I love to cook. I don’t often make complicated recipes, or even use a recipe at all, but I derive a lot of pleasure from making food for myself just the way I like it.  Every couple months I find a new favorite breakfast/lunch/dinner and eat it wayyy too often until I’m sick of it and then I rediscover it a year later and the cycle continues.  The routine is comforting, and I like always having an answer to the question, what should I eat? These are my current breakfast, lunch, and dinner obsessions.

Breakfast

On school mornings for breakfast I have been loving having cheerios, a banana, some kind of black tea, and a blueberry greek yogurt. This is the perfect mix of filling and satisfying and it’s very quick.

On weekends I love to sleep in so my breakfast turns into something more like brunch, and I love spending a little more time making something delicious. Right now I love making breakfast burritos out of scrambled eggs, bacon, a frozen trader joes hashbrown, guacamole, pico de gallo, cheese and hot sauce. I time it so that as soon as the hashbrown is out of the oven, everything else is all made and ready to go so making this only takes about 15-20 minutes. It is SO GOOD!

If I am rushing out the door and I just need something really quick I love heating up peanut butter in the microwave and dipping apples in it. I used to not like this meal, but heating up the peanut butter is a total game changer.

Lunch

When I am at home I love to make tuna and crackers and avocado toast. There is no rhyme or reason to this combination but it just hits the spot every time. I am a diehard canned tuna lover and I won’t accept any hate for it. I like to add mayo (not too much), dijon mustard, parsley, chives, dill, and looots of lemon and black pepper, and I can only eat it with water crackers. The avocado toast I eat with this meal is also very specific. It starts with a layer of avocado with lemon, salt, and pepper, and then I add two slices of tomato with basil, salt and pepper, balsamic glaze, olive oil, red pepper flakes, and goat cheese or feta if I have it. This meal also has to have a pickle with it, as well as some sort of chips, usually takis. I have been known to rush to CVS to buy takis to eat with this lunch if I don’t have them.

If I am packing lunch for school, I often just root through my fridge and pack whatever is quickest. Sometimes If I am making chicken the night before I will make extra and pack it the next day in a salad with chips and fruit, but that’s about as complicated as it gets.

Another lunch that I love to make if I have some time is pasta with pesto cream sauce. I grew up eating a lot of pasta with pesto, because this was pretty much the extent of my dad’s cooking ability, and as I got older I decided to put my own spin on it. I make this by adding a scoop of grocery store pesto to a pan (I’ve never liked making my own), and adding garlic, red pepper flakes, parmesan cheese, whatever fresh herbs I have, a bit of heavy cream, and cherry tomatoes If I have them. I love to eat this with pasta shells, but I’ll do any kind of pasta that I have, except spaghetti. I am staunchly against eating spaghetti/linguini/any long pasta with pesto.

Dinner

When my mom and I are on our own for dinner and we want to do something quick we love cooking this meal and turning on an episode of our favorite show, Downton Abbey. We make a greek inspired salad with romaine, feta, tomato, cucumber, and chicken. We always save takeout salad dressings for this occasion, so there is often an assortment of dressings in our fridge to use. On the side we eat any kind of fruit we have in the house, and most importantly, frozen grocery store spanakopita with lots of lemon juice. We might add other things to make this meal more filling if we have them, such as soup, roast potatoes, or chips.

Okay this next one is sort of cheating because I don’t make it all that often, but I just wanted to share it because it is one of the best things I have ever made. My family spent Christmas in Connecticut last year with my mom’s side of the family, and we went to this market that had this amazing sandwich. When I got home I decided to try and recreate it, and surprisingly I liked my sandwich almost as much as the original. This sandwich starts on warmed up ciabatta bread, and it includes tomato, basil, fresh mozzarella, pesto aioli, and a breaded chicken cutlet. It finishes in the broiler for a few minutes to melt the cheese and crisp up the bread and it is SO DELICIOUS. I would say the elements that make this sandwich shine are a really thin and well seasoned chicken cutlet breaded in panko breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese as well as the pesto aioli which I made with mayo, pesto, fresh basil, garlic, lemon, and red pepper flakes.