Go to any personal finance sites or blogs over the past year, and one of the ‘tips’ you are sure to find ‘brown bag lunches’ as one of the first mentioned in saving some extra dough every year. I figured out that packing lunch at home rather than wasting $5 for insipid cafeteria food was an easy way to leave myself with some extra cash after a few months of graduating – though at that time, I relied on mostly rice and curry to lunch on.

I soon found however that one cannot subsist on the typical Indian lunches alone; you get bored and may get tempted to just eat out for a few days. So I learnt to mix up my lunches, taking a variety of wraps, sandwiches, pastas and leftovers from dinner – it made planning for a week of lunches fun, and made me actually look forward to unpacking my brown bag on most days!

One of the easiest lunches to take are wraps; a wide variety of filling work well when rolled up along with a few greens within a pliable wrap, and for the most part you can pre-assemble them the night before or even a few days before.  If you are lucky and have access to a toaster oven at work, you can warm up your wrap ahead of lunch and snicker at suckers paying top dollar for cold / stale / over-sodiumed wraps at the cafeteria. Our old floor at work had a beat up old oven that worked well enough for me to crisp up hummus wraps or tuna sandwiches. A few months ago we moved in to a brand new floor with  luxurious wooden paneling, fancy paintings, a huge kitchen area, 3 microwaves but alas, no toaster oven! So I had to come up with a filling that would taste great cold or at room-temperature – and nothing fit the bill better than a  spicy, smooth curried chicken salad.

♥   Continue reading In my lunch bag: Curried Chicken Salad Wraps