Lunch Box #1 (Pesto Pasta)

So a couple of days ago I started college and with that came the new responsibility of making my lunches everyday. I've never been too keen on having the same thing to eat everyday, which is why I've always struggled with choosing what to have for breakfast, so it is my new task to come up with healthy, delicious and varying lunches everyday which are all easy to make. No pressure then. I shall be putting a series of posts on here with different lunches that I come up with, starting with today...

So the main thing that I had was the homemade vegan pesto pasta that I'd already made, the blogpost for the recipe is here, this was perfect as it was really delicious and it also really kept me going all day. One of my all time favourite things to have at the moment for a treat is corn chips dipped in homous, oh my goodness it's to die for and if somebody doesn't physically take the packet away from me I can easily just keep on going. I like to also have something sweet so I added a little booja champagne chocolate truffle, if you want to know more about them then the blogpost for them is here.

It's obviously a good idea to try and counterbalance some of the more stodgy and less healthy options with some fruit so I had a banana and fruit flakes, the flakes also count as one of your five a day. To finish it all off with I had an alibi drink, which are the most delicious energy drinks that are full of vitamins and minerals including the following vitamins C, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12.

So this is just day 1 and I shall keep on going until I run out of ideas! I hope you found that useful and yet me know what you like to have for your lunches!

love, bean xx

Homemade Vegan Pesto Recipe

Today I want to talk about a delicious and quick homemade vegan pesto that I made yesterday for my lunchbox. The recipe that I based it on was from a cookery book called 'let them eat vegan' written by a lady called Dreena Burton, it's clearly laid out and all the recipes are well explained meaning that even atrocious cooks such as myself can use it. I like my pesto to be relatively strong which is why I didn't use any of the water that it recommended but instead I used black olives, pine-nuts and nutritional yeast (which contained B12) to bulk it out and produce lots of mouth watering flavours. 

The ingredients are in the picture above (excluding the nutritional yeast and pine-nuts) and it was literally a case of putting them all together and wizzing them in a food processor until I was pleased with the consistency, as I said it's literally a fool proof recipe. I added the olives and pine-nuts into the food processor after everything else so that they didn't lose all of their texture. Then I just stirred in a bit of nutritional yeast and boom, finito!

The pasta I used took about 12 minutes to cook and once I drained that I stirred the amount of pesto I wanted and then cling-filmed the rest for the next day as it easily makes a couple of decent sized portions. It's a perfect and simple recipe for when you are in a rush and the great thing is that you can easily experiment and add different elements to the dish to make it your own. I hope you found this useful and be sure to let me know if you give it a try!


love, bean xx