Thinking of what to eat for lunch when you work from home, let alone setting aside time and effort to actually do it, is often so tiring and draining. Work from home meal preparation can take an hour, while the cooking and cleaning up the pots and pans feel like forever.
To help lighten your load, we’ve compiled 10 easy work from home meal ideas for you. They’re categorized into 3 sections based on the ease of cooking preparation for your convenience.
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Heat and Eat Food
These are the easiest meals you can prepare at home for yourself. They require minimal to no cooking at all. In other words, you buy them, store them in your fridge/freezer, and then heat them at your convenience.
None of these options should take more than 15 minutes of your time to prepare and finish before you get to eat. In other words, these are your ultimate lazy lunch ideas for workdays and weekends where you don’t want to cook.
1. Purefoods Heat-and-Eat Ulam Packs
This might be the closest thing we can get to mass-produced TV dinners here in the Philippines. Purefoods sells these ready to heat viands in several grocery stores and supermarkets all over the metro.
You have a decently diverse choice of common ulams you’d normally eat in a week. They have 9 different viands including Beef Caldereta, Pork Binagoongan, Bistek Tagalog, Lechon Paksiw, Kare-Kare, Bicol Express, Chicken Afritada, Beef Humba, and Beef Pares.
All of them come in packs that serve up to 3 people.
If you’re up for something a bit less mass produced or just something more varied, you can try out ready to eat meals from Commissario by Chef Joseph Viel.
Commissario offers a weekly set of different frozen dishes at various price ranges and they take orders on a first come first serve basis. Some of their weekly menu items include Beef Pot Roast (P220), Creamy Spinach Mushroom Pork Chops (P220), Tuscan Salmon (P350), and Roasted Cajun Chicken w/ Potatoes (P160).
It’s best to check out their weekly frozen options on their Facebook page since a lot of their menu items change from week to week.
Frozen meals delivery has one of the most extensive selections of frozen ready-to-heat options currently on the market. They have over 60 different drinks, desserts, rice dishes, and main dishes to choose from.
Their cheapest dishes start at P130 for a 300g order of laing, which is equivalent to 3 servings. On the other hand, their most expensive menu items go up to P560 for a 550g order of Patatim, which should be equivalent to 5 1/2 servings.
A nice feature of their site menu is that they include the nutritional information of each of their dishes for easier dietary tracking of what you eat per meal.
Ready to Cook Food
Most of these options take out the hassle from work from home meal planning and preparation. All the ingredients will be delivered to your doorstep with the necessary amounts so you don’t need to buy each ingredient yourself.
Some of these options even include pre-prepared and chopped ingredients so that your cooking experience is even faster.
The first meal kit delivery option we have on our list also offers the most diverse selection of food choices and meal customization options.
Kookit allows you to design your meal kit as you wish. Customization options include serving size and the number of dishes that you’d like to have delivered.
They 10 weekly meal options that you can choose from, which is also refreshed and changed on weekly basis. This gives you more food choices so that you don’t get stuck with the same viands every week.
As its name suggests, Online Palengke is primarily an online wet market where you can purchase fresh produce. Along with its raw ingredient delivery service, they also claim to offer the 1st meal kit in the Philippines.
They have a decent selection to choose from, ranging from your everyday adobo or monggo to kare-kare. Each set has it’s own customization options if you want to have your produce pre-chopped or not.
Meal kits labeled with the tag [DELIVER NOW] are available for same-day delivery, while the rest can be delivered the following day. No minimum order is required.
Much like the first 2 options, Eatsogood’s premium food kits are delivered in bundles so you don’t need to prepare the ingredients yourself. What makes them different is that most of their food kits are meant for eating/cooking parties with your family or friends.
Most of their dishes are either hotpots or for tableside grilling, such as shabu-shabu and samgyeupsal. They also sell the necessary hotpot cookers in case you don’t have one at home.
You can check out their full menu on their website, which also includes a few other interesting dishes that you may want to try out.
Our Favorite Easy Recipes
If cooking your own dishes from scratch is your thing, then we have you covered.
We’ve compiled a few of our favorite work from home recipes that you might not have tried yet. We chose only recipes that were fairly easy to make and could be squeezed in during a busy workday. None of these recipes require special knife skills, techniques, or tools to make.
7. Budae Jjigae
A fitting recipe for work from home meal preparation when you’re left with an assortment of different canned meats and knick-knacks. Lee Ara explain what are the few essential ingredients for making Budae Jjigae, and which ones can be replaced with whatever you have on hand.
It’s an easy meal that needs very little planning, effort and time to make. Though there are lots of ingredients for an ideal pot of budae jjigae, most them can be substituted with whatever you have in your pantry.
It makes perfect sense, considering that this dish was invented out of scarcity of ingredients after the Korean war.
8. Healthy Meals Under ₱100 by Erwan Heusaff
Restaurateur and celebrity Erwan Heussaf has 3 different dishes for those on a tight budget. These dishes are simple re-imaginings of common Filipino viands, such as adobong kangkong, ginataang gulay, and monggo. As such, the flavor profile should be familiar enough for most Filipinos to enjoy while being easy to prepare.
All 3 recipes use very common ingredients you can find in local groceries and palengkes in the Philippines. Meal preparation is fairly straight forward. Only the mongo soup may need a blender for you to make at home.
9. 3 Cup Chicken ("Taiwanese Chicken Adobo")
3-Cup chicken is a dish beloved by many Taiwanese. It’s considered by many as Taiwan’s national dish, similar to how we Filipinos have adobo as ours.
Though their origins have hardly anything in common, they do share a lot of similarities in many of their key components (chicken, garlic and soy sauce). They’re also both very easy and relatively fast to prepare.
The flavor profile is somewhat akin to adobo, except that 3 cup chicken is a sweet-savory dish, as opposed to adobo, which is typically salty-sour. 3 cup chicken is aromatic, savory, and pairs very well with freshly cooked white rice.
If you haven’t tried to cook this dish yet, it’s definitely worth a shot. Meal prep and cooking should take around 1 to 1.5 hours from start to finish.
If you can’t find Shao Xing rice wine at your local grocery, you can try these ones from Shopee. As for Taiwanese basil, you can substitute that with Thai basil. Sweet basil will also work if you can’t find either variety.
10. Hainanese Chicken Rice (Shortcut Version) by Nadine Howell
The traditional way of cooking Hainanese chicken with rice is a bit cumbersome for a regular work from home lunch. In contrast, this easy hack on how to make Hainanese chicken should only take a fraction of the time.
Though the results may not be as good as what you’d get in a restaurant or from a hawker in Singapore, this version works great especially considering the little time and effort you need to make it.
