Turning leftovers into a healthy sandwich

Healthy week

This week has been very healthy in terms of food so far, which is great as I don't always manage to get this sorted. After weeks of being in pain, I'm feeling much better and felt like I should focus on healthier food again. You'd think I was all over that while in pain, knowing it will help you towards healing sooner but I just couldn't manage to stand in the kitchen for more than 5 minutes at one time for several weeks, so this didn't happen.

While my boyfriend already works such long hours I felt so guilty and sad about him having to do the rest on top of his regular tasks that I didn't want to bother him. Now that I'm barely having back pain at the moment, I'm on a health spree and bought a lot of veggies for this week.

Food prepping

Food prepping always helps me to make sure that not much goes to waste and if I plan it well, and stick to it (read: if nothing weird happens), it usually means I buy things that last 2/3 meals if possible. I don't always get it right but I'm getting better at predicting how long things will last.

My week started by going to the one supermarket where they usually have all the veggies available for a reasonable price and also good quality. If I'd go to Lidl, I come back with totally different items and usually just a cucumber because a lot of other things just don't look as good as here OR they have an empty veggie department due to my timing. This week, I nailed it and had a big bag of healthy stuff coming from the supermarket.

What's for dinner?

I aimed to make a few different meal salads in the first two days of the week. This usually means I buy as many matching veggies I can get my hands on and cut them to store them in boxes. I add the glass jars with cashew and walnuts to the table and of course a homemade salsa and we start building our salad. What's also very important is that I decided to buy the oiled feta in glass jar from Apetina, which tastes about 100x better than any other feta I normally buy. Simply delicious!

Sometimes I just use canned tuna (my boyfriend loves it) but other times I'm more into the salad without meat or fish OR this week I used chicken sirloin which is already covered in a tasty layer of bread-crumbs. I baked the whole package and when they were perfect, I sliced them in 1 cm wide parts. I then realized we had small tacos leftover in the freezer from our orders at a Mexican restaurant. I decided on the spot we'd eat tacos instead. Sadly, the tacos were eaten within no time and they were so good that I forgot to take a picture, lol.

The next day

On Wednesday, we didn't have any avocados or tacos left. I planned on ordering the tacos with some guacamole at the same restaurant and then place the remaining tacos in the freezer again for another time but the restaurant wasn't open for delivery. Thankfully, we always have tortillas at home so we used these instead. Personally, I prefer the bite of the smaller tacos since I learned to eat these but a tortilla is a good second choice.

Although just a little less good, it was still a good meal. Later I discovered I (once again) forgot to add the walnuts and cashew nuts to the table so these rolls didn't have any nuts inside. A shame because I think it's always a good combination.

What's next?

On Thursday I looked in the fridge and wondered what to do with the leftover chicken sirloin because it was far from enough to fill another tortilla, let alone two of them. I obviously didn't want to waste it either so I thought of another plan. Having leftover lettuce as well as cucumber, tomatoes and red onion, I went for something I normally never make: a sandwich with many veggies and chicken.

I sliced the chicken parts in half so I could spread it over 2 sandwiches in total. I sliced the tomato and cucumber and toasted the bread.

I made a salsa from mayonnaise (not homemade lol) mixed with a bit of honey and mustard, pepper and just a tiny pinch of salt. This is often my go to quick salsa, sometimes I add fresh parsley and other things or some yoghurt but today it was simple as can be. Done in a heartbeat.

One more step: close the sandwich :) and EAT!

I was sad that my boyfriend was helping clients constantly and had to wait 30 minutes before he could come and have lunch. But we both loved it so it was worth the effort.

What a great lunch! Today it's a more "Dutch" type of dish with potatoes, spinach and meat. I'm currently trying to get the meat just right and will be happy when it's ready because I hate standing in the hot kitchen this long. Let's hope it's worth it. The little one prefers these type of dishes so I didn't want to add another day of stuff she partially refuses to eat. Today is her day..

Thanks for stopping by, and have a good evening..