Frugal Tips for School Lunches
Pack a Nutritious School Lunch on the Cheap
Packing frugal, healthy school lunches is no more difficult than stuffing a Lunchables in your student's backpack.
Nothing makes a healthier, and cheaper, school lunch than one packed from home. Here are some ways to make your little scholar’s lunchtime experience nutritious and healthy while not breaking your grocery budget.
Avoid the “baby carrots”
These little peeled chunks of the orange root vegetable are really regular carrots peeled and cut up in to smaller finger-length bits. After an open bag of these nuggets sits in your refrigerator, the carrots dry out and then develop a layer of slime. Yuk!
Buy full-length carrots, peel a few of them and cut them into 4-inch long pieces. Place them in a container of cold water and you’ll have fresh vegetables for your kids’ lunches all week long. Store celery sticks this way, too. Be sure to change the water every day.
Freeze sandwiches
Take your kids’ sandwich orders on Sunday night and create an assembly line on your kitchen counter. Meats and cheeses freeze well. Add toppings such as mayonnaise, mustard, lettuce and tomato later. Put the sandwich in the refrigerator to thaw the night before and add toppings in the morning.
A note about peanut butter and jelly: don’t freeze, but spread the peanut butter on the bread the evening before and refrigerate. Add the jelly in the morning and it won’t have a chance to soak into the bread.
Fill sports bottles with juice
Reduce waste and stay away from the juice box aisle. Fill sports bottles or other portable containers with juice and an ice cube. You save money, reduce garbage and get more to drink, to boot!
Train your kids to bring home their plastic bags
Unless smeared with jelly or coated in crumbs, those little zippered bags are easy to reuse and can last a week before getting too grungy. If you’re really motivated, wash them every night and hang them on chopsticks placed in a glass to dry.
Grocery Shopping Tips contains some more ideas for healthy and frugal supermarket shopping.
