I really want to call this post “what Mary eats for lunch” and “how to prepare a week worth of lunches in less than an hour” or “bomb-diggity Asian-ish salad with ALL THE VEG IN THE LAND.” That third one would obviously be the best for SEO reasons (duh).

But seriously, people have been asking “what are you eating now that you’re in school 40 hours each week!?” and while I’m still kinda figuring that out, I have lunch DIALED. And breakfast, really. Dinner though: sometimes it’s chips/salsa/hummus. OOPS. I’m working on it! Today I’ll share my lunch approach, and Thursday I’ll share my breakfast/get more veg plan! GET READY!

This salad has a few key elements (rice noodles, veg, sauce, herbs), a couple of accessories (nuts, black sesame seeds), and a ton of freedom. Choose whatever veg you want! Make a sauce that you like better! Add more goodies (nori, anyone?)! Swap almost for peanuts or cashews (neither of which I can have at school, hence the almonds)! Just make sure to make the VEG and HERBS (ok, and the sauce) the priority!

Here’s the trick to preparing this in huge quantities in very little time: LE FOOD PROCESSOR! I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: my food processor is hands down the best kitchen appliance I own. I CANNOT recommend it enough. I have a decades-old Cuisinart that works like a champ! For this project I used the s-blade (kale, cilantro, mint), the shredder (beets, carrots), and the slicer (cucumber, green onions). The most essential is probably the shredder — it saves you the most time!

I get all the veg sliced/diced/shredded before I do anything else. Get ’em nice and small! This makes for easy eating. You can cook the rice noodles while you’re doing this, if you want. I use the method of pouring boiling water over the dry rice noodles and letting them sit for 7-10 minutes (covered). I slightly under-cook them, because they’ll soak up some juices from the veggies/sauce when you pack it in the morning!

You could store all of the veggies separately, but I mix them together — when I pack my lunch, I take a scoop of rice noodles (which are in a ziplock with sesame oil, so they’re easy to pull out!), a HUGE scoop (or two) of veg, plenty of extras (nuts, sesame seeds, cucumbers). I put the herbs in with the veg, just to make it easy. AND OF COURSE: add some sauce! I make a big batch, and pour in 2-3 Tbsp for each serving. Stick that in your bag and just TRY to make it to lunchtime without digging in!

Quick, tasty, healthy, flavorful. That’s a darn good lunch, in my book! Stay tuned for what ELSE I’m eating, coming on Thursday!

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