This salad has been part of my lunch this week. The original version is from Cassie at Back to Her Roots and I’ve made it a couple of times and it’s great, I find it’s an amazing hangover food, it’s mild but there’s actual favour. It also tolerates being left in the fridge for a while but benefits from being room temperature when you eat it, which makes it great for packed lunches.

I had planned to make the original recipe but the mouse purge left me missing key ingredients that I didn’t have the budget to replace. So I improvised a bit. I didn’t include the sesame seeds, replaced the tahini with peanut butter (which is a pretty effective supplement for tahini and less than half the price, as a bonus I used it to bait the mouse traps!) and as I didn’t have any rice wine vinegar, I used the red wine vinegar I had on hand.

I portioned it up into five containers and added roasted vegetables because in the post Christmas slump, you can never have too many! That done it became the holy grail of packed lunches, easy to make, tasty, cheap (working out at less than .75p a portion) and interesting. I know that it doesn’t look like much but that it entirely down to my photography skills, at the office on my phone, which make it look like it could be a candidate for sad desk lunch but I promise you it’s not and it’s well worth looking at if you’re in a leftovers for lunch rut. You don’t have to use soba noodles either, you could try wholemeal or spelt spaghetti (which have the added bonus of being cheaper) just weigh out 9.5oz before you cook it.

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