Lunch Salad with Sweet and Sour yogurt dressing

The dressing's made with home-made yogurt and honey.

Eating is an every-day affair, and as a person with a regular office job, I need a quick way to put together my meals. Remember that it’s not good to let the body go hungry as you work for long stretches of hours. Metabolism drops and you’re more prone to over-stuff yourself if you’re famished. At least for me, that’s the case. My brain would go blank if I don’t supply nutrients through my mouth at the time needed.

Back to the food.

I do any cooking in advance, on Sundy or the night before work, and prepare the actual lunch on the morning of.  Here’s what I did in the weekend, plus how I put the lunch together.  Continue reading if you’re curious about what to do in advance, and what to prepare before heading out to work.

Prepare the weekend before

1. chicken breast strips

I cut them in strips, following the direction of the muscle fibers. The inconvenience of chewing on the white meat is that the fibers feel tough and dry. To prevent this, I brown the outsides of the meat over medium-high heat first. Then I pour about 1/3 cup of water onto the pan, close put a lid over the pan, and steam the chicken until the insides are cooked. Even better, mix some lemon juice with the water. When no lemon juice in stock, vinegar is good. Steaming the chicken with moisture gets the meat to be less dry, more succulent.

2. caramelized onions

This is probably one of the cheapest and most delicious and most versatile things you could have in your fridge.

Finely cut up an onion into disks. (experiment with different thicknesses. I prefer a not-to thin 5mm)

Over high heat (but not to high so that the outsides burn), cook th onions until they start to smell great and become half-transparent, and brown in some places. Then reduce the heat to low and stir until everything’s wilted and soft.

A whole onion reduces in size to about 1/3 its original. Store these in a lidded glass container, and they’ll last about a week! You can put these into sandwiches, salads, or top a bowl of rice, etc.

3. baked carrot strips

Carrots are surprisingly sweet when baked, just like sweet potatoes. A theory I haven’t verified is that, the vitamins in carrots are only readily absorbed into our bodies, when the carrot is cooked with oil.

Cut the carrot into planks and pan-fry/bake them on a pan with olive oil.

4. hard-boiled eggs

There is a trick to hard-boiling eggs, so that the shell does not stick to the egg. It takes kind of a lot of work, but the peeling of the shell is gratifying.

I’ve written down the instructions from Julia Child’s book in the past.

Basically, to reiterate:

• Put a hole at one end of the egg, so that it can breathe without breaking the shell open in the heat.
• Plunge these poked eggs into boiling water (eggs need to be submerged completely)
• boil for 8 minutes
• Plunge these boiled eggs into cold water ( I often don’t have ice on hand, so I chill these under running tap water)
• re-boil these cooled eggs for a minute
• take out and chill in cold water

The boil –> chill –> boil –> chill process reminds me of an Asian practice of bathing oneself in icy cold water and then switching into hot water. (Apparently it’s good for circulation.)

The purpose of the alternation is to shrink the egg and expand the shell so that they detach from each other. Wow, this explanation is not scientific or logical at all, but it works! (I’ll find out how this really works, some day.)

5. cut-and-chopped bell pepper

Cut the bell pepper lengthwise into half, and pluck out the spongey core with its seeds and stem.

Then cut the remaining parts into strips. Put in a container and refrigerate.

6. salad dressing

Two ways to prepare a real fast delicious dressing in a minute, with ingredients already in your pantry.

The magic of taste is in the honey.

Yogurt + Honey

Whisk honey into a bowl of plain yogurt. The amount of honey is really up to you.  I like to add about 1 table spoon per cup of yogurt.  Keep in mind that honey mixes well at room temperature. But the honey+yogurt dressing tastes better and has a nice thick consistency when it’s cold.

Olive Oil + Vinegar + Honey

Whisk (or shake in a closed container) together the three ingredients. Add some salt and pepper to taste.

Put together in the morning

1. Wash and chop lettuce

2. Slice a boiled egg

3. Put everything into a nice big glass container

Pour the dressing into a leak-proof container and toss the salad right before eating.

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