Battle of the Bulge: The Brown Bag

I don't brown bag literally. But I do bring my own lunch to work.

1) Sodium is the reason for water weight. No take-out or processed foods, and five pounds are out of the equation. For reals. Same food, homemade, is always better. 

2) Quite frankly, kosher ready-made food costs way too much, and if it doesn't, you get what you pay for. Financially, brown bagging will save you a fortune. Never mind medical bills.

3) After someone who works in the food business told me that it is impossible to have a restaurant kitchen without roaches, I'm good. 

It's not like I don't have opportunities; my office is smack-dab in the center of many options. But my own food always tasted reliably better and I could spend my money at Sephora instead. 

The best gadget I bought was the Crock-Pot 20-Ounce Lunch Crock Food Warmer. It comes with a removable canister with its own snug lid. On Sundays I make up a gigantic pot of soup, and simply pour over some into the canister and take it to work, where I pop it into the Crock-Pot Food Warmer. By lunch I have a piping, satisfying meal, and I have found that soup is what keeps me full the longest.

 

One can warm up whatever one likes in there.

This past Shabbos there were guests, and as always in such a case there was a groaning fridge that needed to be emptied following their visit. I chopped up some greenery (lettuce, cucumbers, grape tomatoes, snap peas, scallions, etc.) and topped it with sliced sweet chicken and the apricot jam mushroom sauce as dressing.

Here's a simple salad dressing that is the only one really used in my house: vinegar, light olive oil, black pepper, and garlic powder. 

I always feel like I need something refreshingly sweet following a meal, so I scour the stores for in-season fruits. If one looks carefully, now there are some very good Golden Delicious apples (matte exterior, a perfect blend of green-yellow with a blush of red, and very freckled. Those are the best ones).  

Mark Bittman of The Flexitarian is also on a quest to revive the brown bag, metaphorically. Does my audience think I am unaware of the potentially "nerdy" connotations of toting tupperware? Tough. The Frumanista has spoken. 

Via ladygouda.com. Très Chic.

I have managed to concoct for Ta a brown bag system that, I believe, has kept his health on track. More on that in another post. But every other man his age that I know is on some sort of medication; baruch Hashem, he is not. Eating out only rarely has to be a health benefit.