If #mealprep isn't for you, try this instead

Sunday lunch soup plus some timesaving tips for wonderful WFH lunches

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t sometimes like to save themselves a bit of time when it comes to making food, especially at lunchtime. It’s not just time, though, it’s the mental load and decision-making fatigue that can leave you feeling ‘I’ll just grab a sandwich’.

Meal prep might seem like it would solve this problem. It looks so appealing, all those neatly stacked glass dishes with beautiful bamboo lids. All the hard work done in one go. Yes, I need that in my life. At least, that’s what Instagram tells me.

But who wants to eat the same lunch five days in a row?

It doesn’t work for me.

I’m leaning into one of the many benefits of WFH life: We can eat whatever we want for lunch—literally, whatever we fancy—at any time of the day.

Instead of meal prep, I prefer a broader approach to meals that includes tumbledown recipes, prepped ahead ingredients, and deliberate leftovers. I’ll give you some examples:

• Deliberate leftovers: Cooking extra potatoes for dinner with patatas bravas in mind for lunch later in the week.

• Prepped-ahead ingredients: Batch-cooking caramelised onions to use in soups and sandwiches on different days.

• Tumbledown recipes: Creating chilli bowls from a ragu base.

You can still get ahead, be organised and save time, but in a way that isn’t as restrictive. It’s flexible food with plenty of room for feeding yourself whatever you fancy on any given day. It often leads to less food waste as an added bonus.

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Sunday Lunch Soup

This week’s food is another example of that approach. It’s getting ahead on Sunday for a midweek lunch.

Roast your vegetables when your oven is on for a Sunday roast — carrots, parsnips, swede and onion. Have some as a side, save some for soup.

It’s two for the price of one. You’ll have done the hard work with the veg prep, and the oven’s done the heavy lifting, ramping up the flavour and intensifying the sweetness of the root vegetables while roasting.

Ingredients

For the roasted root veg

• Carrots

• Parsnips

• Swede

• Onion

• Oil for roasting

• Salt & pepper

For soup:

• Vegetable stock cube

• Flat leaf parsley

• Cream

To make:

Roasted veg

To prepare the vegetables, peel and chop into small cubes.

The onion is quartered and left in the skin.

Arrange them on a baking tray, drizzle with oil and season.

Roast for 35-40 minutes at 190°C.

Eat the vegetables as they are, as a side dish.

Cool and refrigerate the surplus vegetables to use at a later date to make your soup.

Sunday lunch soup

Remove the onion quarters from their skins and place the vegetables into a saucepan, adding water and a stock cube.

Use a stick blender to blend the soup, adding more water as necessary to achieve the right consistency.

Heat the soup.

Add cream and fresh parsley.

Adjust the seasoning and then serve with crusty bread.