Netverse

Skipping lunch should never be an option, but when you work from home, it’s a little too easy to slide into bad mealtime habits. The ideal WFH lunch has to be quick and easy enough to make between meetings and delicious enough to make taking a break worth your time. These 11 recipes hit all the marks and then some.

The humble TMRB is my “break glass in case of emergency” lunch. It tastes so good and takes no time at all to make, both of which are extremely important to my increasingly feeble, ADHD- and self-employment-addled brain. I can’t recommend it enough.

Personally, I don’t feel that a salad is ever enough for a whole meal—except for salade niçoise, the king of salads. As long as you keep boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and green beans on hand, making the best salad of your life is a matter of cracking open a can of tuna, fishing some olives out of the jar, and dumping stuff on top of some greens. (Croutons aren’t traditional, but strongly encouraged nonetheless.)

This one’s for all the protein-requirers out there. Put last night’s roast chicken on top of a bowl of hummus and eat it with tortillas, pita, or greens. It only takes a few minutes, and you’ll put a serious dent in your protein macros.

Very few foods aren’t improved by pan-frying them and stuffing them in tortillas with a little cheese and hot sauce. Meats and beans are the obvious candidates here, but don’t underestimate the potential of leftover roasted vegetable tacos. (The Smitten Kitchen zucchini quesadillas and cauliflower tacos are excellent blueprints here; trust me, they taste just as good with day-old veggies.)

Breakfast for lunch deserves just as much love as breakfast for dinner—and if you make a bunch of breakfast sandwiches and burritos for the freezer, you can have an egg McMuffin for lunch any time you want.

There are few dishes easier to make in bulk—and harder to get sick of—than dal. My go-to recipe is Priya’s dal from Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish, which uses masoor dal (or brown lentils), but if you prefer red, yellow, green, or black lentils, there’s a dal recipe out there for you. Make a big pot and keep some cooked rice and/or frozen roti on hand for quick, high-protein vegan lunches throughout the week.

Poached chicken is just plain delicious—plus, poaching a chicken is the best way to stretch it out for multiple meals, which is always a bonus for WFH meal-planning. One poached bird yields enough meat and broth for at least a few meals, with leftovers for chicken salad sandwiches, chicken soup with rice, stir-fries, or tacos.

I don’t always have chicken thighs, eggs, and onions on hand, but when I do, I make oyakodon for lunch. Homestyle Japanese cooking is next-level comfort food, and this dish is one of the best. If you’ve never had oyakodon, it’s kind of like a soft-cooked omelet with chicken and onion cooked in a soy sauce, dashi, and mirin broth that you serve over rice. It takes about five minutes of active work and is powerfully comforting—especially in the cold, dark winter months.

Your freezer can be a lifesaver on busy days, especially if it’s stocked with dumplings and edamame. While you could technically make a meal out of each element individually, combining them makes a more nutritionally complete lunch that feels like ordering takeout.

Whether you buy high-quality refrigerated stuff or shelf-stable boxes, soft or silken tofu is a certified hack for vegans who work from home. You don’t even have to cook it: Just whip up a simple soy-based sauce (in the photo above, I believe I used cucumber, scallion, celery, sugar, and an aggressive amount of gochugaru), pour it on the tofu, and microwave some leftover rice or veggies. You’ll have a legit lunch in minutes.

Scrounging handfuls of snacks does not a proper lunch make—but cheese with bread or crackers, some fruit, and raw (or pickled) veggies sure does. It’s a substantial meal that takes no time to throw together and feels like a nice little treat. Personally, I can’t think of a better way to break up a long day of remote work.