Bought lunch

No pics today, I was eating on the move, but I have a point and a message and stuff.

I was in a hurry today so I bought myself lunch (drink, sandwich, dessert and then a chocolate lollipop I couldn't resist). It came to more than a third of what I spent on the entire week's groceries in the supermarket.

Making lunch is so much cheaper.

Quesadillas, sort of

I had been meaning to have this lunch for a while and had bought a pack of tex mex dips, but then we had them for lunch at church on Sunday, so I put it off for a few days. Anyway, my interpretation of quesadillas!

It's a rather dull photo but it contains red kidney beans, guacamole, sour cream and chive, salsa, grated cheese, halved cherry tomatoes and mushrooms. I don't think they could really be called quesadillas as they're just mildly warmed and the fillings are all cold but still, nom nom. I made three but had eaten two before I took the photo - this one is now in a box in the fridge to be tomorrow's lunch.

I also made dinner for tonight! I'm off to the library to write an essay, then I have a tutorial, and then about half an hour later I have to head out for a play rehearsal, so I saved some time by making two meals at once. Check out the cute lunch boxes!

The larger two contain pasta salad, and yoghurt (obviously one in each box, not mixed together). The smaller two are currently empty but I think they'll be great for sliced fruit, or dip, or many other things. I got some derision when I bought them and showed them to friends but they're so cute and I quite often have to pack food up to take out with me.

Mushroom Korma

Mmmmmm this was good. I cooked it last night and kept the left-overs to reheat today for lunch. Unfortunately I forgot to take photos yesterday when it was looking lovely on a plate, and today I took the tub over to a friend's kitchen and ate it without thinking so no pictures.

I was pretty proud; I have never been very good at cooking for flavour - I would just heat a food item up to a safe temperature and combine it with vaguely complementary food items and eat them. Now I'm considering what flavours go well together and adding spices and stuff and it's great!

Tomorrow's lunch will hopefully be quaesadillas, or at least wraps, as I've bought Tex Mex dip and carrots and tomatoes and still have some mushrooms left over. Just need to buy the wraps...

Bentolicious

Although I haven't been blogging about my own lunches lately, I have been reading a lot about other people's! I love the idea of bentos for children's lunches and I'm really keen to do something similar for myself, although since I spend most of the day in my room and rarely have to take a packed lunch anywhere, I probably don't need to invest in a huge selection of different boxes and dividers (but boy do I want to!).

That said, I did just order a pair of egg moulds so that I can shape boiled eggs into cute shapes before eating them. I just couldn't resist!

Today's lunch is a back-to-basics, lots of nutrition type lunch to get myself going again. Peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches in delicious seeded bread, a small amount of side salad (it's going off, not a lot of it is edible any more) and some cherry tomatoes. There's also a boiled egg, unfortuately just egg-shaped as the moulds won't arrive for 12-24 working days. I think they're being delivered from Japan by carrier pigeon relay.

As you can see, the salad looks rather sad - I discovered my fridge was too cold so in addition to being out of date it was also frozen. I picked out the least miserable leaves and had to throw the rest away.

The amount of food waste I produce horrifies me, and I do my best to use up left-overs and only buy what I know I'll eat. You can probably see that the sandwiches are missing the bottom crust, because there was a bit of mould on it and I felt it was better to cut it off and not waste half a loaf than to throw the whole lot out. I've transferred it into a box in the hopes that it will be more air-tight and less liable to go mouldy than the bag. A good half of the loaves I buy end up going mouldy before I finish them, because the supermarket (the only supermarket in the town centre) doesn't sell half loaves. In a student-heavy town, it amazes me that there is one small supermarket, one of the corner-shop types rather than a full-sized one, and that it caters for families more than individuals despite the fact that a good 60% of the town's population are students. Grrr!

I'll come down from my hobby horse to note the juice in the bottle - I managed to break another glass a few days ago, so I'm now on the look-out for some more sturdy tumblers.

Lunch will soon be back on the menu!

So the reason I started this blog was in a desperate attempt to give myself another motivation to eat lunch - hunger and health wasn't managing it alone.

Unfortunately I have been busy, even busier than usual, busier than ever before, for the last two weeks and I haven't had time to eat lunch. I haven't really had time to sleep - I think the most I've got is six hours and I normally can't function without nine. So that hasn't been great.

However, yesterday a marathon of work paused briefly and I seized the opportunity to clean my room - I can see my carpet again! And today I got back from lectures to a disgusting, vomit-type smell, so I abandoned the reading I'd been planning on doing and washed up dishes. For an hour. Considering that most of my crockery is currently being used as props for a play (don't ask), that is a long time to be washing up. But now everything is clean and back in the cupboards, so for my lunch I had...

a Cup-a-Soup. Because I haven't had time to shop for any food.

I'll get there eventually!

Pasta salad leftovers

Last night I cooked pasta with a sauce made from chopped tomatoes, carrot, mushroom, onion and garlic, and it was the first time that I've actually been happy with a sauce I've made for pasta! I fried the garlic and onion for a long time before adding anything else, which I think helped a lot, and then fried the mushrooms in with them so that the flavour was literally everywhere.

Anyway, there was a fair bit left over today so I've eaten it for lunch. I was so hungry that I'd almost inhaled half the bowl before I remembered to take a photo! It doesn't look like anything special but it's anothe step on my cooking journey :)

Comfort Food

First lunch of the uni year! It's nothing complex, just mushroom soup in a mug, bread (bit past its best but it was massively reduced), half a tomato out of my fridge :D, orange quarters and a banana, cherry and walnut muffin my mum baked. The pink juice is summer fruits and barley, my favourite.

It's great to be back at uni and I've got a fridge and a huge cupboard in my room which is being my pantry. The kitchen is right next door and a great size. I'm happy.

Delicious Angel Delight

This was not a lunch - in fact it was a late-night dessert - but it was delicious and pretty!

Butterscotch flavour, mmmm.

Lack of Lunch

Now you may have noticed that I have not posted a single, solitary, delectable lunch in the days since I announced I would begin doing so again.

This is because I have not eaten a single, solitary, delectable lunch. It is toooooo hotttt to eat and I seem to be having breakfast at 12 and dinner at 6 - there is no need for lunch in there.

But soon, I promise, I will do something interesting with this blog! I can't see a whole lot of home made lunches happening for the next two or three months, frankly, because I will be travelling round a lot and not have the opportunity or equipment to even make a sandwich (I am struggling at the moment because although I have bread and sandwich fillings, I have no knife).

Perhaps I will just take photos of delicious things I see or eat? That would be nice. And then next term we will recommence with the lunching, courtesy of my new fridge and new kitchen!

A vacation

It's the summer vacation and I've moved into a rented room for a while, where I get breakfast and dinner provided. For the last few weeks (it's been a while!) I've been madly busy with end of year parties, a week fairly badly ill, and a brief holiday in Europe, but now I'm back and will be making myself lunches.

Tomorrow I'm going to go shopping for things I can easily and quickly put together for lunch, without the fairly extensive kitchenware I had in my uni room. All of that is stashed in a garage somewhere! So there will be lunches, possibly fairly imaginative ones (and I've managed to pack my lunchbox, so I will maybe need to invest in a new one. Yay!).

Ice cream sundae :)

Today I went out with my sports team and got an absolutely enormous ice cream sundae which was far too big for me to need more lunch! A photo (with bonus me in it) will hopefully arrive soon.

Cheesy Melt Wraps

I really like tortilla wraps, and I'd been planning on having them hot with beans, cheese and tomatoes. Then I looked in the cupboard and discovered that the beans I thought I'd bought were actually mushroom soup, so I had to do without them.

I warmed them for a bit under a minute to melt the cheese a little - if I had beans in them I would have cooked them first.

I think they'd have been even better with something green in them; perhaps lettuce or mixed salad. One of these days I'm going to make a foray into the pages of my Mexican cookbook and make proper burritos.

Cake, or something like it

We followed the recipe almost exactly, but my oven is truely appalling so the cake did not cook. So we put it into bowls and microwaved it.

Some of my kitchenmates came and shared it with us - it is more like pudding than cake but it is delicious! The fruit you can see is raspberries, we used almost four punnets altogether which might be one of the reasons it didn't cook well.

And here is the icing which didn't go on top of it - also raspberries, and lots of sugar and butter. It tastes like ice cream!

It was fun and it's tasty and I'll have pudding for days, but I'm looking forwards to having a proper oven next year!

Waffles!

Once again I forgot my camera, which this time is a huge shame because "lunch" (it was more like brunch) today was gorgeous! I went out for a post-exams celebratory waffle with a friend and we each had one topped with ice cream, chocolate sauce, Smarties and chocolate buttons with a sprinkling of icing sugar on top. I'm sure I'll go there again fairly soon and I might remember to take a photo to show you all how delicious it was.

Tomorrow I'm baking cakes with a friend, so lunch is likely to be boring and light to make room. If they turn out pretty I'll take photos, I promise.

Comfort Food

Everyone has their favourite comfort food, right? I have a few (I love buttered crumpets followed by fruit yoghurt) but toast is my go-to at the moment because my toaster is right here in my room and I can munch on it while I revise.

Today's lunch is brought to you by the power of miserable weather and tomorrow morning's exam.

The right-hand piece of toast is peanut butter. Mmm, peanut butter.

Doesn't that look good?

Trinity Sunday

Today was a picnic day at my church so we all took our own food. I forgot to take a photo but I had Quorn mini savoury eggs (they are a little like Scotch eggs and absolutely delicious), mixed salad leaves and some cherry tomatoes, more grapes, a packet of crisps, a miniature chocolate bar and a chocolate pudding. Quite a bit of food, shamefully, but it was so nice eating it in the sunshine.

Revision lunch

Today I was asked to go test my friend on some of her revision notes, so I packed up a lunch in my lunchbox and went over there to read out formulae and make sure she knew them. The photos are currently on her camera and will be here some time next week but I had Marmite and cheddar sandwiches, grapes, sultanas and apple, and water.

The photos are here!

Here are the Marmite and cheddar sandwiches - I never think Marmite looks very nice but it tasted really good! I don't like to have it too thick though; my grandad spreads it at least a centimetre thick.

Grapes! I've never figured out how to stop them having that weird bloom on them, except by rubbing each individual one with a clean cloth which is a bit too labour-intensive for lunchtime.

I also took a picture of the apple slices and sultanas but it came out very blurry.

First lunchbox lunch

No pictures today - see previous post for visual reference! I took my packed lunch with me to my exam, and then brought it home again and ate lunch at my desk. I had tortilla wraps with spinach, mushroom and mayonnaise in them, a handful of strawberries (tragically most of the punnet had gone mouldy in the space of a few hours), three chocolate chip biscuits and some chocolate eclairs (the toffee sweet kind, not the cakey kind).

I'm pretty chuffed with this lunchbox, especially since the little water bottle looks like it will freeze nicely! But the more I think about what I can put into my lunch, the more I wish I had my own fridge. Things go mouldy so fast when I have to keep them in a cupboard in my room, and I can't get anything properly cold for this really hot weather. But next year I'll have a fridge and maybe even a freezer comparment!

A splendid storage solution

Hey there lunch blog, we haven't hung out in a while! I've been regressing back to my old ways of eating a) nothing b) toast or c) bits and pieces for lunch, but today I did a big shop in our new, refurbished supermarket and also bought this exciting gadget:
 

It is a lunchbox! Exams start on Monday and I will be out from 8.30 until 12.30 on each day I have an exam, so I will make myself a lunch and take it with me.

I also bought little biscuit boxes - they each hold about three biscuits, but I think I will only use one of them for biscuits and maybe the other one for sauce or dip for salad.

And it comes with a little bottle for juice! It's all very exciting, I never had a compartmentalised lunchbox when I was at school. I used to take my sandwiches in a plastic tub, and didn't normally have anything else with them.

I really want to pack up a lunch now, but I won't need one until Monday (I might put one in the box tomorrow anyway, just because).

Home-Made Pasties

There is nothing better than making something that comes out looking and smelling delicious! I'm usually pretty disappointed by shop-bought pasties because they don't have enough filling, or have too much of one flavour, so I'm hoping that these will be how I want them (and if they aren't, I can try again).

The filling is cubed potatoes, grated Cheddar, diced onion and small pieces of broccoli. The recipe I was vaguely following suggested parsley but I have a broccoli going yellow in a too-warm cupboard so I wanted to use it. There was a bit too much filling for the pastry so I microwaved the remainder and ate it for lunch.

These will be eaten tomorrow, after reheated in the oven to avoid sogginess. I'm hoping to enlist a friend to help me - that is a large, dinner-size plate and the pasties are far too big for one person in one sitting!

Delicious Wraps

I was a bit useless today and forgot to take a photo of my lunch, probably because I was hungry and it was delicious! I made tortilla wraps with egg mayonnaise in them. It could have benefited from some cress but my attempts to grow anything in my room thus far have all failed (the cress was particularly appalling, considering that pre-school children manage it with ease).

The last week or so has been very odd food-wise. I've eaten in the canteen, skipped lunch altogether - not really in the spirit of this project - and eaten weird, un-interesting foods to fill a gap. I think the problem is busyness; I have a lot of other stuff to do and I'm just not making the effort to take a break and make something. Tomorrow I might be going out to lunch but if not, I will definitely make use of the salad I bought yesterday and have a proper lunch.

A New Take on Egg-Fried Rice

Lunch recently has been something of a moveable (or even missable) feast due to various different commitments, but I thought I'd show you this delicious offering:

Know what that is?
It's what happens when you try to cook egg-fried rice in a pan that is far too hot, very quickly because you think you have twenty minutes to cook, eat, clear up and leave (then find that you have an extra hour).

It is a mess of inedible burnt rice, uncooked onion chunks and scrambled eggs. I am eating it anyway, washing it down with salsa dip and poppadums.

Unexpected Cheese

Today's lunch was nice and simple, but it contained an unexpected surprise...

See that big load of melted cheese on top of the pitta bread? It should have been inside, but it was hiding underneath and snuck into the microwave without detection. It was goooooood though! Emmenthal isn't my favourite cheese, I'm all about soft cheeses, but it is pretty nice melted. There was also Marmite in there, which gives it a bit of a bite.

The other half of the avocado is currently in the fridge awaiting the arrival of further salad ingredients to make up a salad. One of my very favourite salads has always been Greek-themed, with feta cheese, olives, avocado, beans and lettuce mixed with a vinegarette dressing. Delicious!

A Very Messy Sandwich

Sandwiches have always been my default for lunch, because that's what I was given in my lunch box at school. But unlike those uneaten school lunches, today's sandwich was jammed with ingredients and I ate every scrap.

Note the black olive peeking out there: delicious. Coupled with some lettuce (sadly past its best, if it ever had a best), tomatoes, mushroom, mayonnaise and mozzarella, on a seeded bread, and washed down with fruit squash. My only issue was that it was too dry.

While I was making this lunch it occurred to me that it might work really nicely as a salad, which I will bear in mind for another time. I do like bread and I never feel full if I haven't had some kind of carbohydrate with my lunch, but a nice salad dressing would have taken this from a pleasant sandwich to a delicious salad lunch.

Wrappin' Around

An unexpected trip to London meant that today's lunch had to be packed in a box, so apologies for the slightly bad angle and lighting.

The first wrap had mushrooms, lettuce, Emmenthal, tomatoes and guacamole. The second had lettuce, Emmenthal and salsa. For me the guacamole made the first one much nicer but I shared the second with a lactose-intolerant friend who appreciated the lack of dairy (hard cheeses, I am reliably informed, have a very low level of lactose).

Wraps are a great idea, but they're pretty messy to make. I had a lot of trouble folding the ends neatly so that everything stayed inside but once they were in the box they settled and were fine.

The original plan had been to follow up the wraps with some natural yoghurt with raisins in it, but the heat of the sun on my backpack meant it wasn't really a good idea to try eating it. I'll have that another day.

The First Shopping Trip

Day one of a new lunch regime and I'm going shopping. Taking inspiration from various lunch-related blogs, I've drawn up an ambitious list that looks a bit like this:

• Goats cheese and mozzarella
• Avocado, tomatoes, carrots, mushrooms, spring onions and lettuce
• Salsa and guacamole
• Raisins, oranges and grapes
• Bread, tortilla wraps and pitta bread
• Marmite
• Yoghurt
• Olives and nuts
• Rice cakes
• Basil plant

Phew! Some of that will come from the village shops, some from a supermarket and some from the open-air market. I've already got a collection of sandwich spreads, but most of the time I end up just eating tinned soup or pieces of plain bread. So this blog is a project to tackle my lunch apathy, expand my repetoire and hopefully get some more inspiration and variety.

My biggest lunch issue at the moment is the fact that it is a chore, and as a result I usually don't bother. As a result I've fainted more often than I'd like to admit during particularly busy periods of term, when I've also been skimping on breakfast and dinner.

Time to get to those shops! Here's to the future, and a parade of delicious lunches.

Later: Well, the shopping is done and all packed away. I had underestimated how much bag space I would need - that list is substantially longer than my usual weekly shopping list and it wasn't a lot of fun carrying it all home. Here is what I got.

As you can see, there are several types of cheese there because I'm a sucker for cheeses, and a few things are missing from the list because I couldn't find them. I skipped the spring onion because I realised I don't actually like it enough to use it before it goes off.

Prices varied wildly - the little local store which I was so excited about when I first found it a few weeks ago is sadly very overpriced, so I think I'll only go there for the cheese counter and only sometimes. The bakery in the same area is only open in the mornings so that will have to wait until the next shop. I got the fruit and vegetables from the market, which I've always found pretty reasonable and there are several stalls so you can find the freshest and healthiest looking food.

Finally I got the rest of my list plus a few other things from the supermarket. The whole lot came to over £30, which is horrifying considering it is predominantly only for one meal out of the three, but it should last a while and I won't make the same mistakes again - food from the market first, and the supermarket to fill in the gaps. Not the local shop.

Tomorrow will be the first lunch, and I think I'm going to make wraps with guacamole, salsa, lettuce, tomato, mushrooms and emmenthal cheese. Just thinking about it is making me hungry!