Lunch Plan

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.