What do you eat when you have to have meals at work? I tend to work evenings and I want a fairly decent meal but I find it’s difficult to think of foods to take in. And I’m getting soooo fed up with sandwiches or chicken burgers from the local shops.
I’m trying to pre-cook food and take it in but I only have a few recipes which really work. I work in a fairly hot environment at times and I’m not really keen on taking meat dishes in. I do freeze meat dishes if I know I can get to a fridge but sometimes it can take an hour or two during which time the food partially defrosts and then is cooled again. I’m not keen on the health risks of that so there’s a lot of pasta dishes going on. I like pasta but not every night.
So does anybody have any good recipes for foods they take into work?
If you don’t always have access to a fridge, that really limits your choices to prepackaged foods, unless you can get an insulated lunch bag and stuff it with cold packs.
If you like tuna, you can get those little lunch packs, with tuna salad, crackers, and even a little breath mint comes with it. If you have access to a microwave, canned chili or soup works. Or now they have prepared dishes in boxes that are shelf-stable that you can microwave.
Any good vegetarian recipe should be fine sitting around for a few hours without refrigeration. Indian recipes can be particularly good for that. F’rinstance Chick pea curry or lentil and vegie curry . This is assuming that you can get to some sort of reheating facilities at mealtimes, and they don’t make you eat in your train!
Or how about a big thermosful of soup? Again, if you don’t want meat-containing dishes sitting around hot for hours, there are plenty of good veggie-based soups to try (tomato, mushroom,leek&potato … and so on)
"Scuse me, but food safety rules ALSO include vegetarian dishes in the time limits. Bacteria are omnivores …
Just sayin’
:rolleyes:
And frequently people now put nice warm soup in a thermos, unless it stays above 140 is a perfect bacterial playground. Think of your thermos as a modern Plato’s Retreat for microbes.
Any ‘vegetarian food that can sit around for hours’ is just as unsafe as a cooked steak sitting around for a few hours.
If something starts the day [or evening] frozen solid, it is perfectly safe as its own cooling pack in one of those insulated lunch bags, and will be almost thawed in the 4 or 5 hours until it is time to eat. In my air conditioned office my bowl of minestrone or lentil soup is still almost frozen solid - to the point of needing to be nuked for 7 minutes to get it to eating temp. I dont know how warm your work environment is, but in a lunch cooler something starting out the day frozen solid will be safe to eat.
Lately I’ve been taking yogurt parfaits. I layer yogurt, blueberries, and granola in a cup, and leave it in the fridge until I’m ready for lunch. It would probably survive quite well in a cooler if you don’t have a fridge available.
I work days now, but what I take for “lunch” would work at any time of the day. I make up a week’s worth of fixins and just assemble them into a brown bag each morning. Refrigeration & microwavability required.
Costco Michael Yoshio Yakitori chicken sticks (sans sauce), qty 2
String cheese, 1 oz., any brand, qty 1
Fat free yogurt, one cup, any brand, any flavor
Pure Protein protein bar, 1.76 oz, qty 1
Now, keep in mind that I have had gastric bypass surgery, and eat a rather small-ish quantity, and some foods don’t agree with me, so I like the predictability of this. It’s really easy to take 10 Yakitori sticks out of the freezer & place them into 5 sandwich bags to go into the 'fridge, tear 5 string cheese sticks off of the package, and buy 5 cups of yogurt and a box of protein bars. This gets me through a week, takes all of 30 seconds to bag up in the morning, and I know I’m good. 2 Defrosted Yakitori sticks heat up in 20 seconds by microwave.
Costco actually has lots of pre-prepared sandwiches & things that are really handy to have around. Ordering out every day gets pricey.
I pack a lunch because there’s not a lot of good eats within walking distance of my work place, and it’s usually a bit of a hike to get my car.
The “sides” are the same almost every day: Baby carrots, a cup of Granny Smith apple sauce, a serving of Baked Lays. The entree is either a sandwich or a microwavable cup of soup or a Lean Cuisine. And a diet Coke. I space stuff out so I’m eating pretty much all work day: chips at 10:30, entree at 12:30, carrots at 2:30, apple sauce at 4 or so. It’s not on that sort of rigid schedule, though.
Before work I often stuff a small cooler with 2 ice packs, a dish of meat (whatever I have), a squeeze bottle of Miracle Whip (or ranch dressing), some lettuce, tomato, and a pack of tortilla shells. Oh, and maybe a piece of fruit if I have any around. It works for most days, and will keep cold for about 2-3 hours on its own if you can’t get to a fridge fast enough. A pre-frozen bottle of water helps too.
I don’t know how it will grab you, but this is what I usually eat for lunch:
Banana or pineapple
lowfat Yogart or string cheese
apple sauce
some third type of fruit if in season
something 100 calories (kudos bars or quarkers multigrain minis lately)
The dairy is the only thing to really need refrigeration.
This also may not be helpful to the OP, but we have a fairly small office (10 people) and a lunchroom with fridge and microwave. I keep apples, chips and soda on site and just bring a sandwich with me everyday. Granny Smith rocks. Small and hard enough to stun an Orc with, I say.
The night before slice very thin strips of parsnips and sweet potato, roast with olive oil, when cooked cool then store in a little tin or ziplock bag, careful not to crunch them all up, next day you have healthier version of potato chips.
Or if you have a kettle those packets of instant miso soup.
Hard cheese can be left out for a few hours. Cheese and oatcakes are a yummy snack with apple slices. All of which can be prebagged.
I keep a can of salted peanuts at my desk. The protein keeps my energy up around that 10:00-11:00 hour, right before lunch, when my stomach starts revving up. Then, they give me something to snack on around 2:00-3:00 when I start getting sleepy.