balancing lunch

Being on a student schedule, I usually get to eat lunch at home. Suuuuuuuuuch a luxury! I’ve had too many jobs where lunch was a ten-minutes-at-my-desk-or-a-meeting affair. Having a (relatively) slow and relaxing lunch is a really nice way to work some self-care into my day. AND, as such, I want it to be balanced and leave me satisfied. Here are some recent lunches!

Lunch #1: The McGriddle (hahahaha not. But hear me out).

 

So my little sister is the master of microwave-cooking eggs in a mug. She taught me how to do it (relatively) well. So I take an egg, THOROUGHLY whisk it in a mug (key) and microwave it with some waxed paper on top for a minute, stirring halfway through.

Then I put it on a salad with greens, chopped apple or pear, and goat cheese. And THEN, put a little MAPLE SYRUP on top. Thus, egg+cheese+maple syrup=McGriddle!

Hahaha I know it’s BS. But this is a really good salad.

  

On balance I’m going to give it a B-. Delicious and healthy, but I probably snacked a good amount later since it was pretty low-cal and I just generally feel fuller when I have grainy carbs with lunch.

Next lunch: Count those food groups!

 

The savory portion of the meal was kind of a mini-version of the grain bowls I’ve been lovin’ on lately. Quinoa, black beans, kale, mushrooms. Topped with avocado for healthy fat/general bliss.

On the sweet end, chopped apples with Greek yogurt and cinnamon. A silly revelation that you all will think is super vapid: for years I put yogurt in a bowl and fruit on top. But if you put the yogurt on top of the fruit… it doesn’t stick as much to the bottom of the bowl! Another deep thought from my blog. You are so welcome.

   

Enjoyed with flowers! Nice and filling, this one. No complaints.

Third lunch: Veggie extravaganza!

I love how simultaneously nutritious and overflowing this plate is.

Let’s do a lap, shall we?

Going clockwise from the orange section, we begin with oven-baked sweet potato fries. Next, the last of some leftover brussels sprouts cooked my favorite way, which have been popping up all over the Internet (jk that’s my bff’s blog! check it out!). For the protein and healthy fat element on this plate of carbs, we have some Trader Joe’s refried black beans topped with some beautiful sliced fresh avocado (tip: Costco has the best avocados. I think they are absolute rubbish at Safeway, Giant and Trader Joe’s). Finally, something rather special: kale chips made with TAHINI. Dude. Try it. Kale and sesame are a match made in heaven. Just make sure to bake your chips on a low temperature and keep an eye on them, because they get crispy faster… then promptly transition to burnt.

It seems unfair to grade this one on balance, cause cmon- it’s a beautiful thing to have your entire day’s veggie needs in a meal. That being said… B+ rather than an A because I was hungry for a snack not too long after I ate it :) Don’t care, still delicious, still awesome for me.

 

the grain bowl

Once upon a time, I spent wayyyyyyy too much money on lunch.

I spent the morning working out and studying my booty off. It was cold and nasty and I couldn’t envision any food at home that seemed to meet any parameters in terms of hunger satisfaction or delivery of nutrients. And I was (kind of) in the neighborhood of the new Mom’s, which I’d yet to check out. It was thoroughly, thoroughly mind boggling, and had a terribly convenient (albeit ludicrously overpriced) little take out market where they’d make you a steamed bowl of joy. I managed to restrain myself from paying another $5 for fresh juice, and came home with this:

The Peruvian Bowl! (Note: that is what they call it. I can just imagine someone Peruvian looking at this and going “…”). Anyway, it was DARN good. Brown rice, black beans, avocado, tempeh, and the thing that made it awesome times 1,000: chimichurri! Crazy flavorful, tons o fat chimichurri.

It was also warm and stick to your ribs-y on this icky, icky day I ate it. So basically we were best friends.

 

 

It was a rather large meal, and had also cost me $$$, so I was delighted when I was pretty full and there was still a decent amount of the bowl left.

The next day I set about revamping it into Grain Bowl: Take 2. Somehow all of the avocado and tempeh had mysteriously vanished (… weird) so I jazzed it up with:
- crispy kale (loved the textural dimension this added to it!)
- roasted mushrooms
- hardboiled egg

STILL great! Uglier…

  

Obviously this meal would have been considerably more attractive had I moved it to a new bowl. But washing extra dishes wastes water. And also time.

   

So THEN I went: Self, you can’t drop that kind of bank on lunch every day. Furthermore, it is morally and intellectually ridiculous when you know how inexpensive those ingredients actually are. So, you are just going to have to MAKE YOUR OWN.

And this will make a great default meal. Oatmeal has always been my default meal for breakfast. I can make it in my sleep, it is physically and emotionally satisfying to me, I can customize it in a variety of ways to keep myself from getting bored, etc. A salad with a poached egg on top serves the same purpose for me for dinner.

So the grain bowl. Breaking down its components:

- Grain (duh)
- Vegetables (for some reason it is much easier for me to eat vegetables in this form than in a salad. I think it’s all weather related. I’ve started to notice an alarmingly strong correlation between the weather and my mood- yet another reason I should never live in Siberia- and the same seems to be true for the weather and my appetites)
- sauce for jazz that ideally incorporates a healthy fat

Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

To make the grain bowl happen, I recommend making a megabatch of whole grains at the beginning of the week. Quinoa was my jam this week: complete protein, holla!

This bowl had grains; scads of roasted mushrooms; chickpeas; egg for protein; walnuts for crunch, healthy fat, and awesomeness; and finally, some sort of green sauce that I cannot for the life of me remember. I actually can’t remember making this meal and was baffled to find it on my memory card. Always reassuring, memory loss at the age of 24.

 

It’s good that this had walnuts. Walnuts= omega 3’s= memory. Clearly I need them.

 

This one I ate yesterday, and I do remember it.

Grains, roasted carrots ‘n broccoli, avocado, egg on top. And for the piece de resistance, homemade cilantro pesto! Mark Bittman’s recipe. Just cilantro, oil, garlic, and salt. Lovely.

Sooooooo many cooooooooolors!

  

And this one was my absolute favorite, due mostly to methodology, because I made everything stovetop and I think it amped up the flavor.

I began by cooking some mushrooms just in cooking spray. Then I added leftover roasted carrots ‘n broccoli (from the day before: win!), a few leftover grilled peppers from a meal out, and 1/2 a cup of Trader Joe’s fat free refried black beans. And the quinoa. And then that got sticky and I added the cilantro pesto to help unstick stuff from the bottom of the pan… but it still got nice and crusty :)

Served atop a bad of greens for extra veggie love (and because the greens were looking rather dismal and needed using!). Topped with avocado for extra awesomeness.

    

Fact: quinoa is really good when it gets toasted. Less airy. More stick-to-ya-ribs.