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Archive for the ‘Lunches’ Category

For those of us who have children in grade school, these are the days when the daily brown-bag lunch is getting to be a tired chore. We are no longer psyched about putting little “I love you” notes inside to surprise our first graders, we aren’t trying to think of new ways to mix-it-up, and we are probably getting a bit lax on the nutrition standards. Or a lot lax…

So here’s a new idea for a kid’s lunch box item that may just bring a little pep to his/her day, just when it is needed the most. How about, instead of the standard peanut butter and jelly, using pita bread instead? If your kid will tolerate whole-wheat then get a whole-wheat pita (and if not, get regular white pita bread), slice it in half, open up the pocket, and smear some peanut butter and jelly in there. Now here’s the next twist: slice up bananas and fill the pocket with them! Now that is a new and exciting way to eat a PB&J!

Now, one last thing: if your child is as strange as I was when I was a kid, and they like to put potato chips (I was partial to Doritos) on their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then instead of banana slices, give them a baggie of chips that they can fill the pocket with themselves when they get to the lunch room. [Disclaimer: I haven’t actually tried this idea out yet but I think it would be great!]

Alright so I’ve said it before: I like to eat a lot in the morning and afternoon and then skimp on dinner. It just fits my lifestyle better and keeps me from getting headaches from low blood-sugar. I therefore usually eat a 600 calorie lunch - or thereabouts - but I am offering a slightly lower calorie lunch menu here that will be more applicable to a broader audience. This particular lunch is great because you do all the prep work (all 20 minutes of it) on Sunday evening and then just grab and go. Because you are planning ahead for a whole week and making your food from scratch you are saving a ton of money by not going out to eat or buying expensive snacks at the office’s honor bar.

Cucumbers

First off, I think you should pack yourself some cucumber slices. I discovered these about a year ago when a friend came over with a bunch of cucumbers from her garden. We dipped them in ranch dressing and I have been addicted ever since! So crunchy, so yummy, so much fiber! So here’s what you do: buy two cucumbers on Sunday, then wash them water, slice off each end and discard those, then slice into 1/4 inch-thick rounds. Don’t peel off the skin - it has all the good vitamins in it! This should take all of 5 minutes to accomplish. Then divvy the slices up into lunch containers for the week.

Brown Cow Yogurt

Next up is a serving of Brown Cow Vanilla Cream Top Yogurt. Yes, I am suggesting you just go all the way and get the fattening stuff instead of the low-fat stuff. Not only is it super-tasty but it is still way healthier for you than Yoplait and other competitors. Many of the Yoplait and other brands have high-fructose corn syrup in them, along with color additives that you just don’t need to ingest. The Brown Cow Vanilla just uses maple syrup as the sweetener. This stuff is food at its purest!

Muffins

Finally, make these Bran Apple Muffins for a really healthy, yet filling, grain item that should keep you going until dinner time. I’ve made these muffins twice and really am pleased with them. They are very healthy but tasty at the same time. Sure, they aren’t going to come close in taste to a chocolate chip giganto-muffin full of lard from the bakery but you will feel much better about yourself after eating one of these than after eating one of those!

So again, on Sunday, make the muffins (they’ll take you about 15 minutes to mix and pop in the oven), then you will have enough muffins for you to have 2 per day for a 5 day week! You can have one as an on-the-go breakfast and the other at lunch, or have one for a mid-morning snack and the other at lunch. Because you are making these from scratch you are saving money too!

My recommendations for tweaking the muffin recipe are: add 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1 tablespoon of white sugar to the dry part of the mix, and substitute 1/2 of the flour with whole-wheat flour to make this a healthier muffin. Do not substitute all of the flour with wheat flour though or you might just end up with 12 inedible bricks instead of the yummy muffins you set out for.

Calorie Breakdown Per Lunch Serving:

• Cucumber: 18 calories
• 2 tablespoons of ranch dressing: 140 calories
• Brown Cow Vanilla Yogurt: 210 calories per container
• 1 muffin: 200 calories
• TOTAL: 568 calories

Resources:

The resources I used to determine calories and ingredients were:

• Calorie-Count.com
• TheDailyPlate.com
• FoodFacts.com

A whole heck of a lot of people eat a salad for lunch, whether it is their entire lunch or just a side. (I am one of those that eats a salad on the side - but then, I also front-load my calories early in the day and eat less in the evening.) The cost of the lunch salad can be broken down as follows:

Most Expensive: The Super-Duper Convenient Salad - $4.00

Buy this from the salad bar at your local grocery or restaurant. You are paying for the ability to say “hey I want a salad today.” Then presto - there it is! This salad will run you anywhere from $4-$10 per day for a total of $20-$50 for a 5-day workweek.

Medium Price: Salad in a Bag - $2.00

This is more work than the salad bar choice and you have to do some pre-planning. But it is so much cheaper!

2 bags of mixed-green salad greens = $3-$4 or ~1.60 per serving

Dressing = $4 per bottle or ~20 cents per serving

Croutons = $2 or ~20 cents per serving

Total cost per salad: $2.00, total cost per week: $10.00

Even though the salad is “pre-washed” you’ll want to wash it again at home (remember that spinach scare a few years ago?), then use your salad spinner to dry it or just lay it out on some paper towels for a while. Divide into 5 servings using plastic containers, then divide the dressing into 5 smaller containers (or just take the whole bottle to work). Put croutons in baggies. Put in the fridge and you are set for the week.

Least Expensive: Chop the Greens Yourself - $1.01

Prep your ingredients on a Sunday and have them ready to go for the week. If you buy a head of lettuce (1 head of green leaf lettuce is about $1.50) plus 1/2 pound of mesclun mix (about 60 cents) you’ll have enough greens for 2 weeks of salad. They might go bad after a week, though, so that is one downside. If you have a spouse or someone to share it with then this is a good option. Shred some carrots ($1.80) and 1 cup of cheese ($2.00); hard-boil 3 eggs ($1.20); add croutons ($2) and dressing ($4). This comes to about $1.65 or $8.25 for the whole week. Keep in mind that you’ve added cheese and eggs to this salad whereas you didn’t for the medium-priced salad. If you omitted the cheese and eggs then your total cost would be $5.05 for the week or $1.01 per day.

All these figures are based on my local Safeway prices.

Well, we did it! We stayed within budget and then some this month! We had budgeted $800 for groceries and restaurant meals for the month for our family of four and came in at $775. We were helped along by a $50 gift card to a restaurant chain that we got from our rewards credit card. Other than that we did not go out to eat at all, except one trip to DQ for ice cream after the kiddos went to sleep (and who can give up that??!!).

The $775 we spent was way less than we usually spend. I know that we could still potentially save even more money, judging by what I see other people reporting on other financial blogs, but we do tend to frequent a more upscale grocery store which we know charges higher prices. Our reasons for going to that grocery store are threefold: 1) There are never any lines at the check-out counters so we save valuable time, 2) We often see people we know there and feel it is worth the social and networking opportunity, and 3) Great produce from local farms.

Our budget looks great when we look at it on Mint. The numbers on the right show our average spending on those categories for the past 3 months (since that’s how long I’ve been a member of Mint) and the numbers on the left are our totals for this month. There is a $55 grocery bill that isn’t reflected in this yet since it is still pending in our checking account (we just spent that $ last night). Here’s to hoping we can keep ourselves at this level of spending for the rest of the year!

We had a couple of left over chicken-thighs from the other night’s blackened chicken so this is what I did with them for lunch today:

Chicken Roll-ups:

• Sliced off the meat from the bones
• Arranged the meat pieces in the middle of a tortilla
• Sliced some cheddar cheese and put on top of the meat
• Added a few dollops of steak sauce (I used Bulls Eye)
• Rolled up the tortillas with a fold at each end to keep the good stuff inside
• Microwaved for a minute

I cut one in half for the kids and they loved theirs. Mine was a whole one and if I weren’t trying to cut calories I would have had two! I served them with a side of baby carrots. Delicious and easy.