Friday Lunch

Rice, beans, broccoli.  Yes, this is about as basic as it gets.  It has been quite a week on my end – my husband has a bad cold, we both had to work a lot and sleep was a priority.  I am in denial that my throat is a bit scratchy and loading up on the vitamin C and an echinacea immunity tablet.  By last night, I knew that going as simple as possible was the way to go for lunch today, since we had run out of most leftovers.  My husband got brown rice started in the rice cooker while I was still at work last night, and when I came home, I put 4 sweet potatoes in the oven to roast.  The combination of the brown rice and sweet potato aroma made the apartment smell wonderfully comforting.  I pulled out some azukis I had cooked and frozen last weekend (I use my rice cooker to cook beans now) and relied on steamed broccoli for my greens today.  On the left you can see brown rice mixed with the azuki beans.  When the rice was ready, I just stirred 1.5 cups of the cooked riced with 1.5 cups of the defrosted azukis and added a heaping tablespoon of miso (I used the last of my South River azuki miso).  The miso is what makes this dish for me – it adds flavor and depth:

You know I usually bring snacks, but today all you can see are a big pile of the rice-azuki-miso mixture and another big pile of broccoli.  I wanted to make hummus last night but work and sleep (and, err,  Grey’s Anatomy) won out.  This morning I was thinking of packing some of the roasted sweet potatoes, mashed with nut butter, for a snack, but I ended up deciding to just pack a bigger portion of the rice and beans so that I could have some for lunch and some for a snack.  

Happy Friday!