Lunch on May 12, 2011 - Leftovers for lunch

I had a great culinary experience tonight, sampling from various LA foodtrucks that I drove about 20 miles in rush hour traffic to eat from.  Yes, I know the LA Times has declared that food trucks are so over but after dinner I went shopping and tried on a top with shoulder pads so clearly I am reluctant to give up on things I actually like for the sake of being trendy.  Well, I am not sure I like all shoulder pads (or food trucks for that matter) but the ones I saw tonight worked.

Despite the fact that I ate well tonight (or perhaps because of it) Juju will be dining on leftovers tomorrow.

 

Lunch includes chicken and brown rice, cantaloupe and grapes, and roasted carrots with onion and shallots.  The dinner this lunch came from was really easy to make.  I am a big fan of Trader Joe's marinades.  Although some are loaded with sugar, there are a few that are really light and tasty and go very well with beef, chicken, fish, etc.  I like to have a bottle or two in the pantry for when I get lazy about dinner.  I can't remember which marinade this was, but it definitely had a lot of soy sauce in it with a hint of honey, or something sweet.  I marinated the chicken in it overnight and then just threw  the chicken pieces and marinade into the oven.  

I made the brown rice in a rice cooker and added some garlic and shallots to the rice and water (the shallots were left over from the mustard roasted fish I made on Monday).  The shallots totally disintegrated when the rice was finished cooking which I wasn't expecting.  The sauce from the chicken poured over the rice was out of this world.   

And just as I was throwing dinner together, The King of All Media noticed we had some leftover carrots in the fridge from when Juju visited a farm last week.  Some horse is pretty sad that she left without feeding these to him.  But I'm glad they were around because we have a little theory in our house and these carrots helped us test it.  We believe that if you throw some kosher salt, pepper, olive oil (and sometimes garlic and/or onion) on any vegetable and roast it at 425 degrees, it will taste fantastic no matter what it is (this is very similar to the theory that anything fried is good).  So, since these sad carrots had nowhere to go but up, we peeled them, chopped them, and threw them together with some onions, shallots, salt, pepper, and oil.  The result: delicious!  The onions got all brown and caramelized and you could really taste the sweetness of the carrots.  I don't know how the dish will taste in a cold school lunch but I figured I would send them and see what happens.

For Friday's lunch I'm going to make a sandwich.  But it's not what you think. . .