Lunches

It is very important to plan and be prepared with your food, all of the time. I usually spend a few hours every Sunday getting foods prepared for my lunches the following week. Remember I eat several times a day, my husband refers to them as "feeding times" and I pretty much eat two lunches.

Here I have already prepared several foods and I am packaging them up in serving sizes that will go in the refrigerator or freezer, allowing me to quickly assemble my lunches the evening before.

I will take my waffles (pre made Sunday) and two meals to work with me. None of them are small snacks, they are all ranging in the 300 to 350 calorie meal. Each "lunch" includes carbohydrate, protein, vegetable.

There are ziplock baggies with 4 ounces of cooked, cubed chicken breast in each, I place those into one large freezer bag and pop the whole thing in the freezer. I eat one with each lunch.

Then in the back are several small storage containers of 4 ounces each of cooked brown rice. In the same type of containers are vegetables.

Today I roasted cauliflower with pimenton agridulce which is a bittersweet smokey paprika from Spain, it is nothing like Hungarian paprika. I get it at Cosentino's grocery, but you can purchase it online at the Spanish Table and a few other Spanish Specialty shops.

There is grilled asparagus. I oven roasted button mushrooms and mixed them with several shitake mushrooms that I grilled to get a smokey flavor, then added to the button mushrooms at the last few minutes of roasting. I guess I was in a smokey mood....

Roasted broccoli and beets round it all out.

All the containers go in the refrigerator, I pull out two vegetables, two rice (or beans) and two frozen chicken bags and put one of each into a glass container and warm it in the microwave at work. You should always use glass, never microwave those plastic containers due to the release of BPA's, the substance used in making plastics that leaches from the containers into our foods.

With the exception of vegetables, you should weigh or measure all of your food, it is way too easy to guess incorrectly and a slight miscalculation for only a few days can make a huge difference.