Ode to Whole Foods

Hooray!!! Photobucket is back up, I am (somehow) still awake, the Bruins are ahead 3-0, and I get to post about something that makes me very happy–food! Whole Foods food!

I am nowhere near the first blogger to sing the praises of the Whole Foods salad and hot food bars, nor will I be the last.

I know, I know, it’s expensive. But since the closest grocery store to my home is Whole Foods, and since I am perpetually short on time, I take advantage of their prepared food offerings from time to time.  It’s never a challenge to find something tasty and vegan, which makes popping in there quite an anxiety-free experience for me.

First I would like to share some photos of the WF lunch I enjoyed today following a 3.5+ hour lecture on Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure.  I deserved it.

Purple Sweet Potato Tempura roll (it had yummy chopped peanuts all over it)

SO beautiful!

And a little Seaweed Salad for good measure

This was such a satisfying lunch–flavorful and full of many different flavors and textures.  I love their veggie sushi. I wish I could eat it every day but my wallet won’t allow that.  Also as a head’s up, they only provide enough soy sauce for maybe one piece, so make sure you grab extra packets or have a bottle in your fridge to tap.  Anyway, this was a very good bar review lunch–it picked up my mood and helped me power through a grueling afternoon.

I may or may not have mentioned this 948398 times before, but I love Indian food.  I wouldn’t call Whole Foods’ version “authentic”, but I do enjoy it, and I couldn’t resist when I spotted it on the hot bar one Friday at the Whole Foods near my internship. That location also has a huge and rockin’ salad bar. I went a little nuts:

Mattar Gobi, along with Chana Masala, a little bit of brown rice, and a giant mixed salad (spinach, grilled red onion, grilled zucchini and yellow squash, grape tomatos, sliced white mushrooms, toasted pumpkin seeds, a couple of cloves of roasted garlic, bacuns [textured soy protein crumbles], and a tiny drizzle of balsamic).

Chana masala is my all-time favorite Indian dish if I had to pick one, but actually that day I was loving every morsel of the Mattar Gobi.  It was so good.  You could actually see the whole cumin seeds in the sauce.  Delicious.  The salad was really good too.  I had never had Bacuns before but I must say, I’m a fan. And in case anyone was wondering, I did not eat that outrageously large mountain of food all in one sitting. Nope…lunch AND dinner, my friends. I’m thrifty like that.

Finally, one more picture of a salad bar encounter I had in the not-too-distant past:

This one contained tofu (teriyaki I think?), roasted beets and parsnips (my favorite part of the whole thing!), grape tomatoes, shredded zucchini and carrots, yellow pepper, artichokes, and chickpeas, on top of a base of mixed greens.

I threw this together in a serious hurry one night on my way to babysit.  It turned out to be awesome, despite the somewhat random mix of ingredients.  I’m pretty happy with what a beautiful rainbow those ingredients managed to create though!  This is why I love a WF salad…when all the ingredients are right there in front of me, I can eat the rainbow without having to think too much about it.

Alright, it’s bed time for real now. In the hope that my bar-induced psychosis is somehow amusing to anyone other than myself, I intend to devote my next post to some of the truly weird crap I have been cooking and eating at home on all those occasions (and they are many) when I don’t have the presence of mind to cross the street and go to Whole Foods.  Stay tuned.