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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Picnics on a plane
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Picnics on a plane

Ditch the horrible airline food for a simple, delicious and healthy salad that you can put together in minutes

Pack a wholesome salad for long-haul flight journeys. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/MintPremium
Pack a wholesome salad for long-haul flight journeys. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

A friend in New Delhi recently started a big new job and on his first day was delighted by the lunchtime ritual he found in the office. At precisely 12.30pm, his assistant came into his office and lowered the blinds. He then spread a sheet of newspaper on the desk and proceeded to lay out the contents of a large tiffin that his wife had prepared earlier. The desk picnic turned out to be a daily affair, the two men eating and chatting companionably until it was time to face the afternoon workload.

I don’t miss very much about office life—I quite like being able to spend most of my working day in my pyjamas, for instance—but I do miss the sociable side of things, chatting around the water cooler, the Christmas party and the packed lunches. And I really envy my friend and his little taste of home to break up the working day.

I love the idea of packed lunches, albeit not enough to regularly work in an office ever again, but certainly enough to buy books with names like Best Lunch Box Ever and Beating The Lunch Box Blues.

Mainly, I just pore over the contents imagining what it would be like to have to put on smart clothes and leave the house before 9am. The only time I actually make use of the recipes, apart from actual weekend picnics in the park, is when I’m going on long journeys, on long-haul flights in particular.

I may have mentioned this before, but I’ll admit it again: The older I get, the more of a control freak I become in relation to anything food- or kitchen-related. When I travel, for instance, I get very anxious about where my next meal is coming from. I eat more at every meal, I squirrel away pastries from the hotel breakfast buffet, I raid the local market, fill my room with fruit, chocolate and biscuits—just in case. And increasingly I prefer to take my own meals with me on long-haul flights.

Mealtimes are out of kilter when you fly and your body takes a battering. For one thing, we become really dehydrated. During a flight, the moisture content of the air in the cabin is between 1% and 15%—the average moisture content of the air in the Sahara desert is around 20%. The food most airlines provide—sugary, salty, often fatty and full of carbs—often seems designed to make you even more dehydrated. Also, there never seems to be enough water. Or food generally—recently there seems to be a trend on long-haul flights to provide one proper meal and one stodgy wrap containing over-seasoned vegetables or chicken, just before landing, which apart from often being unappetizing (especially the wraps) is not really enough if you’ve been flying for 11 hours as I was the other day.

Thankfully I had a large bottle of water and had made this salad before I left, full of crunchy vegetables, sprouts, nuts and seeds, all dressed with the kind of peppy dressing that kicks your taste buds into touch. I felt so smug when the horrible wraps were being served. As I do right now, in a hotel room (happily working in my pyjamas), munching on the world’s most delicious grapes that I took the precaution of buying from a roadside stall yesterday.

Flying Food

Serves 1

This is a very free and easy recipe—choose whichever raw vegetables that make you happy. For maximum joy, try to incorporate a range of colours, flavours and textures in your salad. I found some beautiful purple carrots for mine.

Don’t mix in the dressing before you leave or you’ll be looking at something soggy and unappetizing come lunchtime.

If the idea of frantically assembling salad as you head to the airport doesn’t appeal, this keeps well in the fridge if you make it the night before—as long as you don’t forget to pop it into your cabin bag as you rush out of the door.

For the salad

Ingredients

50g vermicelli rice noodles

A handful of cashew nuts

1 tbsp sunflower seeds

1 tbsp sesame seeds

2 small carrots

1 small cucumber

A few little red radishes or a piece of mooli (white radish)

A handful of sprouted mung beans

A handful of chopped coriander

For the dressing

Juice of half a lime

1 tbsp rice vinegar

1 tsp sesame oil

1 tsp fish sauce

Half red chilli, finely sliced (or to taste)

Before you leave

In a dry frying pan, lightly toast the cashew nuts, sunflower seeds and sesame seeds. Leave to cool, then wrap in a piece of aluminium foil and put it in the lunch box. Put the vermicelli rice noodles in a bowl and cover with boiling water, leave for 5 minutes, then strain and leave to cool. Grate the carrot, roughly chop the cucumber, slice the radishes (or grate the mooli). Put them all, along with the sprouted mung beans and chopped coriander, into your lunch box.

Mix all the ingredients for the dressing and put in a small screw-top container that won’t leak. If necessary, put the jar in a plastic bag—you don’t want dressing all over your iPad.

On the plane

Mix together all the ingredients and dig in—resisting the urge (unlike me) to feel mighty smug.

The Way We Eat Now is a fortnightly column on new ways of cooking seasonal fruits, vegetables and grains. Pamela Timms tweets at @eatanddust and posts on Instagram as Eatanddust.

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Published: 09 Oct 2015, 10:52 AM IST
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