Super-Quick Black Beans & Rice w/ Avocado + Lime

I'm not what one might refer to as "pleasant" company when I'm really hungry.  Apparently this is an inherited trait.

Honestly, sometimes I get so wrapped up in whatever I'm doing that hours (and hours!) go by before I've eaten a single, solitary thing.  Then, suddenly, I'm famished.  Like so famished that I start picturing myself in one of those insanely guilt-inducing commercials about starving children in Africa.  You know the ones - where those doe-eyed children get like 10 grains of rice a day and have flies buzzing around their heads?  Flies!

Not good.  Which is why I thought I'd share my go-to solution for situations such as these, as a Public Service Announcement of sorts.  Ironically, the recipe involves rice.  It also involves canned beans, avocado, lime, and scallions.  What could be simpler?

Hopefully this will carry you straight past that dreaded hungry-angry phase with minimal effort.  And, if you're the kind of person whose temper isn't connected to his/her stomach, well...

{VeganMoFo} Raw Taco Salad

This raw taco salad is something of a revelation.

In it, crisp lettuce marries with seasoned taco meat and tangy cashew cheese to form the main components of the most coveted raw recipe in my arsenal.  The trick is to throw in just a few of the usual taco suspects:  tomatoes, scallions, olives, and cilantro, and to top the whole thing off with nothing more than a bit of freshly squeezed lime juice, which allows every flavor to shine through brilliantly.

Yes, there's a little advanced prep work here.  Yes, it's totally worth it.

This is pretty much heaven in a bowl.

Green Drink

That's right, I TiVo Oprah everyday. So sue me.

Thanks to her show, I've become acquainted with my favorite Doctor in the world - Dr. Oz (whom I don't, in fact, actually know). Anyway, I really like Dr. Oz because he practices both Western and Eastern medicine, which means that he promotes yoga, meditation, and even (gasp!) improving one's health through a diet rich in fruit and veg. Thus, he recently shared the following recipe to encourage people to incorporate healthy smoothies and juices into their daily lives. As for me, I'm pretty adept at blending up the former, but when it comes to the later, uh...notsomuch.

Actually, the meager breadth of my "juicing" experience extends only to squeezing the juice out of lemons, limes, and oranges for various recipes. If that's not bad enough, I don't even have a juicer. And my blender has been decidedly uncooperative lately, resulting in this being a much more time-consuming recipe than it should've been.