Stuffing squash is hardly an exact science. Any summer squash should do; I used zucchini last time, but I’ve also used globe and pattypan before. I’ve used brown rice and I’ve used bread crumbs (but never both together), and I often include cheese, although it’s not necessary. But no matter what, there’s always some vegetables, although the specific ones can vary depending on what’s in the fridge.

I actually like stuffed summer squash best when it’s vegetarian, but as I’ve mentioned before, T tends toward meatier dishes. So here’s how I made it last time around:

Ingredients:

4 medium zucchini
8 mushrooms, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ medium yellow onion, diced
½ bell pepper, diced
1 medium carrot, diced
¼ lb ground dark turkey meat
salt and pepper
½ cup tomato sauce
½ cup bread crumbs
¼ cup grated parmesan
1 tsp dried basil
1 tsp dried oregano
1 egg, beaten

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Trim stems from squash and cut squash in half. Scoop out each half, setting the seeds and flesh aside, leaving 1/4-inch-thick shells.

Chop the seeds and flesh, to include in the stuffing.

In a large skillet, saute garlic and all the vegetables over medium heat until soft. Add meat to vegetable mixture and cook until browned. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Remove from heat. Drain excess liquid. Stir in all remaining ingredients.

Stuff each squash shell with meat and veggie mixture; filling should be slightly mounded.

Place squash in ungreased baking dish, then add water to the dish, just enough to cover the bottom.

Bake covered for about 20 minutes. Uncover and bake for about 10 minutes more. Squash should be tender but still holding its shape.

Serves 4.

We save bits such as green onion tops, celery ends, and mushroom stems, keeping them in a gallon bag in the freezer. (I’ve also been known to just chop up several celery stalks from a fresh bunch and throw them in the bag, because you can’t buy just one stalk and we rarely need more than two at a time for any of our recipes.)

Once the bag’s, say, three-quarters full, you’ll have the makings of a good vegetable stock. (You can also add these scraps to a meat stock, of course, but we don’t usually have bones handy when have enough vegetables!) We do sometimes need to supplement the bag with extra quartered mushrooms, or more onion, but we pretty much always have those items around anyway.

For easy (and lazy) stock making, you can just throw your vegetable scraps in a crockpot with some peppercorns, salt, a bay leaf or two, a couple of garlic cloves, herbs like rosemary or thyme if you’ve got them, and enough water to cover.

Use the low setting, if your crockpot has more than one. Cook for several hours (I often start it in the morning and don’t stop it until after dinner). Strain, cool, separate into storage containers, and freeze.

But once in awhile I go for it. Sometimes it fails, sometimes it doesn’t. One of my recent successes? The cottage pie I tried last week, using lentils instead of ground meat.

This is not the first time I’ve subbed in lentils for meat, but this attempt probably produced one of the best results. Texture’s a bit different, of course, but it’s still wonderfully satisfying.

It is entirely possible to make this vegan, since the only dairy is a sprinkle of cheese and a couple tablespoons of butter… and I might even omit the cheese next time.

If you’re starting with dried lentils, about one cup will yield three cups cooked. You can cook them in veggie broth if you like, but water should work fine too. I recommend prepping your veggies while the lentils are cooking.

Canned lentils should work, though I haven’t tried that yet.

Ingredients:

3 cups cooked lentils
3-4 medium potatoes, cubed
2 tbsp of butter, divided in half
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium carrot, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 tbsp flour
1 cup vegetable broth
1 tbsp fresh rosemary, chopped (or 1 tsp dried)
1 tbsp fresh sage, chopped (or 1 tsp dried)
salt and pepper to taste
handful shredded cheese (optional)

Instructions:

Boil potatoes for approximately 20-25 minutes, until cooked through.

While potatoes are boiling, heat a large skillet over medium heat. Preheat oven to 400°F.

Melt half the butter in the skillet, then saute garlic, onion, carrot, and celery until onions are soft.

Stir in lentils and cook until heated through. Sprinkle flour over lentils, stir and cook for another minute.

Stir in vegetable broth, rosemary, sage, salt, and pepper, and cook until the mixture has thickened and liquid has been absorbed. (Everything should still be moist, however.)

Pour mixture into an ungreased 8×8 baking dish.

Drain potatoes, but save approximately ½ cup of the cooking water. Mash the potatoes with remaining butter, salt and pepper, and cooking water.

Distribute mashed potatoes evenly on top of the lentil mixture.

Cook in the oven until bubbling and brown (approximately 20 minutes).

Serves 4-6.

I fell out of making this kind of lunch after I started living with T. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think a large part of it is that when I lived alone, I had no shortage of room (or containers to store multiple batches of leftovers). But now that I’m living with someone who has a rather different view on meals than I do? We’ve got to compromise on what we buy and keep… and make for dinner.

Dinner’s the only meal we share everyday, both in the sense of “eating the same food” and “eating at the same time”; this is due to our different work schedules, meal preferences, and nutritional requirements. So, it’s usually a bit of a compromise. He makes an effort to include more veggies when it’s his turn to make dinner. (Even though half the time it’s just bagged salad greens. But it’s the thought that counts!) Me, I’ll try to include some meat, even if it’s just a small amount.

This means if I want to keep eating vegetarian meals regularly, I need to have them for lunch more often than not. So I’ve started making big batches of some sort of vegetarian meal on Sundays, and eating the leftovers throughout the week.

Last week, it was a batch of quinoa salad (which is actually vegan!). The week before that, it was spicy tofu and rice. This week, I’m going to try making a vegetarian cottage pie – we’ll see how that turns out. Recipes to come after a bit more tweaking!

My absolute favorite is sinangag, or garlic fried rice. Not surprisingly, I grew up eating it made with white rice, but I find it so much more satisfying with brown rice somehow. Eaten alongside a fried egg and sometimes a couple of bacon slices, it makes a fantastic breakfast.

However, I am also incredibly partial to garlic rice fried with egg and bacon, and veggies besides. A complete meal in and of itself, and one that’s actually pretty balanced.

This, of course, includes the aforementioned garlic, bacon, and egg (three cloves, two slices, and one beaten, respectively). I also used green onion, a bit of regular onion, carrot, red bell pepper, and some frozen green peas when I made this last night, but you can use what you like; this is just what we happened to have on hand. Seasoned pretty simply, with just salt, pepper, and a bit of toasted sesame oil.

Made for a lovely dinner, with enough leftover for tonight!

(This isn’t a bad thing. Mostly, it’s a disclaimer, so that you don’t expect anything fancy from my food posts!)

But anyway, the “little of everything” part? Not too surprising at all, given my upbringing and family and personal histories. I was exposed to a variety of tastes and ingredients and cuisines from an early age, and that tends to carry over into my meals.

For example, let’s take a look at this dinner I made recently. The meat portion is my take on bistek tagalog (Filipino-style beef steak). Unlike either of my parents, I tend to cut it in bite-sized pieces before cooking, mostly because I fail miserably at cooking whole steaks. And, half the time I have more onions than meat, because I’m a sucker for cooked onions. But these are pretty small variations; I still use basically the same marinade, which is the important part, really.

Bistek tagalog is a pretty clear nod to my Filipino heritage, as is the fact that I eat it with rice. (Although I favor short-grain brown, rather than the white rice I grew up with.)

However, the sauteed kale on the side? That’s a nod to… well, some other cuisine. I’m inclined to think American, because I don’t personally know many non-Americans who saute greens. But then, I don’t have a hugely international social circle, so that’s not much to go on.

Generally speaking, every lunch I pack is at least half leftovers. Friday's was no exception:

Thursday night's dinner was Filipino beefsteak and rice, with a large helping of green beans. I'd cooked the green beans with soy sauce and mirin, which was delicious, but it probably wasn't the smartest move in the world because, well, talk about a soy sauce-heavy meal! (The beefsteak also uses soy sauce.)

So, I wanted a lunch that was slightly more varied in flavor.

I packed leftover steak, green beans, and rice in the evening. Then, on Friday morning I made zucchini and chickpea flour pancakes. Shredding the zucchini takes a bit of time, so I normally wouldn't make these pancakes in the morning before work, but I'd woken up earlier than usual. I sliced one pancake for my lunch and the other for a snack.

Finally, I added some sweet cherries.

The final meal was still a bit heavy with the soy sauce (and thus with sodium), but the pancakes and cherries lightened the meal up overall. All in all, this was a tasty and filling lunch. Yay, success!

Dinner was pretty simple:

The main dish is one of my favorite meals, sanshoku donburi – literally, three-color rice bowl. The version in this lunch consists of beef soboro, iri tamago, and blanched chopped spinach on top of white rice.

This is a bit high in sodium thanks to heavy use of soy sauce, but it's not horrible if you only use a little meat (very doable, as it's strongly flavored).

Veggie sides are green beans roasted with garlic and shallots and pepper and onion confit. If I manage to post other Comic-Con meals, you'll probably see the confit in all of them, as I made a huge batch and won't have time to cook much else.

I actually didn't have time to eat the whole dinner in one sitting. I was eating while in line and couldn't hold both tiers of my bento box, and I only had time to finish the sanshoku donburi before entering the exhibit hall. Which was filling enough on its own, but I would've preferred eating it with the veggies – the contrasts would've made my tastebuds happier. Oh well. At least the veggies kept just fine until I got home. (Although I wouldn't have eaten them if I'd gotten home a half hour later – I'm not totally comfortable with room-temp food after a certain amount of time.)

Anyway, I call this one a success!

In the meantime, another lunch.

I eat vegetarian meals at least a couple of times a week. This particular one was filling, but not a total success taste-wise.

The tofu nuggets were supposed to be spicy, but I failed miserably on that front. I'll have to tweak this quite a bit. At least these plainer ones go well with sauces. (I packed tonkatsu sauce today, but forgot to include the container in the photo… oh well.)

Next to the tofu is sauteed zucchini, followed by Rainier cherries.

Finally, there are mashed potatoes with garlic, oregano, and parmesan. No gravy as I like these plain, although I didn't add quite enough garlic. Oh well, next time. Luckily it's an easy fix.

Packing this lunch was super easy, as the tofu and potatoes were both leftover from last night – I just packed portions straight into my bento box while cleaning up. And the zucchini took all of five minutes in the morning.

My mom makes awesome chicken enchiladas, and part of the (long but well worth it) process involves boiling and shredding chicken, then simmering in tomato sauce and onions and spicy goodness. The filling is delicious, but far too much work for me, so yesterday I decided I'd try to adapt it for crockpot cooking. The results were decent, but not perfect, so I'll have to keep working on that.

Anyway. In addition to shredded chicken, I had roasted asparagus and sweet pepper and onion confit – nothing you haven't seen before. I've been doing an awful lot of roasting lately, and believe it or not, I don't always use asparagus, but it had been on sale and I love it, so… yeah.

Finally, brown rice. I actually really like short grain brown rice as long as it's not overly dry. Basically this means I end up cooking it on the stove, as I haven't quite figured out how to make it with my rice cooker (my cooker's several years old and not particularly fancy, so no special brown rice settings).