Last Night's Dinner

The past few nights around our house have been rushed, and as I'm still not very well versed in vegan cooking, I was having a hard time coming up with something fast to fix for dinner last night. I had bought things to make a version of "Texas Caviar", so I decided to wing it and go with that.

What I came up with was very, very similar but I didn't use bottled salad dressing. Instead, I added olive oil and red wine vinegar to taste and added Italian seasoning. I also added the juice of one lime and since I didn't have a bell pepper, I just didn't put it in. I didn't have any cherry or grape tomatoes, so I diced two Roma tomatoes and added those. My recipe also had 2 cans of black eyed peas, though I'm sure one would have sufficed. I added about a cup of frozen corn kernels that I intended to just thaw but ended up cooking. Oops!

This is what I ended up with (forgive the blurry picture, I was using my old, crappy phone):The roomie seemed to like it okay, but was pretty disappointed when I notified him that this WAS dinner. I served it with blue corn tortilla chips (all natural, organic and all that jazz) and we ate it like salsa. After a few chip-fulls, I ended up eating it like a salad with crumbled chips on top of it.

Once we were satisfied with this, we polished off a carton of strawberries between the two of us. We were both satiated and didn't feel like a couple of slugs. We had plenty of energy to go check out the new Transformer's movie!

This is a recipe that works great as a summer side. You can serve it as a salad or like I did with the chips. Either way, it's pretty darn tasty. It's better the next day after it's been given a chance to let the flavors meld. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Happy eating!