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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.)
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.)
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Date: 2011-11-26 04:18 pm (UTC)From: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.