Help! My lunches are boring!!

Fabulous Brown Bag lunch recipes

Can't vouch for them myself, but the recipes look good!

There's also not one, but two (at least) Brown Bag Lunch cookbooks listed at Amazon.com--I'm not kidding. One is "Super Easy Bag Lunches" the other is "The Brown Bag Lunch Cookbook". The first one looks like it's geared for kid's school lunches, the second for grown ups to take to work. I don't know if I can wrap my head around an entire cookbook for Brown Bag Lunches...too avant garde for me, I guess.

When I worked I usually either bought those nasty one dinner meals, which I hated and do not recommend, or I took leftovers from dinner the night before. DD wants the same food every single day for school, so I'm not much help!

Happy Hunting!

Anhata
www.familynaturally.com
Your Family's General Store, Naturally

Honey, can you get hold of a wide-mouthed flask? I know they do them at Lakeland. Then you can take pasta and sauce, stew, soup, other left-over stuff and it's easily contained, kept warm and you can eat it straight from the flask.

How about pate-type things on crackers/oat cakes/rice cakes? You can make good pates using dried beans. Soak cannellini beans/borlotti beans/chickpeas overnight and cook until tender. Then mash or blend them and mix with some combination of garlic/chili/herbs/tomato sauce/mayonnaise/yoghurt/olive oil, plus a little of the cooking water to make your prefered texture. If you make it fairly dry it could also go in a sandwich. Then you can take fresh salad things to go with.

Do you like sardines? They're not stinky in the way tuna is and you can mix with mayonnaise, a LITTLE finely chopped onion, a finely chopped tomato to make a very yummy thing to go on crackers.

Can't think of anything else useful at the moment!

Zillah

is always a risky business! Far too many smell and texture fetishes!!

pasta salad would be the one thing I can think of easily. My two take pate, salami or ham in their sandwiches/rolls, but I've been known to do philly/ham wraps (when the bread was all mouldy!) or offer crackers with snack size peperami and a lump of cheese. Rice salad if you like it. Potato salad. Take care of the carb and add a chunk of cheese, salami or ham to cover the protein. It's like any meal - break it down into the component parts so you've got a carb and a protein, now add a piece of fruit or a tomato. Watch out for wet sandwich fillings because your bread will be soggy by lunchtime - put salad and/or cucumber on the side. If the kettle is easier than the microwave there are soups and even instant porridge as emergency back-up. They work particularly well for the morning you slept late and everything went wrong or those mornings when making lunch at breakfast time makes you want to gag!

Also, eat a good big breakfast if you can possibly face it. Start small and work up with practice because it will make all the difference if you can't get to lunch for any reason. You'll just scrape through till you can get home and cram something down. Porridge really is one of the best for substantial.

as much as I love tuna... I NEVER do it for sandwiches (too wet, messy and altogether not a good idea if you need to be social after lunch!). Don't know how it would fare in the pasta salad, but you can always replace it with small chunks of fried bacon or something. I'm not a huge fan of sardines - always had to be in the right mood and it hasn't come along for 20yrs or so... DD's the fish lover, along with DH.

my father always has cheese sandwiches and an apple (Golden Delicious). These days it's only once a week and rolls instead of sandwiches, but he did it day in, day out for 10yrs at Michelin.

Kerri.

Thanks for all your ideas! I hadn't thought of taking a flask (duh), but did so today with tomato soup (tesco posh soup, by which I mean New Covent Garden style, as opposed to tinned ). I have ordered one of those wide-mouthed flasks, then I'll be able to take my homemade chunky veg soups.

Dunno about making my own pate - I keep buying houmous even though there are perfectly good dried chickpeas that have been lurking in my kitchen unused for months. I am not good at anything requiring forward planning For the same reason, meat sits frozen in my freezer for months because I can never decide in advance what I might want for dinner. I need to get myself organised (now how many years have I been saying that?) I've just bought some chickpea pate to try though, maybe with Ryvita for tomorrow I think.

Anhata, thanks for the website, looks like there are plenty of ideas there.

Kerri - porridge?? You Have Got To Be Joking. Weird gloopy wallpaper paste

you might have more luck with tinned chickpeas than dried, and I believe they do still have a shelf-life and go tough if you keep even dried ones too long. Same for all beans. I'm too lazy to use dried.

Kerri.