On days when I’m not rushed and leaving for work, I like to make healthy, light, and fresh-tasting lunches. A perfect example of this is the raw falafel salad I recently made.

This salad consisted of baby spinach, marinated onions, raw falafel (from the fab blog Bittersweet), and an apple-tahini dressing (Healthy Vegan Blog). I also had a marinated and raw portobello mushroom on the side.

I settled on making raw falafel because I’ve got nearly a pound of raw sunflower seeds chilling out in my freezer, and I want the room for something else. It was pretty tasty, but it didn’t really taste much like the real thing. Also, it wasn’t technically raw because I baked it in the oven, but you could dehydrate them also.*

The apple-tahini dressing was surprisingly good. I say “surprisingly” because I’ve written before on this blog about my hatred of tahini. Maybe it’s just hummus, or my mood when I eat it. Anyway, the dressing was super easy, and is a good, quick solution when you’re craving a tahini dressing but find yourself without many ingredients.

I also recently tried out two home-made vegan “cheese” recipes – one that is meant to be used as the filling for “grilled cheese”, and the other a cheese dip.

Cheese Dip

I didn’t take a picture of the grilled cheese recipe because I couldn’t get one that looked good. It was a recipe from Clean, Green, Simple. The texture reminded me of pimento cheese, so although it’s nothing like grilled cheese as I think of it (lots of gooey Daiya), it’s a pretty decent sandwich filling nonetheless.

The cheese dip I made a couple days later, however, was incredible. The recipe is from My Vegan Cookbook, and it uses over-cooked Yukon Gold potatoes. It turned out super creamy and, dare I say, cheesy. Even my cheese-loving vegetarian boyfriend scarfed it down. I highly recommend that you make this and fall in love with it.

**My boyfriend and I are getting a dehydrator, so maybe I’ll try these out dehydrated also. Oh, and it’s supposed to be here tomorrow!!!!