My lunch plans are boring.

I basically eat from the same set of options each week.  Sometimes I'll have a salad.  I'll have sandwiches with meat and cheese and sometimes tomato or mustard several days of the week.  And of course sides of whatever fruit/chips/other snack-y items I have that week.  And that's pretty boring.  I don't care, but it's not really worth talking about.

What I do enjoy talking about are the special things I do each week.  For example, last weekend a friend and I made pizzas!  We bought pre-made crusts for simplicity and topped them with spaghetti sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and some leftover tomato slices I had.  And of course we added garlic and basil to both pizzas and a small about of crushed red pepper flakes to a small test section.  Yum!  Simple cooking fun with a friend!

And then sometimes I come up with new ideas to make my life simpler/easier.  Usually I buy fruits and vegetables on the weekend and then prepare them when I want them.  So for my first sandwich of the week, I might wash and slice a tomato and store the remaining slices for the rest of the week.

But I don't always have enough time to both prep and eat lunch, so I would just skip on the tomato on Monday...and again on Tuesday...and so on.  So it might be Thursday before I start enjoying some (or most) of the food that I had bought the previous Saturday.  And sometimes food goes bad. :(

So this week I did something different.  I prepared everything on Sunday night.  This mostly involved washing and chopping.  I chopped up my peach, nectarine, and mango and put them in single serving containers.  It was so easy to just grab one of these to eat in between classes!  I also prepared my cucumber and tomato for a cucumber, tomato, and feta salad.  And I chopped the bad ends of the beans so that when I wanted to cook them later in the week it would require less of a time commitment.  And they were so good!

But this method does have a major drawback: sometimes produce isn't quite ripe enough when one buys it.  And even though my mango wasn't quite ripe, I decided to prepare it.  That was not the best decision.  Some of it was good.  But most of it was crunchy.  Yuck.  So, I might have to amend my plans for this weekend.  But the general idea still turned out to be a good one for me.

What ideas have you tried to make your cooking simpler/easier?  How did they work out?