What's For Lunch?

I don't know about you all, but as the Provider of Food here at Greenridge Chronicles, I tend to obsess a lot about the food I make. I know my kids obsess a lot over the meals, but if I had to hazard a guess I suspect we come at it from vastly different perspectives. After a lot of thought, I've narrowed my menu angst down to 4 main issues:

- the need to economize
- the sheer bloody monotony of it all (3+ meals a day plus liquids really oppresses the diva in me)
- the need to have it amuse me periodically
- taste

I guess the last should have come first, but really, finances and monotony do tend to come to the forefront with a rather distressing regularity. A visit to Fujiya, the sushi grocery around the corner, has me wishing they could deliver my lunch every single day. Yes, I can make sushi, but it's the not-having-to-make-it I love most. It just magically appears on my plate, without me having to do anything more than pay to get it there. And I love sushi.

Plus, it's not just me partaking of the meals here. I have three surprisingly expressive housemates hanging around all day. Sometimes it seems as if they do nothing but eat eat and eat, then tell me they're hungry. It's exhausting. Thankfully their father is a mild mannered man who knows better than to criticize the food eats what he's given.

For the past two weeks we've been having these things for lunch. They are easy to make, quick to prepare, use a lot of healthy ingredients, and everyone likes them. You use rice paper wrappers and roll them up with whatever you have handy in the fridge chopped vegetables, lettuce, cold cooked fish or chicken, and spices. Today we used fennel fronds, tarragon, and mint, all fresh from the garden, mixed with shredded lettuce and a can of salmon. I think I used a little balsamic vinegar as well.
Here's a picture of the ingredients before I rolled them up. The rice wrappers are in the forefront, on the dishtowel.