A couple of easy meals

This weekend, I think I have made enough food to get me through the whole week - benefit of cooking for one!

When I have vegetable scraps, I stick them in a gallon freezer bag in the freezer. The bag was getting pretty full, so I made vegetable broth in my crock pot yesterday. Some garlic cloves, some pepper corns, some rosemary, a bag full of scraps (carrot ends, celery that wasn't crunchy, kale stems, etc.), cover with water and cook on low for 8 hours. I got about 12 cups of delicious broth.

 Then I used a lot of it to make home-made hot and sour soup. I forget that I actually like tofu, as in when I was cubing it for the soup I ate some plain and liked it. This is probably the result of a year of eating in China. The soup is actually pretty close to what a restaurant's hot and sour soup tastes like! I could probably increase the flavorings to get it closer, and I used black pepper because I do not have white pepper.

 THEN, I finally made quinoa "mac" n' cheese. It always sounded like a good alternative to using pasta. I ate the soup for dinner, but I tasted the corner of this to make sure it tasted okay. It tastes amazing. I followed the recipe I linked to, but just grated a bunch of cheese without measuring and added some veggies: chopped collard greens, grated zucchini I had in the freezer (just added it to the quinoa while it cooked and counted it as a liquid...because that is what happens when you freeze zucchini), some carrot (I used the peeler to "cut" it into thin strips).

I am looking forward to eating this week. I keep avoiding the lettuce in my fridge, though, so maybe some tuna salad wraps will be added to the above menu.