Packed Lunch: Easy Quinoa Veggie Salad with Zucchini Almond Crackers. Plus VitaCost Sale Details!

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Happy Sunday! Hope everyone is recovering nicely from the long weekend. It’s always odd to return to the grind after a few days off, but into the grind we go. For me, part of getting back into the swing of things is prepping food for this week’s lunchboxes. But as I do that, I’ll share a particularly nice lunchbox from last week, before all the Thanksgiving madness.

Grain salads are one of the easiest, most portable lunches I can think of. It’s simple enough to pack a cup or two of quinoa, buckwheat, rice, barley, farro, or millet on its own, and simply dress it with a little sea salt, pepper, and hemp oil. But my favorite way to pack up grains for my lunchboxes is to toss them with whatever raw vegetable scraps I have—the half eaten bell pepper, the odd carrot, the stalk or two of kale. This week, I combined two cups of quinoa with about a cup and a half of cooked aduki beans, half of a chopped bell pepper, a small grated zucchini, and a tiny bit of leftover kale. I dressed it with hemp oil, lemon, dijon mustard, sea salt, and black pepper, and it all resulted in two lovely lunch portions for the week ahead.

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Accompaniments for this lunch were sliced carrots for crunch, a bed of greens on which to lay my salad, and some raw zucchini almond crackers. These came from a raw zucchini bread I’m currently testing and perfecting at home; sorry not to have a recipe for you (yet), but at least you guys can see that I don’t post something on CR till I know it’s really worthy. Soon!

Anne recently was kind enough to give me some Larabar minis, so I packed those up as snacks:

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Thanks Anne!

And there we have it: a quick, easy, nutritious student lunch. I look forward to sharing more of my portable food as the week goes on.

Before I go, a very special announcement! I’m sure that many of you are familiar with VitaCost, yes? It’s a website that sells health and wellness items, from Vitamins and supplements to groceries, at a deep discount, ensuring that consumers on a budget can still shop for trusted, high quality natural health brands. Shipments are delivered free if they’re over $49, and if they’re not, the shipping is always a flat fee rate of $4.99. Tomorrow, on Cyber Monday, they are hosting a huge, site-wide sale, and they asked if I’d share with you guys. Of course I will! I really love VitaCost for pantry items, protein powders, and superfoods, and I think you will, too. Go ahead and check out the sale tomorrow. You’ll receive a 15% discount at checkout if you enter promo code SAVEBIG. Enjoy!

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Happy shopping, and see you back here tomorrow Smile

xo

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Categories: Side Dishes
Ingredients: Quinoa
Dietary Preferences: Vegan
Recipe Features: 30 Minute or Less

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    9 Comments
  1. I’m excited for the zucchini bread/cracker recipe. Now that I’ve got a dehydrator I want to play with it! Thanks for the news about Vitacost, too. I never knew about that site.

  2. Oof, you got me – totally just made an order with VitaCost! I was due for vitamins anyway. Hopefully you got a commission for that! <3

    • Hahaha! Glad you stocked up. I’m going to do the same today. I have a hankering for some new superfood goodies 🙂

  3. I definitely read this as “VitaMix Sale” and my heart might have stopped for a moment! But I do <3 vitacost and definitely need some stuff so thanks for the heads up!