10 posts tagged “lunches”

Some several months ago, I went to the Pacific Ocean Market in Broomfield to pick up a variety of inexpensive ingredients for ethnic cuisines of the Chinese, Japanese and Indian varieties. Among my purchases was a 2lb bag of besan, which is flour made from chickpeas.  It has been languishing in my cupboard ever since.  Last night, I decided it was time to make dosas.

A dosa is basically a savory Indian crepe-sort-of-thing, usually made with diced or shredded vegetables, herbs, and lots of spices.  I've made them a couple times, but it never turns out as I hope.  It's simply because I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to Indian cookery--I can follow a recipe, but so much is dependent upon a feel for the technique and texture of things.  An idea of how things should look helps a lot, and so I was very glad to discover Manjula's Kitchen.  After watching Manjula's dosa video, I saw that I was going about it all wrong, using a dosa recipe that had more in common with American pancakes than actual dosas. 

Here's what I improvised last night:

• 1 cup besan
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 2 tsp curry powder
• pinch of asafoetida powder
• 1/2 tsp ground white pepper
• salt to taste
• water (1 cup or more)
  

Mix all of the above with a whisk, then add water.  I'm not sure how much water I used, but it was at least a cup.  The first dosa I fried (on a dry nonstick pan over medium heat) was very thick, so I had to add more water to the remaining batter.  With a thinner batter comes a thinner dosa which can be fried on a higher heat, faster.  I think this will vary with vegetable content, so I have to experiment.

Next time, I will give this a try with shredded carrot, since I have the better part of a 2-lb bag of carrots in my fridge. I imagine it will be good with goat cheese.

It's probably not like any pasta e fagioli recipe you've ever seen, but since the name just means "pasta with beans", how can it be wrong?

I call it purple because three of the ingredients in the mix are purple.  Technically, two of them are called red, but since they look purple both raw and cooked, I don't know why they're called "red onions" and "red cabbage".

Ingredients:

• 1 large mason jar of fully-cooked pinto beans
  
• 2 slices of bacon
• olive oil
  
• 1/4 of a medium red (purple) onion
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed
  
• 1/2 bunch purple kale
• 1/4 red (purple) cabbage
• 1 can diced tomatoes (Muir Glen)
  
• handful fresh spinach
• fresh cilantro, about 1/4 cup chopped & loosely packed (I would have used parsley or basil, but this is what I had on hand)
• dried oregano, dried basil, ground cumin seed, ground black pepper
• Bragg's liquid aminos
• bowtie pasta
  

Method:

1. Boil water for pasta and go through the pasta making process.  This should run in parallel to making the fagioli
   
2. Dice the bacon and fry in a large pan over medium heat until it's about medium done and the fat is significantly melted.
3. Crush the garlic and dice the onions and saute in the bacon fat with the diced bacon
4. Chop the cabbage into bite-size bits. When the onions are translucent, add the cabbage.  Stir a bit and cover.
5. When the cabbage is translucent and softening, add the kale (coarsely chopped) and mix.
6. Add oregano, basil, pepper and cumin, about 1/4 tsp each.
   
7. When the kale is not quite cooked, add the beans and some Bragg's to season.  Mix thoroughly.  Some water may be needed.
8. Add the canned tomatoes and 3 tbsp olive oil.  When warm, taste test for saltiness and add Bragg's as desired.
9. When it looks to be done, toss in spinach and serve over bowtie pasta.
10. Garnish with cilantro.
11. Take leftovers as lunch to work for several days. 
    

Today's lunch is comprised of leftovers: vegetarian empanada filling, pickled peppers & onions, rosemary olive bread, and goat cheese.  And for dessert (which I'll probably have around 5pm, since I'm working 'till 6), shoo-fly pie.  All of these things are from this past Saturday, when we had some friends over for social making.

The empanada filling consists of: butternut squash, pinto beans, sweet potato, onion and poblano pepper, seasoned with cumin, paprika, oregano and salt.  It made for a thick, pasty-consistency that worked really well for filling empanadas.  There was, of course, leftover filling, so I had some for lunch.  It's a little sweet and a little spicy, filling and hearty.  It's really good for an early winter day like today (rain/snow mix).

The pickled peppers & onions come care of some of the friends who were over on Saturday.  It's not something I would usually get, so I'm glad they brought it.  It was quite tasty with goat cheese and bread then, and today.  The goat cheese was a standard herbed chevre, and a new monterey jack style goat with chives and garlic.

The shoo-fly pie is a moleasses pie of the Amish variety, common in northern Indiana.  I'd actually made it work a home-region-themed coworker potluck a couple of weeks ago, and the recipe made way too much (it said it was for two 9-inch pie shells, but it made enough for FOUR), so I'd frozen leftovers and baked again on Saturday.  I figure, if I'm using the oven a lot, I might as well get some other baking over with.

I also made beef-filled empanadas, for my carnivorous significant other and our friends.  They were well liked.  I had a little bit in a mixed beef/veggie empanada (I was running out of meat by the 8th empanada), and I found myself feeling ill that night.  I don't do so well with the animal flesh, even of the free-range, grass-fed and organic variety (care of Atraya's brother-in-law, who's a foreman on an Oregon beef ranch).

The veggie empanadas were also a big hit.  I really enjoyed noshing on them cold the next day.  For my next co-worker potluck later this month, there will be half-sized (about 4 bites) empanadas of that variety.

An empanada, incidentally, is something of a pocket pie, of the central and south American variety.  When googling for recipes, I found a number of Chilean and Brasillian varieties.  I ended up using a dough recipe I found at Epicurious.  I substituted vegeteble shortening and apple cider vinegar, and it turned out quite nicely. 

Today's lunch is leftover venison stew and broccoli.

Not pictured: homemade hummus and chopped raw veggies I had later.

Atraya accquried many many pounds of elk, antelope and deer meat from her family (her father and brother-in-law and uncles all hunt), and so she makes stew.  It's a rather simple thing to make: 2 pounds of one of the game meats, a medium onion, some carrots, some celery, some potatoes, a can or two of diced tomatoes, vegetable broth, and herbs/spices.  Now that it's autumn, I'm glad to have it, tho I'll appreciate it more in winter.

I find that I needn't eat much of it in order to feel adequately sated.  Hummus&veggies then make a good snack to have just before my 3-6pm class.

While nuking my lunch, one of my coworkers saw my Mr. Bento jar, and asked about it.  She said that in India (where she's from) she had something similar, but it was just stacking bowls, not bowls inside a container.  I imagine that was rather like the To-Go Ware Stainless Steel Lunch Box, which consists of two bowls, lid and plate.  I've considered getting one of those for the days when I'd prefer to have a salad and bread (which just doesn't work the the Mr. Bento).

Today I had more (we made some fresh yesterday) spaghetti & meatballs with a side of veggies for lunch. Today, there were sliced fresh peaches for dessert, instead of applesauce.  Quite the improvement to have late-season fresh fruit than last year's canned.

My little lunch pail is an object of envy, insofar as it makes for a more appealing looking lunch. It draws a lot of comments.  A lot of people here bring in a nukable leftover for lunch, in any of a variety of containers.  There's something about having the set of matched-size containers, on top of a cloth (it's a dishtowel, actually), all laid out together with chopsticks and spoon on the side that makes the whole lunch arrangement more inviting.  Aesthetics are wed to appetite, somehow.

It probably also helps that I eat my lunch in the staff breakroom/kitchen, generally with a book in hand and sitting by the window.  I notice that a lot of my fellow contemplative workers eat in their offices or cubicles.  That's just not good.  It's hard to take that 30 minutes of unpaid time out of the middle of the day when you're working for such a tiny income at a nonprofit private school, but for me, it's worth it.  Or perhaps necessary.  How could I get through work and school and maintain a long term relationship and help maintain a household if I didn't take even a little time for myself during the day?

Today's lunch is spaghetti and meatless meatballs with broccoli and yellow squash, which is leftover from yesterday's lunch (on weekends, lunch is rapidly gaining on dinner as the largest and most elaborate meal of the day -- to be followed later by a very light supper). 

On the subject of meat-substitutes in vegetarian* diets, I'm usually against it, as it seems a little   disingenuous.  However, I love these meatless meatballs.  They're not particularly like meat, but they occupy the necessary flavor/consistency niche in the this particular dish, with a lighter texture than traditional meatballs.

This is not to say that I'm a vegetarian, but I'm currently subsiding on a restricted diet.

Today's lunch, care of my camera phone:

At the bottom, there's my oven-broiled coho salmon.  To the left: fresh broccoli.  Top left: raw red sweet cherries.  Top right: bowtie pasta with tomato basil sauce.  Of these items, only the salmon and the tomato basil sauce were leftovers.  The rest took me 15 minutes to prepare and package (including boiling the water for pasta and cooking it)

You might also notice my lunch reading.

I adore the lentil -- it's fast cooking legume which takes to all variety of flavor and texture.  It's a standard part of my favorite Indian cuisine...but I'll leave off the complexities of Indian cuisine for now.

Here's the straight-up Italian-style (for lack of a better name).  I note that there is a plurality of Italian restaurants in Boulder over all other sorts of ethnicities, so I see it as a sort of least-common-denominator.  I also imagine that most folk have the flavoring basics for Italian foods in their cupboards.

This dish serves 2  as a stand-alone meal, or 4-6 as part of a plated meal (including 2 other dishes, such as a vegetable and a protein).  It keeps well, and therefore makes a good next-day lunch.  It's also vegan (unless you add cheese).

• 1 cup lentils
  
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 clove garlic
  
• 1/2 tsp each oregano, basil, parsley
  
• salt & black pepper to taste
  
• optional: add orzo pasta and/or grated parmesean
• optional: add baby spinach in the last phase of cooking

Directions:

1. Rinse one cup of lentils (preferably french green, which are tiny, but plain green, which are larger, is fine)
2. Place lentils in pot with 3 cups water, boil until fully cooked (20-45 minutes, depending on elevation and hardness of water).  Add a teaspoon of canola oil to reduce foaming.  You may need to add water while cooking, or remove some at the end.
   
3. Optionally, rinse and drain the cooked lentils (you'll need a fine sieve to do this), depending on your flavor preference
4. Add 1 can diced tomatoes, 2 tbsp olive oil, and one crushed clove of garlic to the lentils.  Heat to a simmer.
5. Add oregano, basil and parsley in 1/2 tsp amounts, or as it suits your palate.
6. Add raw baby spinach (about 4 handfulls) -- stir in and cook until it's just soft and still bright green
   
7. Salt and black pepper to taste
8. Serve over/with orzo pasta -- about a 2:1 ratio of lentils to orzo.
   
9. Top with an optional sprinkle of grated cheese
   

Variations:

• add chopped roasted red peppers (which you can buy in small jars) and yellow summer squash
  
• substitute diced cucumber and raw zucchini for the tomatoes, substitute fresh dill and fresh parsley for the spices, add a tablespoon of red wine vinegar to the olive oil, and serve cold instead of warm.  Include feta instead of parmesean
  

Recently, I was nuking my lunch in the staff breakroom, preparing to sit down for a nice nosh and finish reading Cryptonomicon.  One of my coworkers, who's in a different department (so I don't see her so often) remarked on the complexity of lunch as compared to her frozen microwave meal-inna-box.  Aside from working a full-time job here at the university, she also has a private counseling practice, a husband and a young son to look after, so she doesn't have abundant time to prepare lunches for herself.

The details of my coworkers private lives aside, everyone faces the same issues of scarcity of time and resources with which to create the healthy, varied and viscerally pleasing lunch.  I think it's a real bummer that so many folks are getting by on microwave meals.  It's obvious that they're not satisfied by the food, and are just eating it mechanically for the fuel.  So I'm going to continually dedicate this Lunches tag to recipes and time-saving tips. 

I've been working in office environs for ten years now, in which time I have not satisfactorily solved the problem of lunch.  That is: how to obtain or provide for myself an inexpensive, healthy, balanced meal for each workday, without spending undue time in the mornings preparing the food, nor losing too much quality during daytime storage or with  reheating. 

Working at universities usually means that relatively inexpensive restaurants are within walking, biking or local bus distance, so that has often been a part of my solution.  When working for IT staff salary in the greater San Francisco Bay area, my sense of affordable was skewed by my economic privilege, so daily restaurant trips were not out of the question.  Now, working for a small nonprofit university where everyone is paid poorly, this is not a sustainable option.

My employer/school does have a cafe where a full plate of food may be obtained for $5, but I've found that the cafe food has a number of failings, which I might ennumerate here, but it would be a lengthy digression.  Given my weekly expenditure on grocery food, the $5 amount seems a good starting point as a high-water-mark on lunch costs.  So, how might I make a a healthy, balanced meal for each workday?

First, let's start with containment: the Zojirushi Mr. Bento -- I found it when looking for something like a home bento box -- something I could pack up with food each day.  As it turns out, there are many possible bento box options out there, but the Mr. Bento is a lunch jar made with an impeccable Zojirushi vacuum cannister.  It contains four sub-containers, which may be used for a varieity of foods.  Unfortunately, only one container seals water-tight, but that can be worked with, so long as you keep the jar upright.  Drawbacks: scarcity of replacement containers, and it really only works for keeping cold food cold for about 5 hours.  The advertised hot/cold function seems bunk to me.  Also, size and bulk are cumbersome if you're already carrying a bag or backpack and biking, walking, or taking the bus.

Next, the issue of healthy: this is a thorny area of discourse.  What qualities inhere in foodstuffs which can be appropriately labeled "healthy?"  That's a topic for another long digression, so let's leave "healthy" to mean: having been made from fresh vegetables, fruit or animal, involving a minimum of freezing, drying or processing between when it left the earth or animial and meets my lips.  Also preferrentially selected for "healthy": to have come from a reputably high-quality organic farm or ranch, thereby ensured to have come in minimum contact with petrochemicals and pharmochemistry.  Organic is more expensive, so this must be tempered by bulk-aisle purchases, such as grains and legumes.

Third, balance: One of the more recent food pyramids is a good guide. Roughly by volume, 30% starchy carbs, 30% protein, 30% veggies, and 10% fruit.  I add my fats (vegetable or nut oils) in with the starch and protein.  The Mr. Bento has four containers:

1. Bottom container: about 10 oz., with gasket lid to seal water-tight.
2. Rice container: about 15 oz., with a special lid that seems to be for the purpose of seperating the two bottom containers from the two top by a simple layer of air in plastic.
3. Third container: 9 oz., does not seal water-tight.
4. Top container: 6 oz, also doesn't seal.

My largest container, #2, should be devoted to something voluminous, full of nutrient and fiber, yet low on calorie and glycemic index. It should be something I can digest for the rest of the afternoon without getting the post-lunch sleepy around 2 or 3 pm.  This is my 30% starch.  It's often a grain, which I can make days in advance, or a pasta, which I can cook in the morning.  On occasion, it's my own variation on cole slaw (made with tamari, brown rice vinegar, and sesame seed oil), but that's when I've displaced the starchy substance to another container.

The bottom container, due to its sealing gasket, is good for anything liquid.  Soups, stews, chilis, sauces, and so forth.  I almost always eat whatever is in the two bottom containers together, usually after microwaving.  It's always something I made over the weekend, or the night before -- planning with leftovers, I suppose.

The two top containers, medium and small, are good for: raw vegetables and fruits.  Raw veggies, such as broccoli, are easily steamed/cooked in the microwave, and I put those in container #3.  Also, raw veggies go well with hummus, which can be in the top container, and together make a good mid-morning snack on a day with a later lunch.  The top container is also just the right size for applesauce, fresh cherries, or bits of melon.  This is the best place to introduce variety into your daily lunch -- go with seasonal, locally-produced produce if you can.

The hard part about all of this for just about everyone is the time in the morning.  At some point, I realized I'd have to develop discipline if I want to accomplish anything in life; this case is no different.  For me, that means getting up a little earlier, adding another routine to my morning, and going to bed a little earlier at night.  It's worth the enjoyment of a good lunch (and a good book) in the afternoon.  Even on the mornings where I prepare 3 of the 4 items from scratch (boiling pasta, chopping veggies and fruit), it's not more than 15 minutes of work, and part of it can be done while my morning egg cooks or my tea brews.

So, in sum, my recommendations are:

1. Get a good lunch box/pail/container arrangement which will function for storing, heating and eating food.
2. Work with a staple startch/protein diet that you can make on weekends and consume during the week
3. Vary the fruits and veggies according to what is seasonally available
4. Dedicate 10-15 minutes of time to prepare your lunch in the morning.

After a few months of making my lunches this way, I've found that I have a pleasant break to look forward to.  I don't think I'd be similarly enthused about a frozen microwave meal, and certainly not about the cafe food.