The day 2 Glow Bowl: the recipe and the frame underneath

Day two of the Mini Wellness Reset happens in your own kitchen, with a bowl and whatever is already in the fridge. I call it the Glow Bowl because that is the word participants come back with, usually weeks later, usually while telling me about a Tuesday afternoon that went by without the three o'clock slump. The word makes me wince slightly, it is all over Instagram, but I never found a better one and it stuck.

It took me years to accept that recipes do very little. You make one twice, you lose the sheet of paper, you go back to the sandwich from the shop downstairs. What I am giving you here is a frame: five slots to fill, always the same five, with contents that follow whatever the market stalls happen to be selling. The quantities are the ones I use at home, so bend them.

Five slots to fill, always the same ones

A bowl turns into a proper lunch when all five slots are taken, and when one is empty you find out in the middle of the afternoon. In workshops I have everyone build a bowl on paper, then we look at what is missing: nine times out of ten, the fat or the protein. The fat especially. Thirty years of being told that fat was the enemy leaves a mark.

• The base does the filling. A wholegrain or a warm pulse, bulgur, quinoa, lentils, brown rice, over roughly a third of the bowl. Go beyond that and you have a plate of carbohydrates wearing a salad costume.
• The colour brings the raw and the crunch. Two or three vegetables, one of which has to snap. This is the slot people sacrifice first when they are in a hurry.
• The protein carries you through to the evening: a soft-boiled egg, sardines, feta, leftover chicken, marinated tofu. Chickpeas will do if the base is already a grain.
• The good fat carries flavour and settles hunger. Olive oil, avocado, a handful of seeds or almonds. Skip it and you will be hunting for sugar by four o'clock, and you will find some.
• The dressing holds everything together and turns five ingredients sitting side by side into a dish. I always make it separately.

The Glow Bowl, step by step

1. 01Cook a hundred grams of quinoa or bulgur, enough for two bowls. Rinse it under cold water the moment it is done, then let it cool in the open air, since a cooled grain soaks nothing.
2. 02Wash two generous handfuls of lamb's lettuce and keep the leaves whole. They make the bed of the bowl.
3. 03Halve a dozen cherry tomatoes, cut half a cucumber into thick half-moons, grate a small carrot. Salt the tomatoes separately, or they will leak their juice through everything.
4. 04Add the protein: two six-minute soft-boiled eggs, a drained tin of sardines, or a hundred grams of cubed feta.
5. 05Shake the dressing in a small sealed jar: two tablespoons of olive oil, one of lemon juice, half a teaspoon of mustard, a pinch of salt, a spoonful of warm water to loosen it.
6. 06Build the bowl: leaves at the bottom, the warm grain set beside them and never on top, the vegetables in their own zones, the protein in the middle.
7. 07Finish with a spoonful of pumpkin seeds or crushed almonds. The dressing goes on when you sit down to eat, never before.

What I change as the Marseille seasons turn

• Spring: podded broad beans, pink radishes, raw peas, a lot of mint. The lightest bowl of the year, the one I take down to Pointe Rouge before a late-afternoon paddle session.
• In summer, field tomatoes, raw courgette in ribbons, grilled pepper, basil, and feta in place of the egg. The dressing shrinks to lemon alone, since it is far too hot here for mustard.
• In autumn, roast squash still warm, walnuts, rocket, and lentils taking over from the grain.
• In winter, red cabbage shredded very fine, carrot, orange segments, chickpeas, pumpkin seeds. The citrus brings the freshness January lacks. This is the version I make most often, because red cabbage keeps for a week and I am nowhere near irreproachable on the evenings I get home late.

The office suits this format for very practical reasons. You eat it one-handed, with no knife and no microwave, in a windowless meeting room or sitting on the harbour wall at Les Goudes. It has no smell, which matters more than people think in an open-plan office. And it spares you the heavy digestion that follows a big hot meal: in one corporate workshop, a man in his fifties told me he had got his two o'clock meeting back, and I have been repeating his phrase ever since.

Look at how you feel at four in the afternoon and you will know what your lunch was worth.

Open your fridge tonight, exactly as it is, with the half tin of chickpeas and the lonely courgette that has been sitting there since Sunday. See which of the five slots is empty. I cannot promise it works for everybody, but with the women I coach it is nearly always the fat that is missing. Quinoa cooks in twelve minutes, so you have time to start it before you lay the table.