Potato and egg salad

Components:

• potatoes that I diced, parboiled and fried with spices and oil
• two fried eggs
• pickled onions
• premade salad
• balsamic vinegar

Root vegetable Frittatta salad

Saladify everything. That's how you lose weight. Surprisingly, this was not at the forefront of my mind when I was thinking of ways to use up the fritatta, salad mix, dressing and tomatoes in my fridge. I'm just buying a lot of fresh produce lately.

Grill'd Bunless Burgers

At Grill'd, there's a bunless option. It sounds like bad value 'cause you're paying the same price and not getting the bun. However, it turns out the bunless option is just as filling as with the bread (especially if you also want chips), since the bun is not a filling component of the meal anyway.

This is the bacon and cheese burger. The great thing about having the sauce on the side instead of inside a sandwich is that you can have as much or as little as you want (and it's a LOT of sauce, but having worked in a fast food restaurant myself I know they actually put that amount in the burgers!! This is especially a concern with a high fat sauce like aioli).

The zucchini chips sound like a good alternative to potato, but with the batter they put on the zucchini, they are actually almost as high in kilojoules as their potato counterparts and don't even taste as good (waaaay to salty, and kind of slimy tasting if the batter falls off).

In conclusion, even though restaurant bun-free burgers are better than I expected, the ones I made at home were just as good. I have mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup etc at home that need to be used up too!

Salad with crispy bacon mustard dressing

Since I happened to have bacon, mustard, garlic, vinegar and French dressing, "Supercook," a website that collates various recipes from various websites based on ingredients used, showed me the recipe for this dressing. It was rather amazing and I needed suprisingly little to flavour the salad.

Abundance bowl with carrot and sultana salad

I recently learned about "abundance bowls." They are modelled on donburi, which are various types of meals that are based on a bowl of rice with toppings. Only with abundance bowls, the rice is generally "bulked out" with lentils or chickpeas, and they are topped with salads and lean meat. The salad I used here was a carrot and sultana salad with a dressing made of peanut butter and French dressing. It didn't sound very appetising, and I didn't touch it for the longest time. But next to the lentils and rice, it felt like an abundance of flavours and textures. The nuttiness of the peanut butter accentuated the nuttiness of the lentils in the rice, and the tang of the French dressing balanced out the nuttiness. The sultanas added a little sweetness. The rocket added zing. Overall, very happy.