My Favourite Lunch Time Salads

Not doing the Lyke Wake Walk in June seems to have been the catalyst for me breaking a lot of good habits. I’ve done very little exercise, have done no meal planning, have stopped making my morning smoothies, and have been buying my lunch from the local shop rather than preparing it at home. It’s strange how one thing leads to another. I’ve been very lazy, both by leaving my bum sat on the sofa and with my food intake. It’s not all been bad; I’ve still been eating fresh food and haven’t stopped moving around completely, but when an open day at work leaves you aching as if you’ve walked 20 miles you know it’s time to get sorted.

As it happens, the day after I had the realisation of all of the above, I received an email from Simplyhealth asking me a very simple question: what is your favourite packed lunch?

This is a very easy question, but one that has a long answer. I have noticed as I’ve been browsing the lunch time salad options in Boots, Marks & Spencer, Tesco Express and Spa (I really have been lazy, and wasting a lot of money in the process), in the UK we tend to use very few ingredients in our salads. We also seem to rely on pasta to fill us up in the middle of the day. I find both of those thing boring. I mean, chicken ceaser salad has its place sometimes. And pasta for lunch is great when it’s a leftover pasta bake and you can heat it up in the microwave. But I would much rather have something that is bursting with flavour and provides different textures to keep things interesting.

For example, my favourite packed lunch is a salad with what seems like a million ingredients. I like having lots of flavours and textures in one box; traditional English salad veg just isn’t enough for me! Apart from the usual water cress, spinach, rocket, cucumber, peppers, spring onion and cherry tomatoes, I also like to add pomegranate seeds or strawberries or satsuma segments, cashew nuts or pine nuts, bits of chicken or bacon or chorizo or prawns or boiled egg, cubes of cheddar or feta cheese, pumpkin seeds, beetroot, some beans or fresh peas or similar and whatever else I have.

I told Simplyhealth the above and they responded by sending a nice Sainsburys delivery driver to my front door with a fantastic selection of ingredients to make salads to take to work. Awesome. Talk about giving me a kick up the bum! So I give you… the best packed lunch salads ever… well some of them… would you eat these?

My delivery from Simplyhealth. Wow. Made me really excited for lunch time!

(I always get asked about my bright green tin… it’s from SIGG)

This little encouragement getting me making packed lunches again has already lead to the return of other good habits including making fresh fruit smoothies for breakfast, writing a meal plan for the week, and returning to my morning squats challenge routine. It’s amazing how an email with a simple question can be good motivation.

What is your favourite packed lunch to take to work or for a day out? How do you make sure you routinely make your own lunch rather than relying on the expensive plastic covered options from chain shops? Inspire me in the comments below…

I wrote this post as part of the Simplyhealth campaign to promote healthy lunches at work.