Soon after I started my recipe blog, I was playing the daily game of office-fridge-tetris – trying to squeeze my worthy box of salad into a fridge stuffed full of peculiar looking plastic tubs, such is someone else’s packed lunch whether it be gourmet smoked salmon sandwiches or last night’s turkey curry.

 

If your office is anything like mine, despite the best efforts of encouraging or threatening office-wide emails about the ‘state of the fridge’ and the ‘Friday clear out’, there is always something unsavoury lurking at the back that no one seems to have the confidence to throw away, lest it turn out that Andrew from accounts was, after all, planning to eat that 3 week old beetroot hummus.

And so, having placed a watching brief on an open packet of tomatoes several weeks earlier, I decided that their time had come to meet the food waste bin and that my freshly prepared salad could legitimately take the space it vacated.

I was caught red-handed on the way to the bin by a colleague; hours earlier I had been declaring my commitment to never wasting food and now here I was poised over the bin with some only-slightly shrivelled looking cherry tomatoes. Tesco Finest ones at that.

After some light hearted ribbing, I sheepishly packed them into my rucksack and committed to take them to a good home, some eight weeks past their best-before date.

That evening I popped in to see a friend and on my way out of the door she leapt towards the freezer and announced that I must try one of her goat’s cheese & polenta muffins; she would pop one in a sandwich bag for me now.

Fortune had given me the constituent parts of the perfect packed lunch for the following day – a delicious savoury muffin (thanks Alex – recipe to come!) and balsamic tomatoes (thanks to the unnamed office donor and thanks to my colleague for policing my food waste credentials).

Only problem now was finding some space for it in the office fridge.

Read the recipe here or watch the highlights below.