Hi there! It's Mathea Ford and today I want to talk about Four Easy Bag Lunches that you can use when you have CKD.
This is really a straightforward little talk about how to kind of plan ahead a little bit and have a better lunch. When you're thinking about what you can take with you somewhere either you go to work or you go to the doctor's office or you're out. These are some easy options that are outside a little bit of the normal of what you might think.
Cooking and eating with a renal diet has some struggles and challenges when you're working from home and you have the ability to control everything and it only kind of becomes a little bit more complex when you're doing it when you're traveling. So, I want to help you plan some lunches that you can take with you and if you have a refrigerator you can put them in there or they're good for usually a couple hours so you can take them with you when you travel.
Number one is a Turkey Pita Sandwich. A Pita is like a bread that has a pocket in the middle and then some low sodium deli meat like turkey and some lettuce some onions. If you're not restricted in potassium, tomatoes. You can use a little mayo or mustard in there and add some other of your you know peppers. Any sort of renal approved veggies that you might want to see now add some flavor. A little pita pocket would be great. You can usually find pitas in your bread section at the grocery store.
Number two is a Veggie Pasta Salad. A pasta salad is really easy to make. You boil your pasta whatever kind you want – the Zitti, the you know spiral noodles whatever – and you can make a bigger batch on one day of the week maybe when you have a little more time. It's always good to make it like a day ahead because then you can let the dressing sauce kind of soak into it. You could portion that out once you make it. What you do is you boil your pasta and then once you drain it and it's cooled you add a little bit of red and green veggies like chopped green pepper, chopped red pepper, cucumbers you know if those types of things that you can add to it and then you add a vinaigrette that's low-sodium. It doesn't have to be low fat it really needs to be more of a low sodium.
If you're working… you know if you want to just add a little bit of oil and some vinegar that would be perfect too. That's where you can make kind of like a bulk amount of salad. Mix it up and then you can portion it out for your days.
Number three is it's what's called a Bento Box. I love Bento Boxes because they're almost like little kids' Lunchables but they're for adults so it kind of has each you put each thing in a different section of your tray or a different container and then when you get to wherever you're going you put it all together. The awesome thing about that is if you have a sandwich it doesn't get soggy. If you have a couple of cold things you can do a little ice pack with them like your lunch meat and then on the other part of it, you wouldn't have it cold so it wouldn't affect the bread. You can easily take with you some veggies, some meat and maybe some bread or crackers but just make sure when you're looking at your deli meat like I was talking about a couple of deli meat options make sure that you're looking for the low sodium deli meat or you're watching your portion size but that should be a good way to go. And I love them because you can take peanut butter, you can take nuts, you can do all different kinds of things and kind of make like a little meal that you can then add either mix together when you get it or just eat one piece at a time.
And number four is kind of a little bit of a change up on number two which is this is a Cold Noodle Salad. You had a pasta salad which is like this smaller noodles typically elbows, little spirals. This would be more like ramen noodles but obviously ramen noodles are can be high in sodium so you would take and you might boil s...