lentils, onions, and the kitchen sink

Author Notes

i bring my lunch to work every day, and it’s a good lunch. in fact, i bring all my meals to work {cook’s note: i finally upgraded from a dorky CVS lunchbox to a nifty one that resembles a designer handbag}

like many new yorkers, i used to buy every meal, snack, and drink every day i went to work. based on my food and drink calculations for one day, the total ended up around $21.60. a day. about $430 a month. just to eat breakfast and lunch at work!

today, i spend $0 a day. sure, i buy ingredients and provisions in order to put together my meals, but it is far less expensive that way. i keep several ingredients on hand all the time: peeled and cooked beets, little bags of cooked lentils & onions in the freezer, a few raw vegetables in the fridge. so for lunch, i make a salad – throwing infinitely variable concoctions together in a few minutes before leaving for work.

here is a quick and basic recipe to making a lunch salad every day. it takes a little bit of planning – truly not that much – and simply requires to have a few ingredients on hand. —nadiact