Lunch Notes // 009.

The lunch I've had on repeat for months, what I want to continue, stop, and start for my lunches in 2025, and have you ever heard about Downton Abbey? Pretty good stuff.

Welcome to Lunch Notes.

Lunch Notes was born out of a desire to use my daily lunch break better. It had a bit of a hiatus in the last few months as I walked through some highs and lows (the true low: crying in an airport lounge about Canada Post going on strike and that feeling really personal; the true high: seeing Taylor Swift with my sister in seats so high, my mom asked if we could even see her; and that’s what you missed on Glee!).

But I’m back, armed with a content calendar that takes us until the end of March and much joy in my heart to be back in your inboxes for lunch! Let’s go, girls.

I hope that this feels like a note that someone tucked into your lunchbox. Or like a class newsletter tucked in your cubby that a cringy keener kid made for you.¹

In today’s issue, we have…

• The sheetpan dish I can’t stop making and forcing others to eat.

• Some lunch reflection from 2024 and lunch goals for 2025 - yes, that is a thing.

• Little things I’ve been loving lately.

I hope you enjoy, & welcome to Lunch Notes. 🧡

Hannah’s Harvest Bowl (Patent Pending) (For Legal Reasons, This is A Joke)

I first made this recipe on October 20, 2024, and have joyfully recreated it about five times since. Back in September, my naturopath kindly and reasonably asked me to eat four cups of vegetables every day — I realized in October that this would not happen magically via the sandwiches I could not stop eating (and I wasn’t going to add more veggies on the side), so I needed to pivot the lunch plan to be more veggie focused.

Enter: this sheetpan recipe from Foodie from VT. As you can see, I have adapted to fit my own preferences — but that’s the best part of this / maybe all sheetpan recipes: it’s endlessly customizable!

Here are the details:

I go with a heart measured amount of brussels sprouts, sweet potato (normally one big one), carrots (normally three), broccoli, cauliflower, and red onion (normally one). If there are other veggies you like, toss ‘em on and see how it goes!

Preheat your oven to 425 F and chop up all the veggies. Chop up your protein - Foodie from VT did chicken thighs, but I prefer a fun chicken sausage instead of that. Sprinkle some olive oil and season your veggies with your heart. I like salt, pepper, paprika, nutritional yeast, and whatever else I decide to chaotically add as I pull spices out of our spice box, looking for the paprika. Mix them up and lay the vegetables and the chicken sausage out on a parchment paper lined sheet pan.

Roast it for about 30-35 minutes, tossing them about halfway through. Once roasted to your heart’s content, broil them for an additional 5 minutes.

While they’re roasting, making the best dressing ever - the maple balsamic dressing. Whisk the following all together:

• 1/4 cup olive oil

• 3 tbsp balsamic vinegar

• 2 tbsp maple syrup

• 1 tbsp dijon mustard

• 1 garlic clove, minced

• 1/4 tsp of salt and pepper (but when it’s that much, it’s really just to taste, eh?)

When you’ve got your harvest veggie bowl ready, top it with goat cheese (IT MAKES IT SO CREAMY AND GOOD, TRY A CRANBERRY GOAT CHEESE TO REALLY WOW YOURSELF) and drizzle some of the dressing on it. Feel better than everyone because you are eating so many veggies and they taste so delicious.

Some tried and true notes from moi:

• In my ideal world, I do my chopping with a podcast or audiobook on a Sunday afternoon and roast it all then. Because it is a lot of chopping. But that’s meditative! Do it, it’s good for you, but you don’t have to listen to me.

• I find the dressing doesn’t refrigerate well, so I never make a big batch of it - I’d rather remake it fresh every 2 days, instead of waiting for it to thaw. But maybe that’s just me and my fridge.

• If your naturopath is asking you to eat about 2ish cups of vegetables at lunch, this makes enough for about 4-5 lunches - but it really depends on where your heart veggie measurements took you and what you want for lunch. I’m not the boss of you, you’ll figure it out.

• You can microwave it and that works fine for reheating. I’m wondering about reheating in a frying pan - I’ll let you know how that goes. And you can airfry - I really liked the crispyness that brought me.

The Start, Stop, Continue Retrospective

Or, Hannah brings her agency corporate jargon work life over to Lunch Notes.

I’ve asked my husband if he would consider referring to every month as January so I could capture and bottle this energy. Thus far, he has refused. But the fact remains: I am a New Year’s girlie — chasing after fresh starts and the feeling that anything can happen. Particularly after a Q4 that was not giving “live laugh love”, but more “survive cry tolerate it”, I’m loving the reflective energy and dreaming of all that 2025 will hold.

What that really means is that I was ready for a clean work slate and a fresh start at my life’s work: to figure out a way to regularly and meaningfully take my lunch breaks while working from home. The framework of start, stop, and continue worked perfectly for what I wanted to talk about (although organizing it as Continue, Stop, and Start worked better for these narrative purposes) — so that’s what we’re doing here today!

A quick look at what worked and what I want to take with me for lunches, some bad lunch habits that I want to break, and some lunch habits I want to cultivate.

Let’s dive in!

🔜 Continue:
Three things I want to keep doing during lunch in 2025

1. Spending lunches with coworkers: One of my enduring favourite lunch practices is spending lunches with my co-workers. As an all remote team, this doesn’t happen in a predictable way. A bunch of us gather and watch Survivor together once a week (you can read about that here!). I also live near some co-workers, and we’d either work at my house and chit chat over lunch, or hit up a restaurant in the city about every four to six weeks. I loved it!
   

   One thing I want to be better about: to get the in-person lunches happening more often, I’ll be BAMFAM-ing. BAMFAM is a term we use at work - “book a meeting from a meeting”, although I never use it at work and only use it with my friends and my therapist. It helps make sure I never leave a friend gathering (or therapy appointment) without another one on the calendar.
   

2. Reading Substacks or working on my Substack at lunch: Admittedly, this feel to the wayside when I, you know, stopped writing this Substack. But on a great publishing day (Tuesdays feel especially rich in my corner of the Substack reading world!), I love to sit down with my lunch and scroll through Substacks. It was also a helpful way to spend 15-20 minutes working on the graphics or the writing for this lil buddy, or writing a small section of this newsletter.
   

3. Trying different lunch recipes (or snack recipes): I got a lot more creative with what I was eating for lunch because I wanted to have different things to highlight for the What’s For Lunch section. It started a bit of a Sunday meal prep routine for me, which I also love — there’s something very restful to me about chopping a boat load of veggies. Plus, I loved the adventure of trying different things for lunch!
   
   In 2025, I’d like to release myself of this pressure to share a new recipe every single newsletter (to be honest, the lunch I shared about today is my hyperfixation lunch right now and it’s too good to try something else), but I have ideas to find fun work snack recipes, tips on how to build your office snack basket, and fun work beverages in place of fun lunch recipes.

❌ Stop:
Three bad lunch habits I’m committed to breaking in 2025

1. Having a lunch show, other than Survivor: For a season of time, having a lunch show really served me. A 20 minute to half hour show is ideal, because it allows me to take a rest and maybe do a chore around the house. But too often, this turned into eating lunch at my desk, answering Slack messages as they came in, and numbing out in front of a screen. NO LONGER. Other than our Survivor watches, I’d like to be doing other things at lunch.
   

2. Not taking my lunch break: Ah, remember the whole reason I started this Substack? In an attempt to take my lunch break? Too often in September - December, I did… not that. I don’t get a special medal or heroic plaque for skipping an hour that I am entitled too - and I am a better human and employee when I take that hour away from work.
   

3. LOOKING AT MY FREAKING PHONE: I don’t know why, for the hour I am not paid for my work, I think, “Ah, but if I keep looking at the work and constantly refreshing my email and Slack stuff, I’ll be fine!” Nope. No, I won’t. I’ll just be in anxiety spirals. All I’m going to do this year is repeat over and over to my nervous system: “The world does not end if I am not near my phone for one hour.”

🎬 Start:
Three new things I’d like to incorporate into my lunch practice in 2025

1. Moving my body at lunch time: Hey, little fun fact: the world does not revolve around me sitting at my desk. You might not know that, from the way I SIT AT MY DESK ALL OF THE TIME. But in fact, the world continues on and is even made better because I took a walk with Pippin around the neighbourhood or rode the bike during my lunch. This is a limiting belief I have — “I can’t do this because XYZ” — but XYZ are often made up excuses in my brain. This year, we challenge those!
   

2. Doing errands & chores: I don’t often use my lunch break well to do errands or chores around the house, especially that which would set up future Hannah for success. This week, I’ve been making a concerted effort to tidy up the kitchen and other areas of the house. It makes a world of difference on my mental state — and is one of the perks of working from home, so why wouldn’t I take advantage of it? Here’s to more car washes at lunch, laundry ironing parties, and dinner prep… as well as other things I haven’t dreamed of yet.
   

3. Reading: When I first started working from home back in 2017, reading at lunch was one of the things I always did. A half hour of reading for me, and then I did a half hour of reading for work purposes. It was such a good rhythm. Now, I try to read at lunch and I get sleepy. But! I’m going to find a way. Even if I have to pull out the walking pad and read while I’m walking to keep my energy up, I’m going to find more ways to put reading where mindlessly looking at my phone has been.

And that keeps it fairly reasonable! We’ll do a check in at the end of quarter one to see how I’m holding up on these lunch goals — but I’d also love to hear if you have any goals or resolutions for your lunches in 2025! What’s one lunch continue, stop, and start you have? I want to hear it (and if I love it, adopt it for myself, as I do with all good goal ideas).

Thanks for welcoming back — let’s lunch together more often in 2025, eh?

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In the Lunch Box is a collection of treasures in my life from the last few weeks - media I’ve consumed, products I’m loving, things I can’t get enough of… in a condensed, digestible, aesthetic format (I hope).

1. Zebra Sarsa Pens - 0.5, in Vintage Colours: It’s taken me nine editions of this newsletter before I recommended a pen. If you know me, you know that’s restraint to the highest degree. I was assembling a pen bouquet for a client and some of these were leftover, so I started trying them out. I love the gelly roll of these pens, the muted earthy colourway of them, and I don’t even mind that they’re a larger pen nib size then my preferred (these are 0.5, I am normally a 0.28 - 0.3 size pen person; yes, I do derail professional conversations to talk about this with others.) My friend named these as her favourite pen of 2024. If your New Year energy has anything where you need new pens, I highly recommend giving these a shot.

2. Downton Abbey: 15 years after it started on our TVs, I am here and ready to talk about Downton Abbey. Over the holiday break, I saw something about what types of shows are gentle for toddlers and kids — shows that don’t move around a lot. This feels like the adult version of that to me. I love the British countryside, the stories about everyone, the British sense of humour. I can’t stop gobbling it up and weeping. Aristocratic Britain makes no sense to me and yet, it compels me though.

3. A Bit Much by Lyndsay Rush: I loved diving into this book of poetry from my favourite Instagram poet. She notices life in a beautiful way, and writes with such heart, vulnerability, and humour. She always makes me want to pick up a pen and write — one of my favourite feelings to get when I’m reading. I laughed, I cried, it moved me. I loved being able to find one of my favourite poems in the book - “What It Feels Like to Be At Peace With Myself” I have these lines taped up on a cue card above my desk to come back to it. “I find myself content yet ambitious, calm yet flamboyant, rested but ready to pounce. I am using my curiosity for hope, my imagination for best case scenarios, and my attention to detail for astonishment.” I get goosebumps every time I read those words.

I hope this was a nice, short break away from whatever you have on your plate - whether you’re reading on a work break, your lunch break, or with your coffee at some leisurely moment you’ve been able to steal away.

If you have ideas for future Lunch Notes topics or things you’d like to see me write about here, please let me know and I’ll add them in to my (chaotic) content calendar. (Seriously, I would love topic ideas - I can brainstorm some more ideas but I always love yours! And I have a content calendar now! So tell me what you want, what you really really want!)

Thanks for reading, and enjoy your lunch!

1. I can own it, fine. Yes, I did this. I’ve always been who I’ve always been.