Whether you’re looking for salad bowl ideas for a packed lunch, a picnic or a lunch, if you’re cooking for one and living alone, then you’ll find that you have to operate differently to the masses. You can’t have a vast choice of different foods without either overspending on packaged mixed salads, or throwing unused salad out.
I’m not a big salad eater, so have developed my own little list of foods to have in the house, but once there’s a long holiday weekend, or the sun decides to come out, the first thing I do is fill up the fridge with salad, but, I also need to make sure I’ll be eating it all. I have a #zerowaste policy and can throw no food away.
Today’s Salad Bowl: 
Today I’ve made up a salad bowl containing:
- Scotch egg
- Spicy potato salad
- Sliced salad tomatoes
- Boiled egg
- Fresh yellow peppers.
I’ll sometimes make Scotch eggs, but this time I bought a pack of two. I made the spicy potato salad from cupboard items, the sliced tomatoes have quite a good shelflife and these are tomatoes I bought eight days ago and they’re still firm. Boiled eggs can be made in 8 minutes in my microwave egg boiler and the peppers I bought eight days ago as part of a pack-of-3, this is the second of those peppers.
Overall, the food in this salad bowl consists of salad items that have a long shelf life, are easily obtainable and come together in a nice filling bowl. Look, there’s even two of those mythical 5-a-day items!
No green salad!
You might notice there’s no green salad in there. I’m not a fan of lettuce and I ate a whole lettuce last week, so I plan to avoid them for the rest of the year. Cucumber’s OK, but there’s a lot of it to get through once you buy one, so I gave it a swerve this time. Spring onions are difficult to buy as a single item and I really don’t fancy more than one 🙂
For me, it’s about enjoyment…. if you aren’t enjoying what you eat then there’s no motivation to try to eat “better”…. so I don’t force feed myself things just because they’re “good for me”
Menu Cost:
The scotch egg cost me £0.31, potato salad £0.10, peppers £0.10, tomato £0.10 and egg £0.07 makes the total cost of this salad bowl £0.68. A budget-busting packed lunch choice, or a meal at home.