10 tips on… lunchtime at work

1.    Snacking and holidaying. Chances are that any job is either boring or challenging. Whatever the situation, we are likely to crave for distractions to numb our pain. Short of availing ourselves of the internet to kill time – many of us find solace in grubbing. Keep it cheap and cheerful – €1.00 for every working day on crackers translates to €250 annually. Add cream cheese to that and you can wave goodbye to your weekend in Barcelona this August. Summer fruit costs very little here, especially if bought from the farmer’s market in Ta’ Qali. Double-chocolate chip cookies to dip in your coffee at work? You’ll have to discuss that with your bank manager. Why not krustini, biskuttelli tar-raħal or biskuttini tal-magħmudija found at less than half the price from any of our village bakers? If you are also raising kids, spoiling a partner or both – bake a batch of cupcakes at home and reserve a couple of those for work – you’ll barely feel the cost difference.

2.    Fruit and that dreadful slurp. If you’re not a big eater, fruit may be an ideal source of sugar, water and comfort for lunch in the summer months. Plus it’s cheap. But the slurpy sound we emanate after biting into cold stoned fruits will irritate the hell out of colleagues. Peel and chop up your fruit at home. If you’re after adding a little punch to your fruit salad, try this dressing: 2 parts lemon juice, 2 parts lime juice, 1 part dark rum (no one will notice), 2 parts sugar and a bunch of fresh mint.

3.    Soups and Major Tom. Kitchenette cupboards in offices tend to look like pantries on NASA space shuttles. Have a peek. Soups were never meant to be dehydrated unless you’re on a war mission, in space or on a desert-island. You’re also paying for the packaging, manufacturing process and marketing of the product – which you don’t need if you can make it better at home. Field tomatoes are going at anywhere between 20c and 50c a kilo from the farmer’s market in Ta’ Qali. For every half a kilo of tomatoes, add a small cucumber, a bell pepper, half a small red onion (or less), two gloves of garlic (keep a toothbrush handy or make it one clove), a bit of olive oil, a dash of vinegar and seasoning. Process, chill and allow to settle in the fridge overnight. That’s 3 to 4 portions. Ground control calling gazpacho.

4.    Salads in major key. Nothing like a fresh salad for lunch. But when prepared at home for lunchtime consumption at work, we may be in for bitter disappointment. All excitement fades away to the opening of a plastic container revealing the soggy mush that looked like a healthy salad in the morning. We can almost hear the trumpet riff in minor key in the background while this happens. We can only avoid it by keeping the dry and wet ingredients apart. Washing and drying salad leaves in the morning is a pain. But at €2.00 for every bag of four portions, you can buy ready washed salad leaves from the supermarket. Use them. Add some local capers, pitted black olives and lightly seared fresh tuna (or if you want to go five times cheaper try other tuna varieties like filleted kubrit, plamtu or alonga). Rather than including quartered tomatoes in the salad – remove the pulp and cut the outer flesh into tiny dices to keep things dry. Prepare a quick dressing and pour it in a separate container. Honey, citrus and olive oil will do the magic – just add the oil very slowly as you mix for your fats to blend well into the dressing. At work, all you need to do is drop the dressing into your fresh salad, close back the lid, shake gently and Bob’s your uncle.

5.    Wraps and Sanskrit. A typical worker’s lunch in India is rolled paratha. Sounds exotic huh? We call them wraps here. In the Indian subcontinent, evening leftovers are often included in flatbread, rolled and reserved for the breadwinner’s enjoyment at lunchtime the day after. We pay €5.00 each for the mass production mayo-packed takes of rolled paratha here. But we don’t need to be scholars of Sanskrit to take a leaf out of an Uttarakhandi book. What’s for lunch on Sunday? Rabbit, roast beef, braised pork, roast chicken? Reserve a bit of scraps from your carvery, roll into a wrap, add anything creamy (ricotta, cream-cheese or a sauce) and that’s your delicious low-cost work lunch for Monday.

6.    Self-gratification. Many, including myself in my office days, opted for the easy approach to lunch: find the nearest village bar and stuff your face at €3.50-€4.00 inclusive of drink. I started seeing things differently 20kg too late. With some wise preparation in your home kitchen, you can easily half your weekly lunch cost and eat better. Reward yourself once in a while and eat out. This time you can opt for a proper bistro. By proper, I mean the following:
a. If you wait for less than 15 minutes for a pasta dish you’ve ordered it means it’s pre-cooked. If you don’t have time to wait for pasta order something else.
b.Your wrap is charred on the outside and cold on the inside. Someone must be in a big hurry in the kitchen.
c.The dining room has just 10 tables but 45 items on the menu. Are you sure it’s fresh?
d. You see balsamic reduction and parsley on every single plate. You need your cook to be imaginative.
e. The menu features prawn cocktail. It hasn’t been changed since 1988.

7.    Shaken not stirred... and with ice-cream. Simple, nice and fresh. All you need is a blender. A certain Italian patisserie in Sliema makes the most amazing artisan ice-cream found on the island. A small confectionery in Zejtun still produces wedding ice-cream with nuts and fruit the old way. Just add one part milk for every two parts ice-cream and blend. Yum. If you’re not into ice-cream milkshakes go for a fresh fruit smoothie. This is a nice one: you need a peeled and de-seeded juicy orange; a cored and chopped pear (or bambinella), 200g red grapes and ice cubes. Blend and garnish with a slice of lime.

8.    Tomorrow’s pasta. I would avoid considering a good left-over food any pasta that is meant to be eaten hot and on the dot. Spaghetti al ragu’ for instance, cannot be expected to nicely retain its consistency when eaten the next day. But farfalle alla crudaiola will. And it’s super simple. After boiling and draining your farfalle, just add some fresh ġbejna, cherry tomatoes, extra-virgin olive oil, fresh basil leaves and crushed black pepper. This dish is equally delicious eaten hot or cold.

9.    Avoid. Heaviness: Not all dinner left overs make good work lunches. For instance, unless your workplace adopts lenient policies on afternoon siestas, steer away from béchamel-rich pasta bakes, pies or pastries. Halitosis: If you are into garlicky and oniony foods or Indian curries for lunch, schedule your afternoon meetings with people you want to get off your back. Stinky: Working in a shared office may be irritating enough – so unless you’re vying to get transferred, you might want to keep that slab of aged gorgonzola in your fridge at home. Showiness: OK, you’ve told us about your latest hour-a-day Food Network craze already, and frankly we don’t care – conceal ‘fancy’ foods in humble containers. Oil: Eating greasy foods in company may prove messy and unsightly. Keep your hobż biż-żejt for the beach.

10. Keep it safe. The culprit of 40 per cent of reported foodborne illnesses is known to be poor practice in domestic kitchens. Use your sick leave for bad hangovers and period pains, not for self-inflicted food poisonings. If you stick to some very basic rules, you do not need to be a germophobe to minimise risk in your home kitchen. Your most important rule (especially in the summer months) is to keep things cool. You risk becoming the laughing stock of the office if you walk in with a picnic cooler (thermal bags are nowhere to be seen for sale in Malta), but if you’re recently finding yourself waiting for a whole hour under the sun until the bus ‘arrivas’, you might just have to. If you use AC in your car, just keep your lunch bag on your passenger seat and set your vent to blow on it. Point is, don’t keep vulnerable foods like pasta, rice, fish or dairies for any lengths of time at temperatures beyond 10 degrees Celsius. Refrigerate your food as soon as you reach the office. If your office kitchenette is not equipped with a fridge, find another job.

David Darmanin is chef-owner of traditional Maltese restaurant Taverna Sugu in Vittoriosa.