"I'm in middle school now. Nobody eats sandwiches."
Wyatt delivered this on the Sunday before school started, while I sat at the kitchen table writing out the week's lunches, in the tone of a lawyer making a closing argument. I asked who, exactly, "nobody" was. He said everyone. I asked whether a wrap counted as a sandwich. He thought about it for a long time and ruled that a wrap is not a sandwich, because "a sandwich is bread." We had a deal.
So in sixth grade, Wyatt's lunches come in two forms: hot food in an insulated food jar, and wraps. He still buys lunch on pizza Fridays, which costs $3.35 at the middle school this year. Here's the rotation after our first week and a half, what each lunch costs, and what I got wrong on day one.
The jar
I bought him a 16-ounce insulated food jar for $22, wide enough to eat out of with a spoon. It holds about two cups, which is a real lunch even for an eleven-year-old who has grown two inches since spring. His lunch period starts at 11:50, so whatever goes in has to stay hot for about four hours.
The morning routine:
- Fill the empty jar with boiling water, put the lid on and leave it for ten minutes.
- Reheat the food until it's steaming all the way through. I check it with the Thermapen and go for 165°F.
- Pour out the water, fill the jar right to the top (less air, less heat lost) and close it tight.
On day one I skipped the first step because I was running late. Wyatt came home and reported that his spaghetti had been "room temperature, which is technically a temperature." He ate it anyway. Every morning since, the hot water goes in first. I follow the jar's own directions and the USDA's guidance on keeping hot foods hot, and those are the places to look before packing hot lunches of your own.
The rotation
- Monday, jar: Sunday's spaghetti with meat sauce, an apple and a handful of Goldfish. $1.77.
- Tuesday, wrap: a 10-inch H-E-B flour tortilla with smoked chicken from Matt's Saturday cook, cheddar, shredded lettuce and a little ranch, plus grapes and pretzels. $1.97.
- Wednesday, jar: fried rice with egg, frozen peas and carrots and diced ham, made from leftover rice the night before, with a banana and a cheese stick. $1.62.
- Thursday, wrap: ham and cheese roll-ups with a pickle spear, crackers, an apple and a small bag of Hot Cheetos, which are rationed in this house and therefore treated like gold. $2.30.
- Friday: pizza at school. $3.35.
The four packed lunches average about $1.92, or $7.66 for the week. That's more than the $1.60 lunches I packed for him last year, and the difference is mostly more food. Wyatt was coming home starving on last year's lunches, and a jar of spaghetti fixes that better than a PB&J ever did. Next to buying lunch every day, packing still saves about $1.40 a lunch, around $5.70 a week, or roughly $200 over the school year against a $22 jar.
What works in the jar, and what doesn't
Good so far: spaghetti, fried rice, chili mac, charro beans over rice, and white chicken enchilada filling over rice, which Wyatt calls "an unrolled enchilada." Soup will join the rotation once October cools things off, if it does.
Not good: anything crispy, which steams itself soft by lunchtime. I tried leftover chicken strips once and got a review I won't repeat. Plain buttered pasta also fused into one solid noodle by 11:50.
The jar also has to come home every day, and it has to be opened when it does. The first Thursday, it stayed in his backpack until Saturday morning. I won't describe what fried rice smells like after two days in a sealed jar in August. New rule: the jar gets rinsed at 4:45, before he's allowed his 4:45 plate. Clean as you go applies to sixth graders too.
Meanwhile, the second grader
Eli is not done with sandwiches. Eli is not done with anything he has ever liked. His dinosaur-print lunchbox and its Bentgo insert are back for second grade, packed with the cold cheese quesadilla wedges he's loved since kindergarten, Goldfish, fruit and a yogurt tube, still about $1.55 a lunch. One morning he watched me pack Wyatt's jar, asked what was in it, heard "fried rice," and went back to his cereal, satisfied that his own life remained in order.
Wyatt has already put in his first request for next month: brisket in the jar. Labor Day is coming. We'll see what's left.
