chef joel's lunch recipe

Almost every day at work we eat lunch across the street at the café under the basketball arena. Unfortunately for us, the café closed last week, and won’t open again for six more weeks, so we’ve been bringing in our own lunches for a week. This has given me time to discover that bringing in your own lunch gets boring really quickly.

It takes about a week, in fact.

This is baffling to me. When we talked about how we’d have to do this, it didn’t seem that bad. After all, I brought my own lunch to school every day from kindergarten to graduation, and most days it was peanut butter and grape jelly. I was a really picky eater, and still am, and didn’t trust the school lunch people to provide something I would actually want to eat every day, so I spent over a decade eating the same thing every day instead.

I must have had a lot more willpower when I was younger, because I was already getting bored with turkey and cheese this week. To spice it up, I decided to try flavoring my mayonnaise instead, because I used to get a turkey sandwich at a bread store near my old job that had a delicious pesto mayo on it, and I thought, “I like pesto, and I like mayo. How hard can it be?”

It was actually pretty easy, and after it sat in the fridge all night it was really good. Someone at lunch asked what the recipe was, and I had to laugh. I’m much more “Semi-Homemade” than I am “Top Chef”, so the recipe looked like this:



If anybody is really curious, though, it was two spoons of mayo and one spoon of pesto.