Vegetarian Meal Prep

For today's Meal Prep, I took a slightly different approach. Rather than making up four individual servings of a meal, this time I made a few different vegetarian dishes and kept them in the fridge, picking at them throughout the week for lunches or dinners. Kinda like a picnic, or a very small scale Ottolenghi salad bar.

We've got: zucchini, feta and mozzarella fritters; roasted parmesan broccoli; fried marrows with tomato and feta; shaved cucumber; cottage cheese, and basil pesto. So many vegetables!

Now, I actually made all of these in an attempt to get through all the vegetables we'd bought at the Castlemaine farmers market earlier that week. (You may recognise that the spinach, tomatoes and cucumbers went into my Japanese meal prep).

Vegetables

I started with some roast broccoli - I found this recipe for roasted parmesan broccoli on Pinterest and it turned out really well! Just cut the broccoli into florets, and roast in a little oil with some garlic, parmesan and lemon zest. Whilst we're here, can we take a minute to talk about how awesome roast broccoli is? I love how the edges get all roasty and brown, really intensifying the flavour. Yum! (And way better than steamed or boiled broccoli).

For the shaved cucumber, I just did my usual treatment of putting it through the spiralizer, for some refreshing crunch.

I also made a batch of basil pesto, as I'd bought a (not pictured) big bunch of basil at the market - I didn't follow a particular recipe, but just put the basil leaves in a processor with some extra virgin olive oil, pine nuts, garlic, and parmesan and whizzed it up until it looked right.

I'd had no idea what to do with the marrow (that's the pale, jade-green zucchini-looking thing), but a quick search through my Ottolenghi books led to the fried marrow with tomato and feta that you see above. The recipe comes from Plenty More, and is essentially fried pieces of marrow topped with a tomato sauce (like a pasta sauce), sprinkled with feta at the end. Simple and delicious.

Fried marrow

The zucchini, feta and mozzarella fritters were just Nigella's courgette fritters from Forever Summer, but with mozzarella in addition to her suggested feta. These are nice hot, at room temperature, or even heated up in the sandwich press at work. For extra protein, and general creamy goodness, I mixed up a sauce of cottage cheese with a little salt and pepper, olive oil and spring onions. (I didn't do this, but I reckon these fritters would be great for breakfast with a fried or poached egg).

Zucchini, Mozzarella and Feta fritters

And there we go! Lots of great flavours and textures, heaps of veggies. Much deliciousness for the week.