Here's a helpful tip for those of you who aspire to maximum organization in your kitchen (or who just want a little help taking a lunch to work!) — create a "lunch drawer" with everything you need to grab for a quick lunch.
Blogger Becky Higgins did this in her kitchen — intending it for her kids. She makes their sandwiches, but they are responsible for grabbing their packs of nuts and dried fruit, along with applesauce and granola bars. She has a similar drawer in the fridge, filled up each week with baggies of grapes and cheese cubes.
Some form of this idea could be really helpful for those of us who have a hard time remembering to make lunch. Spend an hour on Sunday cutting up veggies and stock a drawer in the fridge with fresh, healthy things -- easy to grab when you're packing a lunch. Or do what Becky did and have a drawer full of convenience snacks, like packaged nuts and pretzels, that you can grab quickly.
• Read more: Lunch Drawer at Becky Higgins Blog
Do you do anything like this to help you pack a lunch? Do you have other organizing tips to help streamline your workday lunches?
Related: Speedy Lunch Prep! Make a Sandwich Station
(Image: Becky Higgins)
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I love the idea of a lunch drawer!!
Right now I do the Sunday prep for cleaning/preparing veggies and making soup for the week, which works out pretty well.
The other thing that I'll do it portion out leftovers for the next day's lunch right after I make weeknight dinner. Into the lunch bag it goes, and this way I get lunches packed before I even sit down to dinner.
We have a zero waste policy so the pre-packed snacks are out. However, I do keep a "lunch shelf" with goodies to aid fast packing.
This is a helpful tip, but what a lot of packaging. I guess for convenience and to enable kids, this is the way to go, but I prefer to buy a larger jar of applesauce and put it in reusable containers. Same goes for dried fruit and nuts-I usually make my own mix and put them into small containers. I don't have a weeks' worth of containers so I guess I need to just make it myself. My son chooses his own lunch snacks but I'm the one packing it up to go. I usually make his lunch for the next day while I'm packing up the dinner leftovers. Maybe when he's a bit older, he can do this on own.
terrible idea. who has the space, for start? plus it just lends itself to foods which can be kept at room temperature (preserved salad dressings, sugary snack bars, and crackers - as I see in the picture)
Make it a crisper drawer though.... I prepare a load of salad at once each Sunday night and fill a tupperware container with each of shredded carrot, cucumber, beet and lettuce. Stow them in the fridge.. A heaping tablespoon of each into another container makes for a fast mixed salad every day. Take it with one of the soups I freeze in tupperware, and there's lunch sorted.
I like salad... most of the fillings make great sandwich fillings too. batch of hummus nearly always on hand too.
We don't have a lunch drawer, but we do have a snack zone. It houses the nuts and dried fruits we buy in bulk, the occasional box of crackers, and sometimes candy.
Second what everyone else says - great idea, but too reliant on packaging and shelf-stable items to really beef up lunch to its nutritive potential. :( However, I don't have kids and I'm not about to judge someone who is at their wits end trying to find the time and energy to pack lunches everyday, so while this doesn't square with my priorities and ethics, I can't imagine a better way, either.
We just moved my daughter to a new school where we now have to send her lunch from home. While the bulk of her meal is not pre-packaged foods, adding an individual-size apple sauce or cheese stick or yogurt makes throwing a balanced lunch together in the morning a snap.
coming from the house of two adult professionals, we totally have a shelf stable and refrigerated snack zone. We are both trying to watch what we eat and having places to grab something healthy and ready to eat keeps us on track.
If you like to pack things like yogurt and applesauce from a bulk container consider something like a goodbyn, they are meant for kids but they have several leakproof compartments to keep food seperate. also filling up the compartments with different thinks will make sure you are balancing out your lunch. http://www.amazon.com/Goodbyn-20031-Lunchbox-Blue/dp/B002N2YUCW/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1331882231&sr=8-3-fkmr0