Ready in five minutes with six ingredients. Light, sharp and the one salad that disappears before anything else on the table.

Salt the Cucumber First

Slice the cucumber thin, toss it with half a teaspoon of salt and leave it in a colander while you do everything else. Ten minutes later you will pour off a surprising amount of water. That water is the reason most cucumber salads turn into soup twenty minutes after they are dressed, and this is the only step that prevents it.

The Six Things

• One large cucumber, sliced as thin as your patience allows.
• Half a red onion, sliced and rinsed under cold water so it stops shouting.
• A handful of cherry tomatoes, halved.
• Rice vinegar, one tablespoon.
• Sesame oil, one teaspoon — any more and it takes over.
• Salt, used twice: once to draw water out, once to season at the end.

Dress it at the table rather than in the kitchen. Cucumber keeps its snap for about fifteen minutes after the vinegar goes on, and everything you do to it before that is borrowed against those fifteen minutes.

What to Add, and What Not To

Toasted sesame seeds, a pinch of chilli or a few torn mint leaves all belong. Feta does not, and neither does anything creamy: the salt you already used will pull water out of a dressing the same way it pulled water out of the cucumber, and the plate goes cloudy within minutes.

From classic white to whole grain and sourdough — a quick guide to choosing the right loaf for what you are actually going to do with it.

Buy for the Job, Not the Label

Almost every disappointing loaf is a good loaf bought for the wrong job. A soft white tin loaf makes a poor bruschetta and an excellent bacon sandwich; a dense rye is the reverse. Decide what the bread has to hold before you decide what it is made of.

The Four You Will Meet Most

• White tin loaf. Soft crumb, thin crust, slices square. Sandwiches, toast, anything a child has to hold.
• Whole grain. Heavier and slower to eat, with enough fibre that a single slice actually keeps you going. Goes stale faster because there is less fat in it.
• Sourdough. Long fermentation, open crumb, chewy crust. Best on day one, better toasted on day three, and it will not go mouldy as quickly as a supermarket white.
• Baguette. Almost all crust. Buy it on the day, eat it on the day, and accept that this is the deal.

Storing It

Never in the fridge. Bread goes stale roughly six times faster at fridge temperature than on the counter, which is the one piece of kitchen advice that sounds wrong and is not. A paper bag for a crusty loaf, a sealed bag for a soft one, and the freezer for anything you will not finish in two days — sliced first, so you can take out what you need.

A loaf that has gone hard is not a loaf that has gone off. Hard bread is the beginning of croutons, panzanella and bread sauce.

Eat well without overspending — five everyday foods that are nutritious, cheap and stocked in every aisle you already walk down.

Cheap Is Not the Same as Poor

The foods with the best nutrition per unit of money are almost never the ones marketed that way. They are dried, tinned, frozen or in season, and they sit on the shelves nobody photographs.

The Five

• Dried pulses. A kilo of kidney beans costs less than a single ready meal and cooks into six of them. Soak overnight, boil hard for ten minutes, then simmer.
• Eggs. Complete protein, five minutes from box to plate, and they keep for weeks pointed end down.
• Frozen vegetables. Picked and frozen within hours, which usually leaves more vitamin C in them than in the fresh equivalent after four days in a fridge.
• Oats. The cheapest breakfast per serving there is, and the one that keeps a morning quiet until lunch.
• Whole seasonal fruit. Whatever is stacked highest and priced lowest is the thing that is genuinely in season.

None of this requires a new recipe repertoire. It requires buying the base ingredient rather than the assembled version of it, and accepting ten extra minutes at the stove in exchange for a shopping bill that stops climbing.

Half of what gets thrown away was fine when it came home. Where a vegetable is put matters as much as how fresh it was.

The Fridge Is Not One Place

A fridge has three climates and most people use one of them. The drawer is humid and is where leaves and roots belong; the middle shelf is dry and cold and suits anything already cut; the door is the warmest part and should hold nothing that spoils quickly.

Where Things Go

• Leaves. Spinach, kale and bok choy last twice as long wrapped loosely in a damp cloth in the drawer than they do in the bag they came in.
• Roots. Beetroot and carrots keep for weeks with their tops cut off — the leaves keep drinking from the root long after they have been pulled.
• Tomatoes. On the counter, stem side down, never in the fridge. Cold flattens the flavour within a day and it does not come back.
• Mushrooms. Paper bag, not plastic. They breathe, and a sealed bag turns them slimy overnight.
• Bananas. Away from everything else. They ripen their neighbours faster than they ripen themselves.

The One-Shelf Rule

Keep one shelf for things that need eating this week and put everything you buy on it face out. Waste is rarely a storage failure on its own; it is a visibility failure, and a shelf you can read at a glance fixes most of it.

One cooked chicken, one bag of leaves and a short list of storecupboard extras will carry a working week of lunches without cooking twice.

Buy One Anchor, Not Five Meals

Meal planning fails when every day gets its own recipe, because every recipe brings a half-used ingredient with it. Buy one anchor instead — a cooked chicken, a tray of eggs, a tin of tuna — and let the rest of the week be variations on it. Five recipes need thirty ingredients. One anchor and five dressings needs about twelve.

The Week

• Monday. Chicken, cucumber and cherry tomato over leaves, with a lemon and oil dressing.
• Tuesday. The same bowl with kidney beans added and a spoon of the dressing thinned with yogurt.
• Wednesday. Chicken through cold rice with spring onion, which is the day the anchor stops looking like salad.
• Thursday. Egg and leaves, because the chicken is finished and Thursday is the day everyone gives up.
• Friday. Whatever is left, in a wrap, with the last of the dressing.

Dress at the Desk

Carry the dressing separately in a small jar. A salad dressed at seven in the morning is a wet salad by one in the afternoon, and that single habit is the difference between a lunch you look forward to and a lunch you buy again on the way to work.

Cook once, dress five times. Nothing about a week of lunches has to be interesting except the last thing you add to it.