Cooking dinner for the family is easy. Lunch is hard.

Pre-Iris, I used to eat lunch out at every available opportunity. Beef teriyaki and a couple of pieces of mackerel sushi at Hana. Two slices of sausage and onion pizza at Pagliacci. Chicken peperonata sandwich at Red Line.

Now, lunch out is an occasional luxury, and I don’t have Laurie here to entertain Iris while I get lunch ready, so I’m not going to be in the kitchen debearding mussels. Lunch needs to be ready in ten minutes or less.

The best quick lunch is leftovers, and I do my best to plan dinners that result in good leftovers. If there are a lot of leftovers, though, I’d rather save them for dinner the next day. Sometimes we get takeout–Iris has long been fond of the beef, cabbage, and cheese piroshky from My Favorite Piroshky.

But it’s hard to resist the siren song of convenience food at lunch, and we’ve been known to eat things like frozen lasagna, which kind of sucks. But convenience food covers an enormous range of items from inedible to pretty good. I’ll try to spotlight something on the “pretty good” end of the spectrum from time to time.

At the top of our list is Safeway potstickers, which Iris calls “dumplings.” (I realize there are whole swaths of the country that also call potstickers “dumplings,” so maybe Iris is from New York and we just never noticed.) Made with chicken and pork, scallions and crunchy lotus root, Safeway potstickers are better than plenty I’ve had in actual Asian restaurants. The filling doesn’t have that “chewy hunk of meat” quality–it’s smooth, and the dumpling wrappers gets nice and crunchy. (Iris likes hers extra-crunchy.) They take ten minutes to make.

Usually I serve dumplings with some frozen peas. I nuke them and put on some soy sauce, sesame oil, and black pepper. Until recently, I didn’t realize there were two kinds of frozen peas, petite and regular. Iris and I both prefer the regular peas. I guess we’re just tough characters who won’t put up with this petite vegetable crap.

This is a totally great lunch–today’s lunch, in fact. As I pushed her stroller up the hill from Grandma’s house today, I said, “Should we have some dumplings for lunch?”

“And some soy sauce and some hot sauce,” she replied. “Hot sauce a little spicy.” (Iris likes having puddles of soy sauce and hot sauce on her plate for dipping. Right now we have Frank’s RedHot.)

Of course, there are some things Iris likes even better than dumplings. While we were eating our lunch, I said, “Iris, after we finish our dumplings, should we have some pumpkin ice cream?”

She extracted a half-chewed dumpling from her mouth, put it on her plate, and pushed the plate way. “Iris all done.”