Lunch

I'm pretty lazy about lunch. I love food but I don't like cooking and I can never be bothered thinking too hard about what food to make for myself and lunch is the meal for which this manifests most of the time.

Breakfast is easy; I make poached eggs most days.

Tea is easy – usually – because I have the good sense to live with someone who does like to cook, so mostly I don't make tea.

But I get in a rut with lunch. I find something that works and I have it every day – partly because I don't want the trouble of deciding what to eat and partly because if there are only two people in the house and you buy a packet of perishable foodstuffs you have to eat them quickly or they'll go off.

For a while I was making a salad with some grains and some veggies and some chicken. For a while I was having ham on a bagel.

But I had a brilliant idea for soothing winter lunches last year and I've been doing that for the last few months. It is: good noodles.

The idea was to make something not very much more work to make than instant ramen, but very much less of a sometimes food. I make them with bean vermicelli, a scoop of bone broth, a spoonful of miso, a dash of fish sauce. Throw in some spring onion, pak choi, an egg or some tofu, baby, you've got a stew going.

I say I make them but Jamie has joined me on this journey and he's made it more than me. He takes pride in things like perfecting recipes and good for him! But still, I invented them, and I make them often enough, they're great and I'm great for thinking of them.

The best iteration uses the Miso Tasty ramen paste. I like to add some finely chopped carrot, Jamie slices in some garlic. Enoki mushrooms are fun. But the idea is that it's good noodles in good broth and you can throw in whatever you have around. Soy sauce. Chilli crisp. Good fucking lunch.

For the curious, there is a bad noods, it is NongShim shin ramyun with a couple of spoons of peanut butter, also with chilli crisp. Also good fucking lunch but a sometimes food, obviously.

So the good noods have been spectacular, no notes, completely satisfied.

But.

But.

It's getting kind of warm.

And it's not that the good noods aren't still great when it's a sunny 21 degrees, but you do lose that emotional component of nourishing yourself against the cold, you know? Before long it'll be a clammy 28 degrees too, and I don't think I'll at all want to eat a hot broth based lunch on the regs when that hits.

Which I guess means it's time to look for a new default lunch.

Something good enough to eat most days, healthy enough to not feel guilty about eating it most days, and easy enough to make that I actually do it. And the pressures kind of on! I nailed the winter lunch, I want to do the same for the summer lunch.

This is my new project. This is all I care about anymore.

Lunch is all.