I love food. I eat really slowly, comically slowly. Even when I think I'm wolfing something down, I'm still always the last one to finish.
I work for myself, and when I'm in the middle of a workday I want to throw together lunch very quickly. Fast usually means pre-packaged and bad for you, which I'm not inherently opposed to. But I don't want to eat something that's going to leave me feeling hungry, or, worse, make me crash an hour or two later.
Here's my favorite fast lunch for when I'm working. It's quick and easy to make, really flavorful, and it satisfies me until dinner. Bonus points for it being vegan and healthy!
ARUGULA + AVOCADO SALAD
Makes one big salad you can eat while you're working on building your empire.
Tear up a bunch of arugula leaves into a big bowl. Like two big handfuls. I love arugula. You can substitute any hearty leaf, just skip iceberg or kale.
- Dice up a small avocado. I'm not afraid to eat an entire avocado. You can do half if you want.
- Mix up the dressing:
- Take out a small bowl and pour in a tablespoon or two of olive oil or grapeseed oil.
- Pour in about an equal amount of balsamic vinegar.
- Add about a spoonful of stoneground mustard. It needs to be fancy mustard, not the yellow hot dog mustard.
- Stir up the dressing. Stir it pretty fast. The tartness of the mustard offsets the sweetness of the balsamic vinegar and binds it with the oil.
- Pour the dressing over the arugula and avocado. Yum.
- Optional, but recommended:
- Sprinkle a handful of walnuts into the salad. I just bust them up into smaller pieces with my fingers.
- Shake some dulse flakes in. Dulse is a sea vegetable, and the flakes give a slightly salty and tangy taste though it's not very strong. It's rich in vitamins, minerals, trace elements and iodine, which all sound like things I don't eat often enough. Shake a whole bunch on there.
- Add a bunch of nutritional yeast. The yellow flakes are popular with vegans because they taste slightly like cheese or nuts, but not really because they're flakes. I personally really like the way nutritional yeast tastes. It's full of B-complex vitamins and all 18 amino acids, which sound like things I don't eat often enough.
- You can grind some fresh black pepper over the top.
- Today I added in some chopped up chives from my garden.
- If your taste buds are super fancy, drip a few drops of truffle oil over the top.
- Mix it up and eat it while writing a blog post about your lunch. Hopefully it will drive traffic to your website. The blog post, not the salad.
I'm growing arugula in my garden so I was able to pick all the fresh arugula I needed for my salad today. I'm feeling very smug about this.
Does this salad sound good to you? If you try making this salad, let me know!