How To Pack Lunch in 5 Minutes Flat, part 2!

Hello friends!

Since my recent “How to Pack Lunch in 5 Minutes Flat.” post was so popular, I’ve decided to continue this as a regular series on the blog!

Here’s your second installment, featuring my delicious lunch from today :)

On the menu for lunch:

• Mixed green herb salad with green pepper, cucumber, tomato, avocado, and tomato basil feta
• Hummus & Pita
• 2 clementines

Afternoon snacks:

• Nonfat plain Greek yogurt with 2 Tbsp. granola
• 1 kiwi

As I mentioned in my last post, I don’t usually plan my meals because it would stress me out; however, I always make sure I have healthy ingredients handy, and keep a general mental tab of what I have sitting around in the fridge because I HATE wasting food.

The only part of this lunch that took any time at all was the salad! I started with a big tupperware filled with mixed greens (this kind had fun herbs, too, yum!).

I quickly chopped some green pepper and added it to the mix:

Next up: cucumber and some grape tomatoes (which I sliced):

Followed by some almost-on-its-last-legs avocado:

And finally, topped off with this tomato basil feta!

Before closing the tupperware, I added some cracked pepper and a tiny shake of sea salt. I love fresh pepper on salads!

My advice for dressing is to store it in a little baggie in the tupperware so everything doesn’t get soggy! I love Newman’s Own Balsamic Vinaigrette, or you can make your own dressing, which is what I did today since I’m all out.

Lately I’ve been into Hemp Seed Oil instead of olive oil on my salads. It’s made from the seeds of the hemp plant and has a pleasant nutty flavor.

Don’t worry, mom and dad, hemp seeds (unlike the bud and leaves of the cannabis plant) do not contain any psychoactive molecules ;)

For my dressing today, I drizzled a little hemp seed oil into a baggie, followed by a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. I love this combo, especially with the black pepper I already put on the salad!

Store the sealed ziplock mini baggie in the top of your tupperware, and you are ready to rock!

The rest of the meal took no time at all to prepare. To accompany lunch, I grabbed a whole wheat pita and a near-empty container of hummus sitting in the fridge:

And a couple clementines:

All ready to go!

And since we know all hell breaks loose if Anne doesn’t have snacks handy, I grabbed a kiwi, a nonfat plain Greek yogurt, and bagged about 2 Tbsp. of granola (the delicious ginger one I bought in Austin!) to eat with the yogurt.

Done and done! Delicious, quick, and healthy :) Plus, so much cheaper than buying lunch out every day!

Time to get organized — tomorrow is the start of summer class — I’ll be taking Microbiology, my last prerequisite (along with the online BioChem course I’m taking through August) before school in the fall! I even bought myself a big girl backpack at Target yesterday to celebrate:

Yay! I’ve been using a little “daypack” that zips off my big traveler’s backpack, and it was time to upgrade :)

Speaking of class… remember the Nutrition project I did a month or so ago about Vitamin B12? (check out the comments on that post for some nerdy/awesome discussions!) Well, as part of that project, we had to create a flyer to “advertise” our nutrients. Mine was pretty uninspired, but my friend Dave created this AWESOME flyer for potassium, and I just had to share: 

Hehehe…

Have a good one :)