Are you tired of packing sandwiches for lunch? I am! There are so many other things you can send for lunch that don’t focus on traditional “sandwiches” and here are a few!
I pack 2 adult office lunches and 3 kid school lunches, 2 morning snacks, and 4 afternoon snacks daily. That’s a lot of packing! If you are packing lunches for kids and adults, check out this quick video on how I pack an adult or “big kid” lunch with the same ingredients as the little ones.
If I relied on a sandwich day in and day out to provide the bulk of the meal, I’m pretty sure my family would get tired pretty quickly. Though I do make pretty amazing sandwiches.
Maybe it’s because my family knows that I make lunches for a living so they have different expectations; either way, I like adding variety to their lunches.
One of the easiest ways of adding variety is by switching up the “bread” portion of the meal. I like to use Toufayan pitas, their regular and gluten free wraps, pita pockets, and flatbreads. My daughter loves most of them grilled or warmed in a panini press, so even by changing up the texture the meal can be a huge success.
Rest assured that I’m just like you; when it comes to the actual packing routine, I often wish there was a lunch-packing-snack-packing fairy. All this meal packing and cooking means that my sink is rarely clean, there is a clean load of dishes waiting to be taken out of the dishwasher, and everything must be put away (my least favorite thing to do).
I know exactly what it means when many moms complain that kitchen duty never ends. I often tell my husband that one day I want to hire a kitchen assistant/sous chef. I’m not kidding! Between our household meals and recipe testing there is a lot of cleanup to do. In a way, I’m very lucky because he helps with a lot of the cleanup. He joked the other day that he should tell people he is a professional dishwasher.
Related: Try these easy-prep adult lunchables!
So, back to packing. Overtime, I’ve simplified the process to once a week meal planning + shopping + prep-ahead. You can readthis post on how I prep for the week in one afternoon and this post on how I feed my family real food on a budget.
My meal planning routine goes as follows: I sit down with a cup of coffee for 10-15minutes on Sunday mornings, I print out a MOMables meal plan, I plug it in my weekly meal plan printable, and then I fill out the rest of the meals with new recipes from cookbooks and our favorites. Finally, I head to the grocery store with a shopping list in hand and shop.
My philosophy is that making good family food should not be complicated. It's about using the best ingredients available, switching up meal ideas from time to time, and doing our best. In the end, homemade lunches do make for happier meals. For the recipes that inspired these sandwiches, head over to MOMables.com.
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This post was sponsored by Toufayan. The recipes and opinions are my own.
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