Yesterday I wrote about
smoothies for breakfast. Today, naturally,
I want to talk about lunch.
Those of us who work
have, essentially, two choices (three if we work somewhere fancy with a
dedicated cafeteria)—pack a lunch or eat out.
Both of those choices have advantages and pitfalls.
Packing a lunch requires
some planning. The easiest option, if we
have a microwave available, is to bring some of whatever was left over from
dinner. The second-easiest is to repurpose
some of that dinner: last night’s roast
chicken becomes today’s sandwich or salad topping, chili becomes burrito
filling, roast veggies mix with leftover rice and some dressing. In some cases, we might want to plan specific
lunches and shop accordingly. I
occasionally decide to deal with my challenges in eating leafy greens by
declaring salad week. Packed lunches
tend to be cheaper. We have control over
our portion sizes. We also know about
the ingredients and preparation techniques, so we are not surprised to find
added sugars or fats hiding between the lettuce leaves. The challenges of packed lunches are often
about non-food issues: wanting to be
social, needing to be away from the desk, finding a good place to picnic,
feeling bored with leftovers.
Eating out, on the other
hand, offers a plethora of choices. Most
of us have an incredible array of cuisines available to us within walking or
easy driving distance. Restaurants,
however, are not generally focused on the healthiest choices, but the
tastiest. “Crispy,” I read somewhere, is
the menu descriptive word most likely to appeal to diners, and it is usually
about fries rather than lettuce. Most of
the time, restaurant meals have more salt, fat, and sugar than what we would
use making those dishes at home and the portions can be really large. When we eat lunch out, we have to use a fair
amount of self-control to choose wisely for our health.
Either way, we need to
remember that we are the boss of our food choices. We can prioritize vegetables and fruits and other
whole foods.
Right now, my garden is
giving me tons of cherry tomatoes. I’ve
been eating a lot of caprese salad, which I make like this:
Toss together:
About 20 cherry tomatoes,
halved
About 10 ciliegene-sized
fresh mozzarella balls, halved
½ avocado, diced
2 sprigs basil, chopped
Drizzle of extra virgin
olive oil
Salt to taste
