Lunch ideas that go beyond the sad desk salad

How considered is your lunch? Too often when working from home, mine is a rush job – an emergency tub of bought soup, a scrap of sourdough defrosted from the freezer, slabs of cheddar hacked off the block and eaten on the way back to the study. It’s an improvement if I pile the bread with kimchi and grated mature cheddar, and flash it under the grill until bubbling, or turn it into a proper grilled cheese sandwich (butter the outside of the sourdough, not the inside, and use something heavy to squash it against your griddle pan).

But, with a bit of planning, lunch can – and should – be a spot of joy in the middle of the day. Whenever I lack inspiration, I remind myself that there’s an entire chapter of “dinner tonight, lunch tomorrow” recipes in my new Green Cookbook. One of my favourites is lemongrass and turmeric tofu – you make a big batch the night before, serve it with noodles for dinner, and for lunch the next day pile it into a baguette with peanut butter and a fistful of coriander for a bánh mì. Night-before cooking is perfect if you’re lacking the time (or facilities) to cook come 1pm, and Meera Sodha’s flavour-packed aubergine traybake with orzo would work beautifully prepped in advance.

Despite the usual rush during breakfast – getting porridge into one child before nursery, scraping porridge from the other child and warming up the border collie’s breakfast (she prefers her meals warm rather than fridge-cold) – there are usually a couple of minutes spare (thanks in no small part to Bandit and Chilli Heeler’s parenting) to thickly slice a tray of sweet potatoes and pop them in the oven for this marvellous salad from Georgina Hayden.

For a cooler day, I prep a bit of homemade soup in advance – usually, it’s a variation on my mother’s seven-minute pressure-cooker soup: soften onions, garlic and thyme in indecent amounts of olive oil for a few minutes, add a couple of tins of good chopped tomatoes and half a pint of vegetable stock, put the pressure cooker lid on for four minutes, and you’re done. Serve with tonnes of fresh basil and parmesan shavings. But I love a one-tray soup, varying the veg from tomatoes with this vibrantly orange traybake soup by Alice Zaslavsky.

If you are working from home and welcome a few minutes of light chopping, I’ll leave you with something cold, crisp and sweet to add to your bread and cheese for an abundant lunchtime feast: a platter of my watermelon salad with tomatoes and cucumber and peanuts (pictured top), which will be perfect if the thermometer stays high this week.

A barnstorming break | We just got back from another marvellous stay at Warborne Farm in England’s New Forest – it’s a working farm with rustic-chic converted barns, and perfect for a break with children. Each barn comes with a well-appointed kitchen and generously sized produce baskets, and you’re encouraged to pick your own vegetables. I took my daughter to help me harvest heritage tomatoes, cucumbers and courgettes, and the baby had her first plums off the tree.

Seeing red | The best things I ate all week were produce from the farm. For one weekend breakfast, I cut up freshly picked tomatoes and basil, and cooked them with garlic and olive oil until well softened. I made four indentations in the tomato mix, cracked a just-laid egg into each of them, then let them cook until the whites were just set. We ate that with freshly baked New Forest bread, butter and locally roasted coffee. It was divine.

What I read | To recreate the farm at home experience, I recommend Julius Roberts’ beautiful The Farm Table. It’s a stunning book – you’ll want to live in it, fork in hand, surrounded by chickens. I can’t wait to chat with him about it at our event with the fabulous Pen Vogler at the Edinburgh book festival – come and see us on 23 August.