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!