When you have a day job, you only have so much free time. To minimize the time I spend thinking about logistics, I do things like tie my keys to my belt loop, try to keep things in the same place and almost always have the same thing for lunch.

After lo these many years of sailing through my lunches with a Greek Salad, I’m starting to see things shimmering in the distance. To the people who lived there, the mediterranean must once have seemed like the whole world. Now we have airplanes. More to the point, now we have the internet where people share recipes online you never thought you’d make at home.

Enter the Green Papaya Salad. Originally from Laos, it is now popular all over southeastern Asia and the world.

There are many green papaya salad recipes online, and they seem to vary little. I first tried making it after visiting Pig and Khao restaurant in the lower east side in NYC. I suspect Leah Cohen, the owner/chef, is a genius. Everything we tried was beyond delicious. This is where I found their recipe. It takes more time, but it is a thing of beauty. More importantly, go have dinner at the restaurant! Blow your mind.

Pig and Khao go all out and top the salad with crisp fried taro and scallions, using the scallion oil in the dressing. I tried fried julienned sweet potatoes, which are sweet like taro, and it was delicious but I don’t have time to do that for lunch.

Below is a slightly simpler version, with a rotating cast of vegetables.

Green Papaya Lunch Salad

For about 3 salads

to make the dressing:

2 Tbsp sugar

1/4 cup fish sauce

1/2 cup lime juice (lemon works too)

1 large clove of garlic (minced (1/4-1/2 tsp garlic powder-not garlic salt also works)

a couple of very hot chilies minced – skip seeds if you want less heat (1/4 tsp ground red pepper if you don’t have fresh). Alternately a few small dried cayenne peppers soaked into the dressing

1/4 cup oil – not olive, something mild like peanut or canola.

assemble the salad:

1/2 to 3/4 lb. cooked chicken torn or cut into bite-size pieces – OR TRY TOFU crumbled into cornstarch, fried into crispy-chewy sauce-absorbing tiny bundles.

1/2 a medium green papaya, peeled and julienned.

1/2 to 1 cup carrot stix. Precut works great.

1/2 cup of cucumber, julienned.

A large handful of each: mint leaves, basil leaves, cilantro, all chopped.

Dress the salad and top with crunchy Chow Mein noodles and chopped peanuts.

This salad tastes better the day after you make it. I make three days in plastic tubs with the dressing at the bottom. The night before, I shake the salad up. At lunchtime, I add the crunchy noodles and peanuts.

NOTE: Other delicious vegetables to add to such a salad are cherry tomatoes, julienned cucumber, fresh green beans, julienned kolrabi (instead of green papaya), mung bean sprouts. You pick.