My day on a plate when working from home

One of the benefits of working from home is the flexibility to cook or assemble whatever I like throughout the day (as well as the lack of temptation to spend $10-15 on a measly sandwich from the cafe at the bottom of an office building). I am quite a nosy person when it comes to what people eat (one of my favourite types of videos to watch on YouTube are 'What I Eat In A Day' videos), so I thought I'd put together a post on what my average day of food looks like as I work from home.

Breakfast

I am a porridge fiend, and I consume a bowl of porridge most days. At the moment, I like to make a variation of my usual hot porridge, by adding some frozen berries into the mix, topped with some banana, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, cinnamon and almond butter. I usually have my porridge around 7:30am, followed by a coffee (either an iced latte or a hot latte) around 8am.

Morning tea

I am definitely the type of person that prefers to eat regularly (i.e. every 2-3 hours), rather than eating three large meals a day. So, I am usually getting pretty peckish around 10am, when I'll make a cup of tea (at the moment I'm loving chai tea with a splash of milk) and usually a rice cake with a bit of peanut butter, some form of fruit (either some berries or a few slices of banana) and a sprinkle of cinnamon.

Lunch

By the time midday approaches, I am pretty hungry again, so I'll usually heat up some form of leftovers from the night before. I am a big fan of batch cooking, meaning that Dave and I can have enough food for dinner, lunch the next day, and usually lunch on another day as well. For example, this week I made a big pot of Mexican slow cooked chicken, a batch of sweet potato and pumpkin soup, and some baked salmon with mushrooms and broccolini. I keep the leftovers in tupperware containers in the fridge or freezer, so I can just grab one and whack it in the microwave for a few minutes to heat up.

Given that I have a massive sweet tooth, I always end my lunch with another cup of tea and a square of dark chocolate (my go-to is Lindt 85% dark choc).

Afternoon tea

The mid-afternoon hunger worms start biting at around 3pm, which is when I'll usually have a bit of granola in a glass with either some milk or Greek yoghurt and some frozen berries, and this will tide me over for a few hours until dinner.

Dinner

I like to have my dinner pretty early, around 6 or 6:30pm, to allow time for it to digest before I head to bed at around 9:30pm (yes I am a grandma). As mentioned above, I tend to cook in big batches, so that on some week nights I don't need to worry about cooking and can just reheat a portion of what I've made earlier in the week (this is also useful for Dave when he's working an evening shift and can take a container of food, rather than living off yet another cheese toastie at work). In addition to dishes such as the chicken stew, the soup, or the salmon with veggies, some of my staple meals to make are a green chicken curry, pad thai, chilli basil tofu stir fry, or chilli con carne.

I pretty much always finish my evening meal with something sweet.  I absolutely love ice cream, and so will sometimes have a spoon or two (or three) of ice cream to satisfy my sweet tooth. My current favourite flavours are the Weis dairy free dark chocolate ice cream, or when I want something a bit more satisfying, the Connoisseur vanilla caramel brownie (which I need to refrain from buying regularly, because that stuff is seriously addictive). I'll then finish the evening with a cup of tea and another square of dark chocolate.


This is a pretty standard mid-week day of eating for me. We tend to eat out more on weekends, or go around to friends' houses for meals, but I try to keep things relatively healthy throughout the week so that I can enjoy treating myself a bit more on weekends (offer me a lemon meringue tart for morning tea on a Saturday, or a chicken burger with fries by the beach at Sunday lunchtime, and I'll rarely say no). Hopefully this has given you a bit of a look into what those working-from-home types eat during the week, and gives you a bit of inspiration for some new meal ideas!