At 11:58 on Monday, Wyatt walked into the kitchen, opened the bottom freezer drawer, read a strip of blue painter's tape out loud ("taquitos, five each, air fryer 375, 8 minutes"), and made lunch for himself and his brother. I didn't look up from the payroll report. That's the whole idea.
School let out last Thursday. My hours at the preschool stay at 22 a week through June: Tuesdays and Thursdays in the office, and about three and a half hours on each of the other three days at the kitchen table. Office days have their own arrangements. This post is about the home days, when three kids are hungry at noon and I'm in the middle of tuition billing. Lunch has to be fast, and it has to be something an eleven-year-old can make without me.
So over two Sunday sessions in May, I filled the freezer with ten kinds of lunch. The three dozen breakfast burritos I threatened to make back at spring break are in there too, in their own bin. As of this morning there are 21 left. This post is just lunch.
The ten lunches, and what each cost
- Bean and cheese burritos, 24: $11.45, about 48 cents each. The spring break recipe without the eggs.
- Chicken and cheese taquitos, 30: $13.10, about 44 cents each. Shredded chicken, cream cheese, cheddar and green chiles rolled in corn tortillas.
- Ham and cheese sliders, 24: $10.57, about 44 cents each. The last of our Easter ham, finally used up.
- Mac and cheese cups, 18: $6.65, about 37 cents each, baked in muffin tins. These exist for Eli.
- Meatballs, 48 small ones: $12.18, about 25 cents each, from two pounds of the bulk ground beef. Six make a meatball sub or a bowl of spaghetti.
- Chicken tortilla soup, 10 single portions: $9.40, about 94 cents each.
- Chili, 8 single portions: $10.80, about $1.35 each, for Frito pie or chili dogs.
- Egg fried rice, 8 portions: $4.60, about 58 cents each.
- Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, crusts cut off and edges crimped, 20: $6.43, about 32 cents each. The crusts went into the freezer too, for the meatballs' breadcrumbs.
- English muffin pizzas, 24 halves: $10.26, about 43 cents each.
All together, $95.44 for roughly a hundred kid-sized lunches, or about 96 cents a lunch before fruit and milk. Last school year, a packed lunch with everything in it ran about $1.60.
What I learned from the flu
When all five of us had the flu in February, the freezer fed us, but two lessons came out of that week, and both shaped this batch. First, single portions. A quart of soup is great for a family and useless for one kid at noon, so the soup and chili went into our glass containers with the gray and blue lids, one serving each. Second, directions on every label. Every strip of tape says what it is, the date, how many make a lunch, and how to heat it. Wyatt reads the tape. Eli reads Wyatt.
The kid-friendly stuff lives in the bottom drawer of the kitchen freezer, where Eli can reach it. The backstock lives in the chest freezer in the garage, and I restock the drawer on Sunday nights.
Reheating, and who does what
Wyatt runs the air fryer now: taquitos, burritos, pizzas and meatballs all crisp up better in there than in the microwave. Eli uses the microwave with someone watching, and Rosie eats whatever Eli is eating, cut small, plus a cup of frozen blueberries. Anything reheated gets checked for 165 degrees in the middle, which is the USDA's number for leftovers. Wyatt checks with the Thermapen, mostly because he likes using it.
What didn't work
- The mac and cheese cups dried out in the microwave. A teaspoon of milk on top and a damp paper towel over the bowl fixed it.
- About a third of the crimped sandwiches leaked jelly at the edges. Less jelly, and a ring of peanut butter around the edge as a dam, solved it on the second batch.
- The first taquitos cracked when I rolled them, because cold corn tortillas break. Thirty seconds in the microwave under a damp towel made them roll like they were supposed to. I knew that one from the restaurant, and I forgot it anyway.
One week in, the taquitos are disappearing fastest, mostly because Wyatt has started eating them at 10:30 and calling it brunch. Eli has ranked all ten lunches. The mac and cheese cups are first. The soup is last, behind an option he wrote in himself, which was "nothing."
