3 Make-Ahead Recipes to Upgrade Your Work Lunch

When the Copenhagen-based chef David Zilber, 39, left town for a week last fall, his girlfriend and two-year-old son ate like royals. They wolfed down chicken meatballs and tilted back bowls of curry that Zilber, a former chef at Denmark’s Noma restaurant, had stockpiled ahead of time in the fridge. But you don’t have to be a professional chef to meal prep like one. We asked Zilber and two other Copenhagen-based cooks to each share a recipe that can be made ahead of time and served for a few weekday lunches. To qualify, the dishes had to last at least a week in the fridge and be transportable to an office desk.

Their recipes have two things in common. First, they all have the consistency of stew. “Anything that’s stewed together will get better over time,” says Zilber, who coauthored “The Noma Guide to Fermentation” with the chef René Redzepi. They also lend themselves to endless modification. The big-batch beans that Eva Hurtigkarl, the in-house chef at the Danish fashion label Ganni, makes are a shortcut to dips, salads and soups, she says. And Youra Kim, the owner of Propaganda, one of Copenhagen’s few Korean restaurants, recommends bulgogi (sliced and marinated beef), for its versatility: Her recipe works with a range of accompaniments, from white rice to spaghetti. With so many ways to iterate, each lunch can be distinct from the next without much added effort.

David Zilber’s Curry With Chicken Meatballs

This curry has been part of Zilber’s life in some form since high school. He picked up the recipe while working at Rain, an Asian restaurant in Toronto, and has been riffing on it ever since. This version was born out of necessity. “I’m desperately trying to keep my child, who can sometimes be a capricious eater, alive,” he says. Lately, chicken meatballs have done the trick.

Makes six servings

Ingredients:

Meatballs

• 2 cups ground chicken

• 1 egg

• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper

• 1 tablespoon salt

• ⅓ cup cilantro stems, minced

• 8 sprigs cilantro leaves, sliced

• 2 scallion greens, minced

• 3 cloves garlic, minced

• 1-inch nub ginger, minced

• 2 tablespoons fish sauce

• Rice flour, for dredging

Curry

• 1 white onion, diced

• 4 cloves garlic, minced

• 2-inch nub ginger, minced

• 2 scallion whites, minced

• 1-inch nub galangal, minced

• 1 finger chile or bird’s-eye chile, sliced

• 1 eggplant, chunkily diced

• 2 stalks lemongrass

• 12 makrut lime leaves

• ¼ cup Mae Ploy yellow curry paste

• 2 cans coconut milk

• 1 cup water

• ¼ cup fish sauce

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

• ⅓ cup coconut oil

• Salt to taste