intensify the sweetness and to get a nice caramelized exterior, I tossed the cut cubes with some olive oil (side-stepping the melted butter a lot of the recipes called for) and brown sugar – this resulted in a lovely golden brown char on a few pieces and infused the vegetables with a gentle, warm sweetness.

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Filed under American, Dinner, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on February 18th, 2010 |

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In my lunch bag: Curried Chicken Salad Wraps

Go to any personal finance sites or blogs over the past year, and one of the ‘tips’ you are sure to find ‘brown bag lunches’ as one of the first mentioned in saving some extra dough every year. I figured out that packing lunch at home rather than wasting $5 for insipid cafeteria food was an easy way to leave myself with some extra cash after a few months of graduating – though at that time, I relied on mostly rice and curry to lunch on.

I soon found however that one cannot subsist on the typical Indian lunches alone; you get bored and may get tempted to just eat out for a few days. So I learnt to mix up my lunches, taking a variety of wraps, sandwiches, pastas and leftovers from dinner – it made planning for a week of lunches fun, and made me actually look forward to unpacking my brown bag on most days!

One of the easiest lunches to take are wraps; a wide variety of filling work well when rolled up along with a few greens within a pliable wrap, and for the most part you can pre-assemble them the night before or even a few days before. If you are lucky and have access to a toaster oven at work, you can warm up your wrap ahead of lunch and snicker at suckers paying top dollar for cold / stale / over-sodiumed wraps at the cafeteria. Our old floor at work had a beat up old oven that worked well enough for me to crisp up hummus wraps or tuna sandwiches. A few months ago we moved in to a brand new floor with luxurious wooden paneling, fancy paintings, a huge kitchen area, 3 microwaves but alas, no toaster oven! So I had to come up with a filling that would taste great cold or at room-temperature – and nothing fit the bill better than a spicy, smooth curried chicken salad.

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Filed under American, Lunch

Posted on February 12th, 2010 |

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Quick and Easy: Deli-Flat Pizzettes

Sometimes you want the taste of pizza without going through all the effort of getting a pizza crust ready, crank up the oven, load up the pies and wait for the piping hot pizzas. And sometimes, you have some left-over pizza sauce you need to use up, some veggies about to go bad, and some cooked chicken that you’ll too lazy to make chicken salad from. On those days, using deli-flats and the toaster oven to pull all these ingredients together into mini pizza-type ‘pizzettes’ is the perfect answer to getting a quick pie fix.

Deli-flats (we get the Whole Grain Pepperidge Farm version at our local mart) are 100-calorie flat breads cut in rounds – you can use them for putting together some healthy sandwiches, or use each half of the flats as a base for these pizzettes. The recipe is customizable to whatever odds and ends you have left in your fridge, and any cheese you throw on there will work – just make sure you broil them enough to melt the cheese fully to get a nice pizza taste. They make a great dinner along with some soup, or for a weekend lunch.

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Filed under American, Dinner, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on February 5th, 2010 |

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Homecookin’: Fried Chicken and Waffles

No recipe for tonight – just a simple ode to one of my favorite home cooked meals of all time – fried chicken and waffles. I have never been ‘down south’, but given my love for most southern dishes, I feel like I’d fit right in down in Savannah! Shrimp and grits, buttermilk biscuits, peach cobblers, and ofcourse fried chicken with waffles – as the song goes, these are a few of my faaavotire things!

Fried chicken with waffles is just one of those perfectly balanced food pairings that offer such a delightful contrasts of tastes and textures- sweet and savory, crispy and soft, tender and with a bite. The dark golden skin of the chicken pairs with the light brown waffle to present some form of a foodie yin and yang – yes, my friends, the first time I savored these two items together in one place, at a now defunct hole-in-the-wall in St.Mark’s Place, the experience was nothing short of religious.

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Filed under American, Breakfast, Favorites, Lunch

Posted on January 25th, 2010 |

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Quickie Cooking: Turkey Pastrami on Ciabatta

As promised, here is the recipe for using the NewZealand Cheddar I wrote about yesterday in a quick sandwich. To be honest, the sandwich is so quick and easy to put together that it hardly qualifies as a recipe – but then again, that is what sandwiches are intended to be, aren’t they? A quick and easy meal to put together, especially for lunch on a weekend when you’ve already had a heavy breakfast and need just a small snack to hold you over till dinner.

I am also a firm believer that if you use good quality ingredients, you don’t need a whole lot more to gussy up your meals, especially something that involves no cooking and just merely assembling the ingredients, like sandwiches. For this sandwich, I used organic ciabatta bread from Whole Foods, turkey pastrami from my local deli, and the cheddar – that’s it. A few slices of the pastrami, topped with a couple of slivers of the cheese , thrown into the toaster over for a few mins to warm up and melt the cheese, and viola, my light lunch was ready! The fresh bread crisped up beautifully, and as you can see from the picture, the slices were nice and airy enough to ensure the base didn’t overwhelm the fillings. The cheese added a nice tangy undertaste to the meaty pastrami while allowing the smokiness of the turkey meat to shine through.

If you have your ciabatta sliced thin like I did, you can use this to serve up some nice open-faced sandwiches for a crowd; with football playoff season upon us, this can be your take on home-made panini to serve up! The turkey pastrami offers a nice change from the traditional red meats, and you can throw in a few veggies (I like cucumber slices) to hearten up the sandwiches.

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Filed under American, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on January 20th, 2010 |

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Quickie Cooking: Chicken Kolhapuri

Chicken Kolhapur

Growing up in a typical South Indian Telugu household, most of the day-to-day foods we ate were mostly the bread-and-butter pappu’s (lentils) and southern curries. North Indian preparations, like their excellent Chicken curries, were reserved for special occasions when my mom wanted to try something new, or for when we went out to eat. I looked forward to those meals and always promised myself that when I grew up and became an adult myself, I would have such food every day.

As an adult, however, I quickly realized that it was wasn’t healthy for either my body or my wallet to eat restaurant-made North Indian curries very often, and the best way to meet my cravings for these curries was to prepare them at home. However, given the complexity involved in cooking some of these items, we usually resort to pre-made (the horror!) masala mixes to whip up a quick curry whenever we want to.

Now, while this may seem like blasphemy to the usual Indian canon of healthy cooking from scratch, I distinctly remember that even my mom sometimes resorted to using spice mixes just to avoid having to put together and grind each of the dozen or so spices that give each curry a distinctive flavor. Modern mix packets just take this step a bit further by also included oil and salt in the mix; advanced science allowing for vaccum-packing of such mixes without using much, if any, preservatives or additional junk. The preparation just calls for adding the mix, along with some water or milk, along with the meat or vegetables of your choice to a saucepan, heating for the recommended time and getting a piping hot curry onto the table within 15-20 mins. Quickie Cooking at its finest!

So seek out these packets as your local Indian grocer; Parampara and Sanjeev Kapoor make some of the best tasting mixes which don’t contain too much unneccessary filling. Given the simplicity involved in putting these curries together, I decided to put in a tiny bit of extra effort and upping the health-quotient of these dishes by adding in some fresh or frozen vegetables – this helps counter any extra sodium in the mix, while also adding some texture and freshness to the curry. This week we tried the Chicken Kolhapur – a Maharashtrian dish with a spicy, dark sauce.

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Filed under Dinner, Indian - North, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on December 27th, 2009 |

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Gnocchi Alfredo with Red Peppers

After a couple of years of turning to the ubiquitous boxed pasta’s whenever we wanted a quick and cheap Italian meal, lately the wife and I have begun experimenting with some fresh pasta. It all started when I spotted some fresh tagliatelle on sale at the local grocers; once we tasted the true deliciousness of the fresh pasta, it became near impossible to go back to the regular old Barillas! There is something homey and old-worldey about a bowl of fresh pasta tossed in a quick home-made sauce (what, you think we do Ragu?!) and mixed in with some veggies and meats to make it a full meal.

We try to pick up whatever fresh pasta’s are available every few weeks at C-Town or Whole Foods, and yes we shop at both ends of the supermarket spectrum! Last week wifey spotted a packet of potato gnocchi and there was no going back – pasta and potatoes being two of her favorite foods. We made a quick cream sauce, tossed in some onions and fresh red bell peppers, topped it off with some bacon (only on my bowl, ofcourse) and had ourselves a nice hot bowl of pillowy little potato balls.

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Filed under Dinner, Italian, Lunch, Restaurant Meals

Posted on December 15th, 2009 |

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Shrimp Fajitas

Life is a series of coincidences. I’m sure a lot of you can look back upon your lives and some of the coincidences you might have brushed off in the past, but which you can now saw helped shaped your path in one way or the other. I’ve had a few of those myself, and one that relates directly to this blog happened in the most unexpected of all places – a Container Store.

A week or so after I got my own studio and decided that I loved interior decorating and want a clean, modern bachelor pad (!), I went down to the Container Store on 58th street to check for some cool organizational items. At the checkout counter, I spied an eye-catching magazine cover with fresh fruits and vegetables – the Fall 2006 Food issue of Real Simple. For someone who firmly believes in subscribing to magazines and never paying the outrageous book-store prices for a single copy, I just couldn’t resist buying this one.

And what an investment it turned out to be! For a young guy just learning to cook for himself, this one single issue contained all sorts of wonderful advice – from what to stock your freezer with, to how to avoid messy cleanup, to how to put together a menu for a dinner party, and most importantly – easy, simple-to-follow recipes that lead to delicious meals and forever got me hooked on the benefits of cooking at home.

One such recipe, which I’ve since adapted to my own tastes is one that will ease your fears of cooking seafood and serve as a fun little dish to spice up weekday nights – Shrimps Fajitas. Cumin and chili powder give the shrimp filling a deep flavor; pick up some whole wheat wraps, slap some mayo in it if you are so inclined, add in the shrimp filling and you’re in seafood fajita land.

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Filed under Dinner, Lunch, Mexican

Posted on November 23rd, 2009 |

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Meatless Thursday: Veggie Pita Pizzas

I don’t meat on Thursday’s, just a gentle way to practice some restraint in my eating habits I suppose. Which poses a problem while structuring my meals for the day; veggies just lack the protein, and let’s be honest, the sheer deliciousness of a slab of meat! So I have to ensure the meals I prepare for Thursday are creative and tasty enough for me to look forward to eating them without getting tempted to slip in a chicken nugget or two.

Cheese pizza is the ultimate fall-back meal for vegetarians everywhere, my lovely wife included. She will gladly pick up a greasy/oily slice at 3am after a party night – that is the lure of the ubiquitous slice. But given my intense dislike for foods that have been sitting under a heat lamp, and the sheer impracticality of rolling out my own dough every Thursday, I decided to take a healthy shortcut – Whole Wheat Pita Pizza’s! Piled high with fresh veggies and really mozzarella cheese, these beauty’s are a cinch to make, re-heat perfectly in the toaster over, and taste good enough to not even tempt me to throw some pre-cooked chicken on them!

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Filed under American, Dinner, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on November 19th, 2009 |

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