If you live in a small household and eat normal portions, lunch might be the easiest meal you make during COOK90, because lunch can just be leftovers. But let’s say you live in a household with four or five people and leftovers aren’t common. Or say you live in a household like mine: two adults who, apparently, eat double a normal dinner portion every night. If either of these situations sounds familiar, you’re going to need to do some lunch cooking.
Who has time for that? You do. But not in the morning. Mornings are for making coffee and warming a bowl of oatmeal. Your lunch should be made and packed the night before, ready to grab and stuff into your bag.
This is where you put the PREP section of your meal plans to work. Scan your week and find the moments when you’ll have time to wash some romaine and fry some bacon for a few Breakfast Salads (here), or cut up some salami for a batch of Antipasto Salad Jars (here). Maybe one of those times is Sunday afternoon—you’ll make a Freeform Farro Salad (here) for lunch that day, and pack it up to eat again on Monday and Tuesday. Or maybe it’s on a Wednesday night, when you’re planning a quick pantry pasta (see here) for dinner, so you know you can fit in making some lunch, too.
Most of the time making lunch will take a half hour tops, and you won’t yield just one lunch but two or three. Portion them out into individual containers as soon as you make them. If you’re packing up lettuce-based salads, keep the dressing separate; other salads, like the antipasto (here) and the tuna/bean situation (here), can hang out in their dressing for days.
Of course, you don’t have to cook a “lunch” recipe for your lunch. Almost every recipe in this book would be great at noon—especially the curries here and here (see the full list here). But some recipes are just lunchier than others, and that’s what you’ll find in this chapter: salads, soups, and cobbled-together—I mean intentionally composed—meals that look better in a bento box than on a plate.