James Ramsden - Love Your Lunchbox: 101 Recipes to Liven up Lunchtime

MORE GREATPAVILION TITLES
Tap on the titles below to read more

@PavilionFood1 www.pavilionbooks.com Contents Introduction For many children of my generation, the lunchbox was a treasured possession. My Thomas the Tank Engine one was so cool that my five-year-old self practically paraded down the street to school; its contents, whatever they were, however similar to yesterdays pickings, offered fresh promise, new excitements, and something to look forward to at midday. Would it be a cheese and pickle sandwich or a ham and lettuce bap? Would there be a chocolate biscuit or a fruit roll-up? Capri Sun or Um Bongo? Golden Delicious (thumbs up) or Granny Smith (thumbs down)? The intrigue! With this book I want to re-inject that sense of potential, that sense of anticipation, that frisson of a well-whetted appetite to the often-too-ordinary midweek lunch. But for grown-ups. Why should kids get all the fun while the grown-ups eat the same lunch in front of their computers each day? Why not follow the Japanese and dive head first into a steaming bowl of slippery noodles, or the New Yorkers with their pastrami and rye bread, or our Mediterranean cousins with their fresh salads and nourishing grains? These lunches are resourceful, creative and practical. But in every case, it is flavour that comes first, with convenience a happy corollary and not the other way round.

Of course, moveable lunches neednt be restricted to the office many of the dishes here will be just as happy on a beach, up a mountain, by a river, or in the park. Wherever you find yourself unwrapping your lunch, I want it to have all the delight of a Christmas stocking, and none of the disappointment. We dont want the same sandwich every day any more than we want the same pair of socks every Christmas. Love Your Lunchbox is a book for anyone who wants better socks. Or, rather, lunch. For anyone for whom lunch is something to enjoy rather than endure, to linger over rather than bolt down, to make yourself rather than make yourself walk to the shops in the rain for.

If that sounds like you, then youre in the right place. This book is about the spirit of the lunchbox, rather than the vessel itself. A trend for vintage lunchboxes would be a happy thing (theres no shortage online), though a Tupperware and a carrier bag will do the trick. As mother always told me, its whats on the inside that counts. COOKING These recipes are written to be prepared and cooked in advance and eaten later that day, or the following couple of days. Some of them are doable in a matter of minutes on the morning you plan to eat them, others may require a bit of time the evening before.

This isnt necessarily a book for every day. Instead, its for those evenings when you find you have a slice of time to prepare a lunch or two, or a Sunday afternoon to put a few bits in the freezer. REHEATING AND EATING Although these dishes are intended to be made in advance, clearly there is nothing stopping you devouring the thing on the spot. It would, however, get a little repetitive of me to say eat now or chill for later on each recipe, so you can assume this is the case with all the recipes unless otherwise stated. You will generally need a toaster, a microwave, or a kettle to finish those recipes that cant be eaten cold. ON MICROWAVING Ignore the baseless claims about microwaves nuking nutrients and embrace their incredibly efficient means of heating up, and indeed cooking, food.

Generally dishes should be covered with clingfilm to reheat, if only to minimize spattering, with a few holes poked in the clingfilm. Avoid putting any metal, including foil, in the microwave. SERVINGS Most of the recipes in this book serve two, meaning you can either lovingly prepare lunch for yourself and your other half, or lovingly prepare lunch for yourself for the next two days, or lovingly prepare yourself a single lunch of quite unnecessarily large proportions. COST Each recipe aims for a cost of less than 5 a head (often considerably less). At the time of writing, the average cost of lunch for an office worker is reported to be 7.81, so less than a fiver seems about right for a homemade lunch that leaves you with a few quid for a Coca Cola/Snickers fix. A caveat: I dont know whats in your fridge or cupboard.

There will be recipes in this book that cost you a little more to shop for, but thats because you may need to buy, say, rice vinegar, or a spice of which youll use only a tablespoon. In all these cases, Ive done my best to make sure such items are not perishable, and can be used and reused. Those that arent can be frozen. ONE LAST THOUGHT There has been some debate recently about the relative merits or otherwise of eating lunch at your desk, with a health minister labelling the practice disgusting. I say its entirely up to you where you strap on the nosebag, though perhaps be aware that some colleagues might object to a particularly pungent curry distracting them from crucial research on the Daily Mail website. CHAPTER 1 WEEKEND LOOSE ENDS This chapter presupposes that you will cook certain things over the weekend.

And when I say weekend, I mostly mean Sunday lunch. Your weekend may follow many paths. There might be a bowl of pasta on Friday night, curry on Saturday, a breakfast somewhere along the way, perhaps involving muffins and croissants and bacon. An entire day might be lost to pints and pork scratchings, or to prams and tantrums and takeaway pizza. But Sundays, on the whole, are more predictable. Sundays are for a roast.

Pork belly or roast chicken or a rib of beef. There will be roast potatoes, which Ive yet to fashion into anything decent the following day, and so are absent from this chapter, though roast root vegetables are always very fine and very adaptable. And, after all, Sunday is the plum day for preparing a couple of lunches for the week ahead. Roast vegetables with lentils, chilli and feta The temptation with leftover roast vegetables by which I mean any or all of: beetroot, celeriac, butternut squash, parsnip, red onion (always), garlic (ditto), swede, turnip, and so on is to boil them briefly with stock and blend them into a soup. Its a temptation worth submitting to every now and then, creating a rich and deeply flavoured soup. But for something a little lighter and more textural, this salady number is a winner.

Next page