Brown-baggin' it - wait, who has brown bags anymore, really?

[wallwalker]

Every bit of advice on saving money on food says, "DON'T EAT OUT." Some of them throw "EVER" in there, but most of them stop at the first three words. I would like to follow that advice. And they make it sound so easy - throw together some leftovers, and viola, lunch.

But right now my only leftovers in the fridge are the pizza that someone else got for dinner last night (after I basically said, "Sorry, I'm not cooking after a ten-hour shift, can you deal with dinner please?" Not that I was reasonably expecting this particular person to make a home-cooked meal after saying something like that, but honestly, it would've been nice and I should've specified that,) some home-made mashed potatoes from Thanksgiving (but not the rest of the meal - thanks to said shift we had to leave before leftovers could be portioned out) and some spaghetti and meat sauce that's maybe a week old, because despite my best efforts and the efforts of both of the people I live with, we just can't seem to finish eating stuff like that. Maybe I cook too much at once. I don't know how else to do it; if I don't cook it, we won't end up cooking it and we won't eat it anyway! Either way I end up wasting food. I really just can't seem to win.

[I am NOT going to say that the math and science courses I took in school were a waste of time, because they weren't. But I will say that given my current job and my current fortunes, a course on how to effectively keep a household budget, how to keep a pantry, how to store food properly, and so forth would have given me skills that are a lot more relevant to how I must live this life today. And in all honesty, why isn't that course required for everyone? Even scientists and mathematicians need to eat! And given the number of science majors I've known in my life who basically and literally lived off of ramen and the occasionally takeout, these are obviously not ingrained skills.)

I suppose I'll take the spaghetti and mashed potatoes to work, and take my chances (and hell, after this week having an excuse to leave early would be a relief, in a way.) I'd take the pizza instead, but the pizza is a lot more likely to get eaten if I don't take it with me, and the chances of the spaghetti getting eaten by anyone but me at this point is practically nil. I hate wasting food.

(I'm mostly joking. The spaghetti is probably fine if I heat it properly. I've done this before.)

Comments

[lassarina]

Home Economics should be required coursework for all genders, seriously. When I went to university there were girls there over 18 who did not know how to do laundry. How does that even. I mean. WHAT.

The hardest part, for me, is finding things I can stand to eat repeatedly. The paladin and I generally make up a two-part shopping list every Saturday morning: dinners, and breakfast/lunch. Sometimes, that means making a massive batch of beef burgundy, lentil-sausage stew, chili, or fajitas on Sunday and taking the leftovers for a lot of the week. Other times, it means we pick up bread and deli things.

When we have short weeks (since we both work office jobs), we might just plan one meal that'll give two lunches' worth of leftovers and then rummage for ourselves (i.e. eat out) the rest of the time; some weeks I'll just buy four little cartons of yogurt, some veggies to slice up, some crackers or rice cakes, and hard-boil some eggs, and then I can portion out everything so that I can throw it all in my lunchbox while I'm brewing my tea.

We also keep frozen French bread pizzas and/or TV dinner type meals in the freezer for cases of "zero fucks given," and cup ramen in the pantry for the same reason.

In general my best advice is portioning things out the night before into your tupperware or what-have-you because then in the morning even if you oversleep it's grab and go and adds 30 seconds to your routine. (This obviously doesn't work so well for sandwiches, but that's what tea-making time is for, in my case. I make a travel cup of tea every morning.)

For me the big limiting factor is that I just cannot eat the same thing every day (with very few exceptions), and I get tired of sandwiches particularly quickly--I've been known to just take the damn lunchmeat and the hell with bread. If you don't have that problem, that will probably make life much easier for you.

Incidentally, I plan for one lunch out per week. That's to cover the inevitable morning when I either have no fucks to give or have overslept or I know that I have something starting immediately after work (like my French class) and I don't want to be hauling around my lunchbox all that time.

As far as brown bags: for food safety, I bought a cheapie insulated lunchbox at Wal-Mart about 2 years ago, which still works fine, and I keep several ice packs in the freezer to make sure food stays at the right temperature.

[stealth_noodle]

I stopped making salads and have started buying them when I (frequently) forget to pack dinner at work; the amount of stuff that went bad before I could finish it was making it almost more expensive for me to make my own. :/

And everyone should have home ec, yes. One of my college roommates taught me how to cook, because the extent of my skills was boiling water. I did know laundry, because I'd been in charge of it at home for a while, but I seriously had no clue how to make food happen from ingredients.

[thene]

IA with NOT EATING OUT (EXCEPT MAYBE ONE LUNCH EVERY TWO WEEKS OR SO). I also go with not drinking anything except tapwater, tea and coffee.

I tend to assume that the best way to learn to cook is by cooking; I didn't learn much in two six-week food tech (ie. HE) courses in my first two years of secondary ed, but I learned a lot in a hurry when I started doing all the family cooking when I was 13. Can one give children courses in self-reliance? I figure it's what people learn when you take the support systems away.

I am a very lazy cook. I mostly hate cooking, but I hate eating out way more because I spend the whole time thinking thoughts like 'I could have made this at home for under $2/plateful' - I can enjoy it so long as it doesn't happen more than about once a week, and when we do eat out it's almost always sushi simply because I can't make it at home. anyway, I just have a decent-sized mental list of things I can make as quickly & painlessly as possible out of inexpensive staples.

re. lunches, it's good to find kinds of readymeals/soup/granola bars you like - that way you have something that you can store forever that's always there when you need it. My usual shift is 6am-2pm so I mostly just don't consume anything during my work hours except for granola bars and green tea (I took my spare kettle to work yay).