making lunches again!

I have mostly been packing sandwiches for lunch.. yea, I have gotten pretty lazy about packing my lunches.. but I am going to try to start it up again! I'm getting really tired of sandwiches.. although I have to say that mine are pretty tasty, hehe.

I've been meaning to try quinoa for the longest time, and that is what I made for lunch this past week. I have to say that I am definitely a quinoa lover now, and can't wait to try other ways of eating it! The great thing about quinoa is that I can see how versatile it can be and it can be eaten hot or cold (perfect for packing lunches with), and is satisfyingly filling as well.

Ingredients: 1 1/2 cups quinoa (4 1/2 cups water to boil it), edamame, red onion, red pepper, carrots, jalapeno, sesame seeds, sesame oil, soy sauce, lime or lemon juice or rice wine vinegar

Basically, you soak the quinoa (and rinse thoroughly) for a good 5 minutes before boiling it. Boil for about 10-15 minutes until the grains become translucent. While it's boiling you can chop the veggies anyway you like. I used frozen shelled edamame so I just blanched them in some hot water, but all the rest of the veggies I left raw. The raw veggies I let it sit in the lemon juice until the quinoa was done, just to marinate those flavors together. When the quinoa is finished, stir in the seasonings (salt & pepper), soy sauce and sesame oil to your liking and mix in all the veggies as well. You can serve it right away with some avocado slices or what i did was refrigerate it portioned out to take to school for lunch for the rest of the week. This amount of quinoa made enough for 3 lunches.

I also made mini key lime pies!! In honor of π (pi) day (3/14) and St. Patrick's Day (lime = green!), I decided to make these delicious tiny desserts.

I looked at a lot of different recipes before deciding to go with the key lime recipe from Joe's Stone Crab Restaurant. One pie = 12 mini pies. For the crust, I had some leftover shredded coconut (about 1/4 cup) so I added that into the food processor with the graham crackers and OH MY GOODNESS it was the most delicious pie crust ever! The coconut added a nice texture to the crust nd it went perfectly with the key lime flavors. Because it was already sweetened, I didn't add any additional sugar into the crust. I made the pies in these disposable foil muffin pans i found at my grocery store and after refrigerating the pies popped out perfectly (forgot to take a photo of that though..).

If you see key limes at your grocery store, you MUST make these (and yes, it does make a difference to use key limes as opposed to normal limes)! The hardest thing about making these pies is to squeeze the juice from those tiny limes (which made me decide that I need to invest in a lime juicer), but everything is pretty much smooth sailing from there -- you just beat the egg yolk, lime juice and sweetened condensed milke together and bake! Oh and I guess if you don't have a food processor to make the graham cracker crumbs that would take longer for you. Man, I'm craving some more now...

Currently wearing Rage by Orly. SO SPARKLY! perfect for summer! This polish is so pigmented, one layer is enough. How crazy is that?

-J