I managed to wake up every morning at 6.15am the last two weeks to cook lunch to pack to work. It wasn't as tiring as I thought actually! Putting more effort to make my lunch taste good and look colourful makes cooking in the morning fun! And I really do look forward to eating lunch. :)
The difference in the lunches here and in Part 1 is that these have more variety and are more filling too. There's 3 compartments of food, and I have a different main (pasta, sweet potato, wrap, rice etc.) every day. It's more satiating because there's more carbs (yay carbs!) and protein, but I try to keep the fat low. I've not put so much effort in lunchboxes since like Year 1 of poly I think, but this way, lunch is so much more interesting!
This is wholewheat pasta spirals with carrot, sweet peas and baby corn, cooked with 1 tbsp Annie's Organic ketchup, 2 tsp of my grandma's homemade ginger chili, nutritional yeast and a mix of spices. Topped with raisins for more sweetness.
On the side I have butterhead lettuce, cherry tomatoes and a tofu scramble. I've not made a tofu scramble in a long time and this was really good! I hand-crushed some firm tofu and pan-fried it with button mushrooms in a pan coated with oil-spray. Then I added turmeric, curry powder, nutritional yeast and pepper. I had it with a bit more ketchup too - ketchup makes almost everything taste good! Haha.
I always bring snacks along, for the mid-afternoon (and sometimes for mid-morning too). This was a short day, so I didn't bring much.
These are some buys from Marketplace because dad had vouchers! I LOVE Puffins! Low in sugar, high in fibre, low in fat, low in sodium, non-gmo... but still tasting great. The crunch is so satisfying!
Wasa Fibre crispbread taste wonderful too! I would describe it as delicious cardboard (maybe that's not an oxymoron after all). Emphasis on the delicious. ^^
I've tried this brand of spelt flour before and it's good. Not that my tastebuds can discern one brand from another.
- Millet with chopped apples, shreds of carrot and raisins.
- Lightly steamed broccoli and raw cherry tomatoes.
- Za'atar spiced tofu and button mushrooms, pan-fried in oil spray.
The millet, za'atar spice and Charlie's smoothie were from Mustafa! See
here for a haul post.
- Too-lazy-to-cook messy wraps made with tomato & herb Mountain Bread, zucchini, carrot, avocado, red bean, nutritional yeast and a squeeze of lime.
- Leftovers of the pasta salad.
- Berries.
The Mountain Bread's from Mustafa too. It's like regular Mountain Bread, I can hardly taste the tomato or the herb. :(
I find Charlie's smoothies too sweet, so I usually dilute it - 2/3 smoothie & 1/3 water. This is the spirulina smoothie by the way. I didn't find the spirulina taste to be strong enough but my friend thought that it was quite prominent.
I boiled a batch of red beans over the weekend so I had enough to add to my meals the whole week.
- Sweet potatoes and red beans.
- Asparagus and oyster mushrooms cooked in grandma's ginger chili, topped with chives and a squeeze of lime juice.
- Japanese cucumber and cherry tomatoes.
The juice of tiny kaffir calamansi limes magically makes food taste great! [Edit: wow I didn't know that those are calamansis! The package just says 'small lime' -_- Took me lots more Googling to find out]
The Indian-dessert-looking things (according to mum) are Tomato Pumpkin Oat Bran Bars! I'll probably do a post for that soon.
I always bring infused water to work, because I don't really like plain water. :x Like with infused water I can drink a few litres of water but with plain water... less than a cup the whole day. So I usually add lemon, dried hawthorn slices, dried goji berries, or chia/basil seeds if I want to chew stuff.
I was packing my cupboards and found that I didn't use Orgran's Rice & Corn Pasta Penne that I bought from iHerb ages ago.
So I made a kinda veggie stew as the sauce for the pasta... perhaps blending it a little would've made it more appropriate as the sauce. It contained tomatoes, eggplant, carrots, celery, beetroot, Annie's ketchup, nutritional yeast and more (I can't remember heh). The pasta was a bit weird. Like powdery. Because it's gluten-free? Or maybe because it was undercooked. I have close to zero pasta-cooking experience lol. I shall cook it better and make a nicer sauce next time!
I was packing light that day, so I brought a wrap! It's a tomato & herb Mountain Bread stuffed with butterhead lettuce, millet, yellow bell pepper, tofu, avocado, strawberries, beetroot, carrot, red onions and ketchup.
It's quite a small wrap (one Mountain bread can't fit much without tearing) so I bought something else at the hawker centre:
It's a kueh called pulut inti. It's glutinous rice topped with grated coconut candied with palm sugar. I had no idea until I wiki-ed hehe. It was my first time having it I think. Didn't have an interest in kuehs when I was younger. Except maybe for kueh bahulu (tiny crusty sponge cakes). It was $0.70 and it was fragrant and yummy, albeit kinda oily.
- Red bean sweet potato rice.
- Brown button mushrooms, sweet peas and celery, 'stir-fried' in water with grandma's chili.
- Raw carrot & bell pepper sticks and cherry tomatoes.
The rice was SO GOOD omg! I used leftover white+brown rice that I froze, and cooked it with Japanese sweet potato chunks and the red beans. I made the rice become more porridge-y and moist. I LOVE porridge-y rice. Mum tried some rice and beans and she thought that it tasted like png kueh (a pink waterdrop-ish shaped kueh filled with glutinous rice) filling, but less salty. Lol! It was also very satiating. :)
At the top left you can see the delicious cardboard.
I added strawberries and lemon to my water, and it tasted wonderful! All the pink-ness goes into the water...
And at the end of the day you get white strawberries! Cool. And I find that my water tastes good the entire day. :)
Lols my food looks so similarly colourful every day that I almost forgot to add this in.
- Pumpkin & french bean porridge-y rice.
- Baked eggplant strips (in a little oil spray). My friend said that it tasted like mushrooms lol!
- Baked mushrooms, raw cherry tomatoes and butterhead lettuce.
Sometimes I bring veggie sticks too! I like carrot and celery the most because they're so crunchy.
So... packing lunch to work is really not that difficult at all! You can bring leftovers from dinner the day before, or meal prep in advance. Saves money and it's probably much better for your health too! And you can be 110% sure that it's completely vegan. ^^
