Chris and I have been trying to be better about making our own lunches instead of ordering out both to save money as well as eat better food. I have been spending a lot of time on Pinterest looking for healthy and fun lunches for the both of us. The key is to look at the ingredients that you will have left over from making dinner (or leftovers from dinner). This isn't so much a recipe as a great way to package and store sandwiches in order to shorten the amount of time you spend making them and maximize the amount of time that they keep. If your lives are anything like mine you are tired after work, and not too into thinking about the next days lunch. This is where meal planning comes into play. On Sunday (if that's your free day) come up with your meals for the week. Try and plan things that use similar ingredients (if you are making salad and chicken one night, do Mexican or Italian the next night to use up the rest of the peppers and onions, and maybe use the left over chicken for sandwiches) that you can use for other meals throughout the week.
An example of a week of meal planning is:
Sunday lunch: Sandwiches
Sunday dinner: Roasted chicken (use left overs for next day sandwiches), spinach, roasted potatoes
Monday lunch: Flattened sandwiches made Sunday (using left over chicken)
Monday dinner: Homemade pizza (using mozzarella that was used for the sandwiches)
Tuesday lunch: Flatted sandwiches made Sunday
Tuesday dinner: Lime chicken orzo soup and baguette
Wednesday lunch: Left over lime chicken orzo soup and baguette
Wednesday dinner: Enchiladas, homemade chips, and guacamole
Thursday lunch: Baked chicken tenders and avocado sauce
Thursday dinner: Chive butter chicken, garlic chive mashed potatoes, salad
Friday lunch: Chicken and salad
Friday dinner: Spaghetti with garlic gravy and herbs.
If you notice, we maximized the ingredients. For the soup, we needed carrots and celery, but only needed 2 carrots, and 2 stocks of celery. As you know, they come with more than 2 per bag, so we have salad, for Thursday and Friday so we can use the rest of them without them going bad.
So, now, finally I will talk about the sandwiches. It is hard to make sandwiches in advance, they always get soggy or just don't taste as good as they should. I saw this trick, and was a bit skeptical, but I tried it and it seemed to work reasonably well.
What you need:
Bread (baguette, ciabatta seem to work better...I would not recommend using regular sliced bread)
Cling wrap
Heavy books
What you do:
If you are using a baguette, cut the bread in half lengthwise.
Put your ingredients in (think ahead about how the layers are...don't put soggy materials close to the bread although I had tomatoes against the bread and it held up ok)
Put the top of the bread back on and wrap the entire baguette in cling wrap tightly.
Place heavy books on sandwich for about 3 hours in the refrigerator.
Cut off pieces of sandwich as needed, keep the rest wrapped in cling wrap (preferably also in a Tupperware).
Flattening them really helps hold them together.
I made my sandwich on Sunday, and had my last bit today for lunch, so they keep for several days.
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| Chris's sandwich...As you can see, he had a lot more ingredients, but it still holds together quite well. |
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