How can I liven up my lunches?
There are so many exciting yet healthy ways of livening up your lunches, and achieving this may be easier than ever before if you are at home and have a little extra time on your hands to prepare your food! To help you spice up your lunches, we must consider the following:
- Good eating mechanisms
- Luscious lunch ideas
- How to stir up your sandwiches!
Read on to find out lots of great tips and ideas for creating tasty, nutritious lunches.
1. Good eating mechanisms
With (possibly) a little more time on your side, focus on making lunchtimes calm. Sit down, relax, chat to family or listen to something cheerful on the radio whilst you fully appreciate and enjoy your meal. This will promote good digestion and lessen the likelihood of those troublesome after-lunch digestive twinges and energy slumps.
Best not to watch TV or anything online, check your social media or scan the news whilst eating, as those activities can all trigger a response from your nervous system, switching off efficient digestion. Here's the thing: your adrenal glands don't know the difference between real danger and a madman with a gun in a film. They will prep you for flight either way! And this involves diverting energy away from digestion. So, focus on eating to give your gut a chance to do its thing.
Being at home to eat may mean you now have the option of hot lunches – yum! Your gut really likes that: warm, cooked food requires less energy to pull it apart, so the nutrients within it are more easily accessed.
You may now be able to switch to having your main meal at lunchtime and a lighter meal at night. Why do this? It's better for your sleep quality1; it's better for your weight control2; and it reduces your chances of night time acid reflux.3 So, definitely worth trying!
Take this as a chance to experiment, especially as current conditions mean you can't always be sure you'll get the foodstuffs you're used to using.
2. Luscious lunch ideas!
I love my lunch, and love playing around with ideas for livening things up. There's nothing to say you can't stir noodles into your soup, or punk up your potatoes with extra pizazz.
Boring beans on toast? Add curry powder as you heat the beans, or make your own blend of turmeric and cumin, or black pepper and paprika. Top with a few snips of parsley or rosemary, which you can get as living herbs in supermarkets and keep on your windowsill. Rosemary is one of my favourites – great for the circulatory system, and full of iron and calcium. Parsley is a source of vitamin K, as well as calcium and potassium. It's their taste that does it for me, though. Snackable! Chew a little rosemary when your concentration levels are low.
Baked potatoes a favourite with the children? Sweet potatoes are faster to cook and chock-full of nutrients such as the antioxidants beta-carotene and vitamin C (great for the respiratory tract), and potassium (good for energy). Slice across them like a toast rack before putting them in the oven. They'll take about 20 minutes at 200°C, and come out crunchily crispy and delicious. Add a smidgeon of butter or coconut butter, or a drizzle of olive oil, then fill with red pepper humus or cottage cheese, topped with toasted seeds or sprouted mung beans.
Make your own: To toast sunflower and pumpkin seeds, spread a couple of handfuls on a baking tray, sprinkle with a little Herbamare or soya sauce, and grill for a few minutes until they start to snap at you. To sprout some seeds, check out the BioSnacky pages. You can sprout mung beans and chick peas the same way.
My Top Tip:
Add these to salads, soups, dips and many other dishes for a light but distinctive taste.
"Very tasty and I loved the mix, germinates well."
3. Stir up your sandwiches!
Go Danish! No, not as in pastry, but as in the open sandwich. Build your own!
- The Basics: try oatcakes, crispbreads or rice cakes as well as bread. They keep for ages, so they are good store cupboard fodder.
- The Foundation Layer: a little butter or coconut butter, or some nut butter – almond, hazel, cashew, they are all full of protein and nutrients such as magnesium and calcium.
- The Leafy Layer: doesn't have to be lettuce; try a few leaves of spinach or watercress, or branch out into chicory or radicchio if it's available. Bitter leaves are great for the digestion.
- The Veggie Layer: this is where I like to get adventurous and layer in sliced beetroot; a slice of roasted aubergine (inexpensive and available at the moment); sliced roasted courgette; or chunks of roasted butternut squash (really good value for money, and packed with those chest-friendly antioxidants).
Roasting is easy: slice or dice your chosen veg, spread them on a baking tray, sprinkle with a little olive or rapeseed oil, add some chopped herbs if you like, or a dusting of paprika or black pepper, and bake for 20-30 minutes (20 for courgette, 30 for butternut squash) at 200°C. Do a good quantity at a time and use the rest to go with pasta or on rice at another meal.
- The Chunky Layer: top off with some cottage cheese, humus, sliced boiled egg, sardines, or toasted walnuts or flaked almonds.
- The Twirl on Top: a sprinkling of rosemary, parsley, coriander or sprouted seeds will load on the flavour and nutritional value, but not topple the pile.
What about plain peanut butter and sliced banana? That's fine too; just switch it up sometimes with almond butter and apple, or a dusting of cinnamon or ground ginger. Cinnamon is good for blood sugar levels, and ginger is anti-inflammatory and peps up circulation.
Vote
References
1 Crispim CA et al. J Clin Sleep Med 2011; 7 (6): 659-664
2 Ravussin E et al. Obesity, 2019; 27 (8): 1244
3 Fujiwara Y et al. Am J Gastroenterol 2005; 100 (12): 2633-6
