Breakfasts that turn into Lunch

There is very little mummies (and an increasing tribe of cool kitchen-savvy daddies) dread more than waking up on a school day and wondering what to put in junior/juniorette’s lunch-box. Working girls and boys don’t usually think about lunch until 12:45 when the next cubicle passes you the same three worn out menus. Then you order in a less than balanced meal of same-old-same-old, suffer a hazy, post-lunch slump that usually results in a snacky (insert deep fried item of your region here) 4 o’clock guilt trip.  

Putting together a meal of dal, sabzi, roti and rice is eye-pokingly industrious for the early morning and it’s likely to turn into a congealed, overcooked-in-its-own-heat, slumpy mass by the time you take it out of the box at least 4.5 hours after it was packed. And everyone now knows that most of those old fashioned wonders, the thermos lunch boxes that ‘keep the food hot’ actually kill nutrition, keep temperatures ideal for bacteria to flourish and make food taste yucky.

But, with a little imagination and some prepping the night before you can toss up a healthy, colourful, crunchy fresh breakfast that will reinvent itself as a power-lunch with as little effort as a cup of hot water. Alternatively, you can take the same basic ingredients, use them one way for the kids and another way for you at the office. So here’re two of our favourite ‘Transformer’ breakfast-brunch-lunches that will leave you bright-eyed and bushy tailed well past everyone else’s 4 p.m. high glycaemic calorie-count-collapse.