Of the 7 meals I eat everyday, lunch is the meal I eat at my desk 5 days a week and when I’m most distracted. It’s the meal I exclaim “Yum!” at the least and also when I never do my happy food dance because I’m at my desk working. The last time I did the food dance was when I realized Goldfish make great croutons.
I usually spend a couple of hours on Sunday meal prepping my lunches for the week. I’m not a fan of leftovers because life is too short but I’m also not a fan of the free lunch at the office (the first generation of economists that pruned my mind and I are currently in a fight). My meal prep time is sacred to me. I go into a zone where I can switch off the annoying parts of my brain. It’s just me and my vegetables. It’s often hard for me to give people my recipes because I never remember what I did. Such is the magic of the zone. Recently, I made lasagna soup for lunch. I didn’t know such a thing existed until the guy who sits next to me at work ate it for 4 weeks straight. At week 4, I knew exactly what lasagna soup was. My vegetarian version had lentils in it. I only had urad dal (black grams I think?) so I threw that and some veggies and whatever else I would throw into a lasagna + extra water into my trusty Instant pot and voila, two 20min pressure cook sessions later , she was ready. I took two sessions because I can never tell how Instant, the Instant pot is.
Now that it’s cold and wintery (3/7 days here in New York) and the Holiday Season is upon us, I’ve been working from home a lot more. My new plates and the time to cook meals mid-day have improved my mood by 87%. Being present and not reading about the who’s who of debt markets while eating leftovers accounted for maybe half of that. I’ve also somehow managed to romanticize cooking and eating a lunch by myself on a work day (Don’t give me a hard time about it, I do what I must to survive). Sometimes I put on my flouncy yellow and pink flowery apron and prance around my tiny but well-lit kitchen in what Stanley Tucci would describe as a Julie and Julia-esque manner. The other day I made a quinoa, and kabocha and delicata squash salad with freshly grated parmesan and spinach for lunch. Saying, “Sorry, I was on mute” as I quickly swallowed a chunk of juicy warm squash was definitely more pleasurable than when I almost choked on a crouton at my desk. *Cough Cough* I meant Goldfish. I had purchased the squash at the Union Square Farmer’s market the weekend before (Just cast me in a rom-com already).
I’m not a big fan of tofu and seitan masquerading around as a Peking Duck. I always wish they could embrace who they are on the inside and come out of the closet as soy. Soy es el tofu (still laughing about this little nugget of protein humor). Another working lunch star was my shaved carrots and pesto. This carrot dish was born out of a chubby girl’s need to substitute the pasta in her pesto. I peeled my carrots entirely, par boiled them and tossed them in fresh pesto (made in my mortar and pestle) and some more of that freshly grated parmesan. It’s not a good pasta substitute. I will continue to need carbs but this was so yummy. I still think about these carrots on a semi-weekly basis.
Yes, a mid-day cooking break is fun but that isn’t a surprise. That isn’t just where all my joy was coming from. It was also from taking a moment listen to a song while making eye contact with the window cleaner propelling off the side of building, from actually noticing and caring about what I was eating and planning to send the email after I finished my meal. Sometimes, I make tacos and doing all that is less of a choice and more of a necessity given the hands-on nature of the taco-task at hand.
I have a few more weeks before the luxury of working from home will be more of a rarity and I will be going back to that meal prep life but I’m hoping lunches at my desk will now have more happy food dances. I’m not going to reinvent fettucine every day (which is a bummer) but I will make more of an effort to ~be present~ .
Are you an at your desk lunch-er?
Vish Eats Delish 