The Working Lunch #46
Slow-cooker baked beans, peanut butter banh mi, simple vegetable soup and a patty melt - it's your weekly reminder to show your lunchbreak some love.
Hello again
We all feel busy. Really busy at times, don’t we?
Are you ever too busy for lunch?
Sure we might grab something on the fly. A sandwich al desko. A piece of toast between tasks on the to-do list.
And it can be challenging to make time for lunch if you’re limited on working hours, your day bookended with school runs. The lunch break can feel hard to justify, a luxury.
Even if it’s a really short break, I hope you find time to take one.
Here are some lunch ideas from last week.
Cook while you work…
Slow cooker baked beans
Five minutes first thing and leave the slow-cooker doing the work ready for a very warming and hearty take on beans on toast when you stop for lunch.
Full recipe for slow-cooker breakfast beans via BBC Good Food. I couldn’t find pinto beans so swapped them for tinned black beans and made enough to go on baked potatoes later in the week.
Simple swap: Crack open a ready-done tin; OG baked beans on toast is always a winner.
Just a sandwich….
Peanut butter bánh mì
Tuesday’s lunch recipe was straight from
Substack. Their peanut butter bánh mì (just think about it for a minute before you dismiss it) was so tasty and pretty quick to put together. I really loved the freshness of the pickled carrot and chillies with the salty-sweet peanut butter.To save time, I opted for bake-at-home baguettes rather than making the bread. You could probably do the carrot pickles ahead of time too.
Cook while you work…
Vegetable soup
A simple stalwart from the soup series, this basic vegetable soup takes diced carrot, onion, parsnip, swede, leek and potato and sautés them in butter, before adding vegetable stock.
Leave it to simmer while you get on with some more work.
Then season and blend when you’re ready to eat. I went for leaving some of the vegetables chunky to give it some texture.
Simple swaps: Any root veg would work well. Add some more texture with croutons.
Just a sandwich….
Patty melt
A guest appearance from my son at Thursday lunchtime. He made us all Patty Melts.
A variation of the hamburger going back to its roots as a sandwich, the “Patty Melt” is a seasoned beef patty, layered up with cheese and fried onions, encased in toasted bread.
Typically it uses rye bread. He went with a bakery-sliced white. And if there wasn’t enough filling, we also had bacon in there.
Why only four meals?
I know, most people work 5 days a week, I do too. It’s nice to wing it one day a week.
See you next week, lunch buddies
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If you’re not feeling the lunchtime love with this week’s selection, don’t forget that you can tuck into the archives at any time.
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