Best Work Lunch

The easiest thing to be at work is a salad. You can buy it ready on places like Safeway and Trader Joe's and just bring it to work. No need to refrigerated or warm it up. I specially love salads from Trader Joe's, a must try is the bacon spinach salad. Not that healthy, but it's delicious and still a salad!

 

Do you have refrigerators to store your food, as well as toasters and microwaves to heat it up? I'll assume you do, but obviously your options are going to be much more limited if you don't.

One of my personal favorites that a coworker and I used to share are meatball sandwiches. His mother would make large batches of these turkey meatballs, and he would make them into a bunch of meatball sandwiches early in the week then bring them into work for us all for lunch. I would of course chip in financially to reimburse him for the ingredients, but they were great. He just wrapped them all up in plastic wrap and we reheated them in the microwave. But if for some reason we didn't have access to a microwave, they were just as good cold too.

A muffaleta sandwich would be good too. You basically take a large round loaf of bakery bread and cut the top off, then hollow out the inside and fill it with various cheeses, meats, olive tapenades, pickled veggies, hot peppers, etc... then put the top back on, and wrap the whole thing in foil and weight it down with some bricks or canned goods and let it rest in the fridge. Once it's set and the flavors have all melded, you simply cut it into triangles like a cake, and you could bring a slice or two to work with you for a few days.

Home made chili is another favorite, and if you are really in a hurry, just get one of those Chili seasoning packets, a pound or so of ground meat of choice, and a can of kidney beans and a can of diced tomatoes and throw it all together in a pot. You could bring some crackers or crusty bread to go along with it.

 

I usually bring my own food for lunch when there is leftover from our dinner the previous night. It's a good thing that our pantry in the office is equipped with a microwave, a toaster, and a fridge. Especially when my food is a vegetable dish, I would put it inside the fridge when I arrive in the office and re-heat it in the microwave. Sometimes I bring a big volume of food to share with my office mates.

 

It does depend on what you have, but I do like to have a flask and to have hot pasta in it or soup and some nice bread. Microwaves are fine, but sometimes you have to wait. I know it's not always healthy, but if you don't have a fridge, then some cup noodles (vegan and vegetarian ones are healthier) can be quick to eat. After a while sandwiches and wraps can get boring, so it is good to alternate them.

 

You could try making burritos which you could prepare and freeze beforehand. This way, you wouldn't even need to prepare anything in the morning as you could just grab a roll out of the freezer and heat it up during lunch time at the office. What's also good about this is that it's easy to just make a huge pot of beef and rice and all of the other ingredients since you'd only have to do it once in a while instead of having to prepare one serving each time.

 

I know omelettes are easy to make and also waffles. You can try all types of filling for sandwhiches, but I think you will save the most if you stick with only cheese or peanut butter as filliing.

 

I might be very boring when it comes to takeout lunch made at home, but a ham sandwich is my common staple to get covered lunch at work.

I took a part-time offline job early this year, and this was my daily lunch along with some veggies and fruits for "dessert" and a natural fruit juice. When my 3-month contract was over, I went to work for a week at a cleaning service where employees have access to a microwave oven, so lunch for that last week working out there was home-made tacos or burritos, grilled ham sandwich, or hot pasta salad with tuna.