Broke, Quick, Improvisational Lunch

I woke up extra early this morning.  4 am, to be precise, and like all mornings where I awaken extra early I am lulled into a false sense of having more extra time that I genuinely do.

So while I had time to take Gatsby for a lovely 40 minute walk, enjoy a leisurely (and hot!) shower for the first time in months, and tidy up the yard I was also sprinting out the door, hairpins flying, & frantically wishing that I would make my bus to work.  I ate approximately 90% of my breakfast (guess who inhaled the crumbs?) and ran out the door with a protein shake, a frozen veggie burger, and a couple of yogurts hoping that I could cobble together something edible for lunch.

Guess what?  I did and it was delicious!  I knew that I had some leftover lettuce (current condition: unknown) and some random items in the fridge at work.

Here is what I made:

Yes, this is a paper bowl and plastic fork.  I'm sorry, planet Earth. :(

Yes, I know that my cellphone takes fairly lousy photos.  The lens is probably dirty and smudged, too.  Oh, well!

Black bean burger, crumbled atop the edible remnants of the curly leaf lettuce (not many curls in evidence...), with chiffonaded (is that even a word? I've never used "chiffonade" in the past tense...) freshly palm-crushed mint (aromatic!), half a package of roasted/salted peanuts from Costco, and the dressing was made with two genuine soy sauce packets (no MSG or weird stuff, whew!), a splash of orange juice, some crushed red pepper, and a bit of freshly ground black pepper.  No need for additional sodium with the soy sauce and salted peanuts, folks!

I also ate three slices of dill pickle, but that is neither here nor there...

P.S. It's a good thing that excessive parenthetical blogging contains zero calories... jeepers...  (...ellipses, on the other hand...)