As described in my last post, in an effort to cut down on costs and eat healthier, I’ve decided to start bringing my breakfast and lunch to work. On average, I spend about $17 a day on food which includes a pastry and juice for breakfast, and a salad or sandwich for lunch. That’s $85 a week that could be spent on something else, over $4,000 a year. Those sounds like the statistics people rattle off at smokers to try and get them to quit, but this is an addiction I think I can break in just two steps:
1. Bake breakfast in advance.
Week One: Blueberry muffins
I’ll outline the full recipe for these in a later post, but blueberry muffins are easy to bake, pack, and eat on the fly in between morning meetings. They took only thirty-five minutes of my Sunday morning to make and the only ingredients I had to run out for were blueberries and yogurt. If you want to make a large batch of muffins to last you a while, you can actually freeze them once they are completely cooled. Just wrap them in foil and place them in freezer bags for up to 3 months.
Cost: $14
2. Prepare lunch the night before
Week One: Salad and fruit
I already have a sizable chunk of farmer’s cheese in my fridge, so as I was putting together my shopping list this morning, I thought a week of salads and fruit for dessert would be cost effective. I picked up a few heads of romaine, sprouts, a bottle of balsamic vinaigrette, a red pepper, grapes, and a stack of Gladware containers.
Cost: $16
Overall at-work food cost for the week: $30
That’s a savings of $55, so if I keep this up, I could buy a Macbook Air in 32 weeks using just the cash saved by brown bagging it.
I am going to miss the pastry counter at Dean and Deluca though.
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I have recently realized that I am spending a Portland-comparable amount on my daily lunches. I may take a different approach to lunch than you from now on, but we shall see.
In the meantime I recommend for you a sandwich of tempeh, tomato, and avocado with a taste of black pepper. This sort of thing destroys my wallet.