This is a very “student-friendly” pasta sauce. I came home late on Thursday night after a busy day teaching and tutoring. I had about 20 minutes to prepare some dinner before needing to do something else. I took out my wok, heated some olive oil, garlic, dried basil, oregano, some other miscellaneous herbs, and chili flakes (ever since making that daal below i’ve been frying my dried spices before adding everything else to see if it makes a difference for flavour). While that was going I had a small pot of whole wheat fettucine boiling.

I then took a can of whole tomatoes, added a package (500g) of medium tofu (soft would be better, but medium is all i had), a few handfuls of spinach, and let that simmer for maybe 10 minutes.
It could use a number of modifications, but the result was a healthy hot meal with minimal mess, easy to store leftovers, and it took maybe 15 minutes start to finish. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to stop for photos, but i guess you can use your imagination.

p.s. Tofu is surprisingly good with tomato-based stews and sauces! just in case you were wondering…

I had a craving for a chickpea salad kind of thing, but I hadn’t really made one before. So I looked in my cupboard and had a can of mixed beans, and I also had some onion and celery around. The result was actually really tasty.

I rinsed a can of mixed beans (actually, i’ve made this salad twice, so i only used half a can each time). Then I added around 2 stalks of celery, chopped thin, and a quarter of an onion, sliced/hashed very thin (you don’t want a whole bite of onion when you’re eating this). I chopped up a few leaves of romaine lettuce and mixed the whole lot together.

For a dressing, I used one that my family has loved using ever since my brother’s girlfriend taught it to us. It’s simply equal proportions of lemon juice and soy sauce. So for a quarter of a lemon, that’s around 1 tablespoon of soy sauce. Pour that over your salad, adjust to taste, let that soak into your beans/onion/celery, and you’re good to go!

You can also pre-make this salad and leave it to marinade in the fridge overnight, but I would take out the romaine and add it before you are going to eat it. Lemon juice tends to “cook” the weaker ones like lettuce – it will get wilty.

I’m thinking chopped parsley would be a great addition to this salad, because it reminds me of tabouille. In the future I want to switch to sokaing dried beans instead of using cooked canned ones because canned ones have so much sodium in them. However, as I experienced the other day, canned beans are awesome to have around when you are looking for something quick.

The prep time for this took me maybe 10 minutes or less. It’s great! The organic content of this salad is just the romaine lettuce. Still working on that.