I realized today that I have been slipping quite a bit on the bring your lunch to work part of budgeting. Not only does this mean I am eating a lot of unhealthy junk, I am also wasting a lot of money on this unhealthy junk. Uh. Fail.
I do realize the why of it and it stems from pure laziness. There are a few extra steps you have to take in order to bring your lunch to work regularly. One is preparation. I am one of those people that has no time in the morning, so I need to prepare my lunch the night before. Preparation also means making enough dinner so that I may have leftovers to take to work for lunch the next morning.
I came across this article regarding a Bring Your Lunch to Work contest and thought it would be interesting to see what kinds of lunches the winners of the contest had. To my surprise, the contest winners’ lunches consisted of things that looked way too complicated and fancy for me to ever even make for dinner, let alone lunch at work. Greens pie with kale and swiss chard? Uh no. I’ve never even made a regular pie. And to tell you the truth, I think I burned an already prepared pie in the oven once. Call me simple, but I wondered also if chard was actually a typo and was supposed to actually be swiss cheese.
Except I have heard of swiss chard. Not sure what it is, I did have the Food Network at one time.
Here I thought my fantastic recipe for Chicken Salad sandwiches was pretty fancy. That’s what’s usually in my lunchbox. Some kind of sandwich, some veggies, fruit or whatever I have around the house at the time, which means there will never be potstickers in my lunchbox either.
I think I will consider experimenting with some new things though, which could possibly put me back on the track to taking my lunch to work again. Would also help make dinnertime a little more interesting too.
Do you experiment with new foods for your lunches? Or do you take the basics like I used to?
Would be interesting to know what others are doing. If you have any tips for taking lunch to work, I’d be interested in those also.
One Comment
I’m pretty much down with the basics. My lunch generally consists of: carrot sticks, sandwich, yogurt, fruit. Even though it’s pretty routine, we’ll vary between different lunchmeats (or PB&J) for the sandwiches, I always get about 6-8 different yogurt varieties and we vary our fruit purchases based on what’s cheap and in season. Every once in a while, I’ll get sick of sandwiches and will figure out a way to take leftovers or a frozen meal to break up the monotony, but really I haven’t gone out for lunch in months, and while this is pretty basic lunch fare, it works fine for me.