The Worry of Nine-to-five newbie

A column about newness for the new year! Plus: one more holiday hiccup reported!

Dear Tamar:

As a new 9-5 worker, I don't know what to bring for lunch. I try to bring leftovers, but I often don’t have enough. Some nights I go to out to dinner, and end up bringing a cheese stick and a banana to work. 3 pm hits and I'm at the vending machine. I have a farm share (CSA), but those vegetables don't often make it into breakfast or lunch. What are some meals, or components of meals, or snacks that I can make and eat for lunch all week? Hopefully, that integrate my farm share veggies?

-Nine-to-five newbie

Dear Nine-to-five newbie,

My culinary career may have begun with office lunch. Or with my recalcitrance vis-a-vis microwaves. Or with an innate belief in the link between dignity and crockery.

I first faced the 9-5 lunch question as a fact-checker at Harper’s Magazine. I’d had one other office job—at the American Friends Service Committee—but it had been right after college; I’d been so excited to be grown up that I’d spent my entire salary on fancy sandwiches. By the Harper’s days, I understood that a-fancy-sandwich-a-day is a path to penury.

I started by packing up the previous night’s leftovers. I’d refrigerate them in the office fridge, then loiter by the microwave, watching my container slowly turn until it beeped. I’d bring whatever it was back to my desk and contemplate it, steaming in a buckled, lightly carcinogenic container. And I would feel pitiful and resigned and uneasy—not at all like one should feel when facing one of the day’s three meals.

So I began, while cooking dinner, to cook one element specifically for lunch—or more precisely: not specifically for dinner. I developed a knack for this, not out of any intrinsic specialness, but because it’s easy and makes sense. While I was making dinner, I’d also cook a rice-cooker’s worth of rice and designate it “lunch rice.” I’d cook twice as much salmon, then set pieces aside for the following day. I made sure what I cooked was simple—to prepare and in flavor—so that it could become lunch the next day at lunchtime, rather than having to be lunch a day early.

It helped. It also helped me identify the microwave as a dark-magic portal to lunchtime sadness. I would feel optimistic when I put my lunch rice and piece of salmon onto the lucite microwave tray and shut the door to await a “ding.” But by the time I withdrew my lunch, it would have acquired a discrete whiff of anguish—as though it had spent its time on that little tray in a nightmare world, enduring too much.

It took a little experimenting, but I eventually learned which ingredients warmed up enough on their own at room temperature by lunchtime to not need microwaving, and which I should avoid ever refrigerating if I wanted to keep a microwave out of the picture. If I pressed “go” on my rice cooker in the morning and brought rice to work warm, it only cooled to lukewarm in the several hours before I ate it. As I mentioned, it took some repetition and some failure to figure out which cooked ingredients fell into which category. But the process taught me a lot about how different foods deal with heat—aka cooking.

Once I had a mandate—to 1) avoid my precise dinner for lunch; and 2) focus on foods that could avoid microwaving, ie could sit happily at room temperature—I found myself, conscious of another day and another office lunch around the corner, cooking “elements” in general—turning ingredients into simple, cooked versions of themselves rather than into complex dishes. My mother also did this, which I imagine helped me adopt it quickly.

It became central to my first book, which contains a chapter on cooking vegetables for a whole week’s worth of meals, in one session and recipes for turning the cooked vegetables into dishes as the week wears on. Here are the instructions from that chapter, in essence: Open your farm box (or grocery or market bag), and wash and cook everything in it, individually, by roasting or boiling. (For lettuce, obviously, just wash.) While you’re roasting and boiling, prepare other elements that will help you turn your roasted and boiled vegetables into meals. Toast nuts on a tray in an oven or toaster at 400 degrees for about ten minutes. Toast croutons, making sure they’re well oiled. Pick the leaves off a bunch of parsley.

I got fairly good. So did my lunches. A plastic container full of, for example, rice, salmon, and avocado would sit on a shelf by my office entrance. Passersby would notice—my office didn’t have a door. I became known as the lady with good lunch. Sometimes I would buy a fresh baguette and fill it with cooked vegetables and goat cheese from the transparent container. Or, there might be three containers: one containing spinach; another containing chopped egg, bacon, bleu cheese, walnuts; another vinaigrette. My new identity as the lady with good lunch built my confidence. It also revealed a truth: no matter how un-microwaved my ingredients, or how often they featured farmers’ market hauls, there was only so dignified anything could be in a plastic container. Watching my co-workers watch me put the truth in fine relief: I needed crockery.

I adjourned to nearby Pearl River Mart and, after some bowl-browsing, bought a big, noodle-sized one, plus a fork, knife, and spoon; chopsticks, and a pint glass. From then on, I transferred my lunch each day to my lunch bowl, to be eaten with my lunch cutlery, accompanied by water in my lunch glass. I found that once I was eating off ceramic with real utensils, any lingering reluctance I had to setting up the rice cooker, or boiling extra eggs, or setting aside some roasted broccoli, faded. Those small exertions were simply the cost of having good lunch.

All of this is a long winded way of saying: Here is my system, devised when I was in your shoes: Cook your vegetables simply, making sure they’re well seasoned with salt, well oiled, and cooked to tender. Store each separately. Base lunches on a simple starch, plus one or two of the cooked vegetables. I define the category of starch loosely—rice, farro, sometimes beans, bread, which you can buy from a bakery by your office. When life feels too starchy, base lunch instead on a cooked vegetable, like roasted squash, to which you can add toasted nuts and goat cheese and herbs. Use cooked vegetables to accessorize and define the meal.

My book editor is committed to a sandwich from my first book, of room temperature cooked greens—kale or collards—and ricotta on crusty baguette. Let the greens and cheese sit in your office at room temperature, find a real plate, and this is a perfect introduction to all the ideas above. I also keep publishing recipes for “Big Toasts”—a perfect desk lunch—which go something like: Buy good bread; slice it thick; freeze it. Cook vegetables well. When you’re hungry, toast a slice of bread, rub it with a cut clove of garlic, smash vegetables in a bowl; heap them on bread. Finish with olive oil and flaky salt.

A final lesson learned from those lunches was to rely heavily on accessories. (This is not an expansive philosophy; I’m terrible at sartorial accessorizing; I’m only good at the culinary kind.) When I started at Harper’s, I’d just moved back from Thailand, where I’d fallen in love with nam pla prik. I kept a jar of it in my office, and drizzled it amply over any lunchtime rice and vegetable combination I had. My quiver has since filled with scallion-ginger oil, the various sauces I call “brighteners,” furikake, chili oil, Mr. Naga, and more. Each is different. Each will transform a starch-plus-cooked-vegetable into a distinct meal.

Dear cook, almost everything has changed since my days at Harper’s—smart phones! Uber Eats! Everything other than the reliability of hunger striking during a 9-5 day. And I think also unchanged are all the many affordable and generally pleasant ways of sating that hunger, day-in, and day-out.

I asked, you answered! A reader named Amy reports a cranberry snafu, below:

For my first holiday with my new family, I completely destroyed the jellied cranberry by mashing it up to try to make it into a sauce. I didn't realize that I was supposed to extrude the entire can and then slice it. I wrote about it here!

In an effort to empathize, rather than one-up, I report to Amy and the world that as a cook at Chez Panisse, I was once handed a beautiful little container of jewel-like duck gelée, intended to be cut, by me, into a tiny brunoise and sprinkled over the duck confit on my station. I didn’t get the memo. I heated it, melting the gelée, treating it as sauce. My boss was miffed, but gracious. Which it sounds like your family was, too.