Lunch Hacks

Lunch is a problem. I don’t want to make lunch. Nor do you.

I don’t want to eat a supermarket meal deal - a claggy sandwich, a warm bottle of diet coke, some quavers. I don’t want to spend £12 on an artisan burrito from a food van that will send me to sleep. I don’t want to reheat last night’s sheperd’s pie (also soporific) because I can’t BEAR people in an office going ‘oooh that smells nice!!! What is itttt???’. And then you have to explain the middle class wanky leftovers you are having.

I don’t want a chalky protein shake. I don’t want a Nando’s or a Gregg’s or a McDonald’s or a scorching, embalmed Costa panini. The closest thing to what I want is a Pret, but now that costs the best part of £20 for lunch so now I don’t want that either. Not that there are any near me if I did.

I cannot, with a straight face, suggest that you piss about filling up mason jars or the like with salad. I also can’t endorse gym-bro batch cooking: the thing that tasted nice on Monday repulses me by Thursday, and it means so much time spent and cooking and washing up, the very thing I am trying to avoid. I want something filling, nutritious, great tasting but above all EASY. I cannot stress enough how easy it needs to be. It must be easier than walking to Tesco Express. It must be opening-two-packets-and-putting-them in a bowl easy.

I have felt the lunch problem all the more poignantly over the Summer holidays, where my children have needed three meals presented to them each day - such a bore! So enslaving! This is why all the women in the country went mad over lockdown when we all suddenly became ‘lunch chef’ without being asked. I’m not having it.

So what then, Claire? What do we do?

Here are all my suggestions, some pretty ingenious, if I do say so myself. They are about crafty shopping, the very lifeblood of this Substack. Print it out and pin it to your fridge. Thank me later.

1. If you work from an office, have a little stash in your desk drawer containing Malden salt, a small pepper mill, some tabasco and a real metal knife and fork. Never again eat an underseasoned superfood salad with a dry cardboardy wooden fork with stumpy prongs. Just this will improve your work lunches ten fold.

   

2. Also get yourself a shaker of furikake. It’s a Japanese rice seasoning that is made up of sesame and nori granules - it’s sweet and savoury and crunchy, bringing a regular supermarket egg mayo sandwich up to another level. This one is amazing, and has little tiny beads of wasabi in it.

   

3. If you want a hearty salad, one of the best lunches there is, then bypass the ‘food to go’ section in the supermarket altogether and go to the veg aisle. Get yourself a larger prepped and washed salad bowl, those ready made ones that will have tomato/a little pack of croutons/a sachet of dressing.

   

   Then go to the ‘deli’ bit and get yourself whatever protein bits you fancy: a packet of cooked chicken, some artichokes in oil, some hot smoked salmon. Dump the later over the former. Mix. This will be 100 times nicer than a salad box in the lunch section, and won’t leave you starving at 5pm.