Eating healthy lunches while working can be tough. Healthy options–like Chipotle when done right, for example–are expensive and time-consuming. I’ve figured out a way to eat a week’s worth of lunches for under $10 with near-perfect macronutrients.
Over the course of the year, using this and other similar recipes, you could spend just $520 on work week lunches. A year’s worth of Chipotle lunches costs $2340 without a pop or chips. That’s an $1820 savings in a year. Plus, you don’t have to go wait in Chipotle’s line. And we all know that a Chipotle jaunt around lunch time takes 45 minutes at a minimum. Recipe like this could save you 45 minutes per day Monday through Friday. That’s 11,700 minutes in a year–or 195 hours! For a lawyer or other professional billing by the hour, that’s a huge savings. At big law firms requiring 1900 hours billed per year, 195 would cover about five week’s of billing. And while no one would actually eat every single meal at his or her desk billing for an entire year, the point remains; using this recipe (and others like it), you can save a bundle of time and oodles of money.
My wife calls this the “Rob Special” because at various times during her pregnancy (mostly first trimester) I’ve swooped in like Superman to cook dinner when she’s sick, tired, or the sight of food grosses her out. She’s a wonderful cook, so I think calling it the Rob Special is her way of making fun of me for how easy the meal is to make. So I’ve embraced the name: The Rob Special. It has a nice ring to it if you ask me. And she actually does like the meal, so it works for my ego and her pregnant belly. Everyone wins.
But seriously, The Rob Special is a simple recipe. Earlier this week, I prepped a batch of the Rob Special with my cooking-challenged brother. He immediately recognized the benefits in terms of health and money savings. He spends “too much” on lunch (most days a $10 sub sandwich) during the work week. Using the Rob Special, my brother could make six healthy, macro-balanced meals for the cost of one of his unhealthy subs.
Here’s what you’ll need:
Yep, that’s it: 3 lbs ground turkey, 1.5 cups of brown rice, two garlic cloves, and a red onion. This meal tastes fine with just these ingredients. I normally add on lime juice, hot sauce, salsa, cilantro, and sour cream–but you can spruce it up however you want.
Alright, first you need to throw some butter on a pan and fire up the stove.
While your butter melts, chop the onion and garlic.
Once the butter melts, throw three-fourths of the chopped onion and the one (chopped) garlic clove into the pan.
Once the onions are glazed, throw the turkey into the pan and smash it up until the pieces are about the size of a marble or smaller.
Once the turkey goes into the pan, start boiling the water. After the water boils, pour the rice into the water and lower the stove temperature. Add in the remaining onion.
Brown the turkey. Drain the fat. Dump the rice in with the turkey. Mix the rice and turkey. Add in some lime juice. You can eat the meal plain if you like. Assuming you will use the whole batch for your week’s lunch, divide up the meal into six equal portions, and you’ve got your lunches for the week (and one extra meal). You can eat the meal plain or spruce it up. I like adding some sour cream, cilantro, cheese, and salsa to make the meal even better. Here’s what you will get:
Total macronutrients per meal* (before sprucing up the meal):
- Calories: 500
- Protein: 40 grams
- Carbohydrates: 36 grams
- Fat: 22 grams
*note that I did not include the nutritional content for the onion, butter, and garlic so these macros should be considered approximate. I am guessing the fat contnt would be higher. We use about one tablespoon of butter in the recipe, so that’s only like 100 grams of calories of (mostly) fat. So I would just add roughly 15 calories and two grams of fat per meal.
Total cost per meal:
- 90% lean ground turkey: $1.66
- Brown rice: $0.13
- Red onion: $0.07
- Garlic: $0.02
- Lime juice: $0.04
- Hot sauce: 0.07
Total: $1.99 per meal. And it tastes great.
Meals like this are a wonderful tool for young professionals especially. You can save oodles of money and give your body healthy fuel. If you can manage to skip breakfast (more on that in a future post) and eat this lunch (with, let’s say, 100 extra calories of “fixings”), you have 1400 calories for the rest of your day (assuming you eat 2000 calories in a day). And I’ve found that as I age, I enjoy a more varied diet. When I was young, I ate virtually the same thing every meal. Now that I am older and married, I can’t just eat the same five items every day. But if you can, meals like The Rob Special are perfect for hitting your fitness goals and saving some serious dough in your pocketbook.
Also remember: all reps matter.
