Roasted butternut squash with cinnamon, caramelized apples and onion, feta, pecans and honey, tossed through green lentil spaghetti. It eats as a warm pasta or a cold salad, which makes it one of the more useful things to have in the fridge in October.
Keep two ladles of the pasta water back. Tossed into the skillet it pulls everything into a sauce, which is the step that turns this from pasta with things on it into an actual dish.
The faces are the whole trick. Underneath it’s teriyaki quinoa in a bell pepper — a dinner most kids have turned down before — but carve a jack-o’-lantern into the front and it stops being a vegetable and starts being a Halloween thing.
The filling is quinoa, scrambled egg and mixed vegetables in a coconut aminos teriyaki, so it’s an actual dinner rather than a side.
Carve the faces before you boil the peppers, not after. Five minutes in boiling water softens them enough to eat while they can still stand up on the plate.
Quinoa, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, chickpeas and a lot of chopped dill, dressed in nothing but lemon juice and olive oil. The feta is optional, so it works vegan by leaving one line off the list.
Let the quinoa cool before the vegetables go in. Added warm, the cucumber goes soft and the whole bowl weeps by the next day.
Quinoa instead of rice, scrambled egg through it, and a coconut aminos teriyaki sauce with sesame oil and rice wine vinegar. A bag of frozen mixed vegetables does the rest, which makes this a genuine twenty-minute dinner on a night with no plan.
Drain the quinoa properly before it goes into the wok. Wet quinoa turns the whole bowl to mush and the sauce never clings.