It’s warm here at the moment. Which calls for lots of salads. We have a family of very varying tastes – particularly two kids who like almost entirely the opposite foods, it feels like. So tapas, salads, picky bits, and other meals where there is are a bunch of different small plates and bowls on the table to choose from. It means there will always be at least one or two things that each person likes and other things they’ll probably bring themselves to eat. And also means that people mix things together as they prefer.
And wraps work really well for this, either for the meal itself or for eating leftover salads the next day. We had wraps two days running at the weekend. The first day was plain wheat tortilla wraps with hummus, guacamole, lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, olives, pine nuts, red peppers, and roasted paprika sweet potato. The second day was rice wraps, with teriyaki tempeh (yes, I did some tempeh, and it was fine mixed with everything else but I still didn’t like the texture on its own), sichuan tofu, pickled sliced baby cucumbers, pickled cabbage and carrot, and pickled daikon. And then over the next couple of days we grabbed wraps for lunch, breakfast and dinner, combining them in a variety of ways.
So much healthier (and tastier!) than a couple of slices of toast (although I did have a couple of slices of nice wholemeal toast with hummus on one and guacamole on the other and vegetables slices on top for breakfast one day which was very very nice) and handy when we’ve both been very busy with work. A time when we can tend to easily default to quick and speedy junk food (that’s often not much speedier than the healthy option – but that’s a discussion for another post, I think).
Do you have go to things you put in wraps? Do you tend to stay within a particular cuisine (e.g. Mexican burritos, or tacos, of course; Greek mezze fillings…)?
A lot of wraps!
Aubergine pasta tonight – I topped mine with a big dollop of guacamole and some pine nuts, and then also mixed in some leftover baked beans, which sounds weird but was actually really nice.
Lots of proper sweet potato fries, one time as loaded fries (I may have already mentioned that) and other times to just accompany salady things
A fairly ordinary noodle stir-fry
A variation of my pasta primavera, where I threw in some silken tofu (leftover from the loaded fries) and also included some miso paste (because I’d read a thing in the Guardian about adding miso to everything) and some whole cashews, because I had run out of ground almonds. It was nice but a very different flavour profile to the usual one, so I think it probably counts as an entirely different meal rather than a variation
What have you eaten recently? Are you mostly on salads too, or managing some lighter cooked meals? Any seasonal ingredients you’re loving at the moment?
This is the last Wednesday in July, so next month the illustrated recipe and veg letter will be behind a paywall. I hope you’ve enjoyed free July and have got a feel for what I’ll be writing and drawing about here. If you liked what you saw, why not take advantage of the launch offer, that I’m running till the end of August. 50% off all subscriptions!
See you next week where I might write about breakfast or getting through days and weeks when you don’t think you want to cook. Or something else entirely different, of course. You’ll have to wait and see.