Lunch Ideas

[frec]

What do you eat for lunch at work? I can manage a celiac diet fine at home, but my list of lunch options is getting increasingly limited. I have very little time to eat at work. I am an elementary teacher and usually spend any breaks helping kids in the room or prepping my next lesson. In addition to gluten I can't have dairy, soy, corn, potatoes, or sesame. I've had jaw surgery twice so I'm not big on carrot sticks and other crunchy things. I'm living on nuts, pears, carrot juice, rice protein drinks, almond milk, and hemp drinks. Any clever ideas?

[lonewolf]

Can you bring a thermos full of hot soup or chili? What about a salad with chicken, deli turkey or taco meat and salsa? I like deli turkey or chicken wrapped in lettuce leaves with a dab of mustard. I make sandwiches out of brown rice tortillas, Trader Joe's brown rice bread (toasted first) or pre-toasted Ener-G hot dog buns. For "sides" I like popcorn, Envirokidz bars, apple slices sprinkled with cinnamon (no sugar), Lara Bars or Clif Nectar Bars, Satsuma oranges and bananas.

[gfmolly]

Hi Frec,

I am a teacher as well, so I know what a half hour lunch is like, when you've got kids in and out on both ends of lunch! I also use the brown rice tortillas, Food For Life are good, and Applegate farms turkey wrapped in it. I also like tuna for lunch. Often I will do leftovers that I can carry around with me and eat easily. I try to eat a piece of fruit during my prep so that I don;t need to eat as much at lunchtime. Bananas are my fav, cause they are easy and packaged!

Terri

[wellsfamily]

I am so glad I saw your post. I am new to the gluten free thing, and also have a corn, sesame, soy, nuts (some), a bunch of fruit etc.. . allergy. I am having such a hard time with the corn thing. As you know, so much gluten free stuff has some sort of corn derivative. It is driving me crazy. Even splenda and aspartame have maltodextrin. Are you as strict w/ the corn as gluten? I ocasionally am having a diet pepsi and splenda in my coffee. Maybe we should join forces and share some ideas

The pounds are flying off of me b/c I don't know what to eat.

[emcmaster]

I'm a big believer in cooking enormous batches of soups, stews, and casseroles on the weekends and freezing into individual plastic containers. For lunch each morning, I simply grab a container from the freezer and go.

If I have a big cooking weekend, I can literally go months without cooking again.

[njbeachbum]

I'm only one week into the gluten free life, but I've seen lunch as one of the bigger challenges too. I've been doing salads almost everyday, with lots of veggies, "short cuts" chicken thrown in, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. last week i made yummy chicken/brown rice/veggie soup in my crock pot and had that for lunch one day with some tasty rice crackers. i try to keep a couple of pieces of fresh fruit nearby for snacking, as well as honey roasted nuts, larabars, glutino pretzel sticks, caramel rice cakes, and nature valley roasted nut crunch bars.

I think I will need to find these brown rice wraps that you guys speak of. That seems like an easy solution for a sandwich. I can't see that the gluten free breads will make very good sandwiches that sit in the fridge at work for 5 hours before eating. besides that, i need to start cooking more on weekends, like grilling a lot of chicken and making big batches of rice... so i can bring leftovers to work. it is definitely a BIG adjustment, but not impossible.

[VioletBlue]

I tend to eat leftovers from dinner the night before. I make double the amount for dinner and package the rest in plastic containers and stick in an insulated lunch bag. If you don't have access to a frig the insulated bags with a small blue ice brick works wonders. Last night I had roasted chicken for dinner. I made up a small salad and sliced some of the left over chicken and mixed it in with the salad. That and a drink and I'm set.

Chips are out for me too since I'm not only allergic to potatoes and non GMO corn but sunflower oil too. I've brought rice cakes and peanut butter a few times, and fruit. I also make gluten-free muffins sometimes with fruit. Namaste makes a pizza crust mix that is corn and potato free. I use that sometimes to make mini pizzas I can slip in a baggie and have for lunch. It's not a great pizza crust, but it's corn and potato free as well as gluten-free so I'm thrilled with it. Thai Kitchen makes indivdual meal size rice noddle packets. Do you have access to hot water? They also make rice noddle meals in plastic bowls that aren't bad; the kind where you poor boiling water into the bowl with the lid on and let it sit.

What do you eat for lunch at work? I can manage a celiac diet fine at home, but my list of lunch options is getting increasingly limited. I have very little time to eat at work. I am an elementary teacher and usually spend any breaks helping kids in the room or prepping my next lesson. In addition to gluten I can't have dairy, soy, corn, potatoes, or sesame. I've had jaw surgery twice so I'm not big on carrot sticks and other crunchy things. I'm living on nuts, pears, carrot juice, rice protein drinks, almond milk, and hemp drinks. Any clever ideas?

[Offthegrid]

Because of the soy thing, I can't have "mainsteam" tuna. Some low-sodium tunas are soy-free, but I think they taste horrible, especially without the garlic Italian dressing I used to use that also has soy.

Now I bake some chicken breasts on the weekend with lots of spices and some olive oil. I typically put that over spinach with gluten-free croutons from the gluten-free pantry (no soy or potatoes!). I make my own vinegar and oil dressing.

Sometimes I crave something hot, though. Then the easiest is leftovers. I always try to cook more than we need so I'll have leftovers for lunch. I have also eaten cold rice for lunch on occassion.

If you're really pressed for time, then have rice cakes with jelly and natural peanut butter. Resembes a PB&J sandwich a little bit. This was a suggestion from the board.

[Beesweet]

You can google "Dosas" and learn to make them. They are like little Indian crepes -- made with ground rice and a lentil type bean called urad daal. It takes a bit to get set up to make them -- to find the right daal ( mail order if you live far from Indian grocer) but once you do, you can always have a batch ready to fry up in the morning. They have a sourdough action, and only have three ingredients.

They are soft and easy to chew. You can eat them plain, with a nice curry that you can make and freeze ahead, with nut butter, or wrap around a soft piece of chicken., or with any soup or chili. And I think it is a complete protein -- with the rice and bean combo.

This is actually a pretty good link for a recipe. I omit the fenugreek.

Open Original Shared Link

How about egg salad or chicken salad with rice crackers?

Or learn to make sushi -- it's easy, and you don't have to use raw fish. I use scrambled egg & scallion, chicken and steamed julienned carrots, smoke salmon and asparagus, you name it...just stick a protein in there. Keep a bottle of wheat-free tamari in your classroom.

And Ditto on the instant soup stuff. Thai kitchen makes a few good ones, but check your ingredients, because they have a little soy oil packet in there. Bring your own sesame oil and toss the soy packet.

A Thai soup, with a little piece of chicken chopped up in it...very tasty.

All easy to chew, portable, and pretty simple to eat.

Just my two cents

[Fiddle-Faddle]

Check out Open Original Shared Link for lots of recipes plus great little Japanese Bento-box-style lunch kits!

[frec]

Wow. I am reading all these posts and making a shopping list. I shouldn't have gotten so discouraged, but the new soy allergy really threw me, and I've been busy with other health problems this fall. Thank you all very much!