海角大神

It鈥檚 pretty easy to understand the desire to eat out in the middle of a workday. It can be really inconvenient to prepare a meal before you go to work, after all, and many of the meals you can throw together in a minute in the morning are pretty bland.

The problem is that eating out for lunch can be expensive, even if you eat at an inexpensive place every time. If you spend only $5 on lunch 鈥� and that鈥檚 a pretty cheap lunch when eating out 鈥� that鈥檚 $25 a week.

That leaves us with the idea of taking leftovers to work, which is something that people often don鈥檛 like to do because it means eating more of what you already had the night before (or the night before that).

Thankfully, there鈥檚 a pretty simple approach that solves all of these problems. All you need is a slow cooker and a small pile of freezer-ready resealable and reusable dishes. One good solution is to just buy a bunch of them in bulk, like this聽.

All you have to do is turn on your slow cooker on a Saturday or Sunday morning, toss in the ingredients for a particular slow cooker recipe, and let it cook all day long. If you wish to have that food for dinner that night, you can do so, but it鈥檚 entirely up to you.

When the food is done cooking, simply fill up as many containers as you can with whatever you prepared. Then, on each container, stick a piece of masking tape. On that masking tape, write what the food is and the date you prepared it.

Then, just stick all of the filled containers in the freezer.

Each week, do this with a different recipe. One week, you might make chili. Another week, make beef stew. Another week, make slow cooker lasagna. Another week, make chicken tortilla soup. Just find recipes that sound good to you (and, ideally, recipes that revolve around ingredients that are on sale at the store that week).

Each day, before you go to work, just open the freezer door, grab a container, and take it with you. Put it in the fridge at work so that it will thaw a bit in the morning, then microwave it and enjoy a warm lunch that鈥檚 not just a repeat of what you鈥檝e had recently.

During the first few weeks, you won鈥檛 have many options in the freezer, but by the third or fourth week, you鈥檒l open the freezer door and see containers of several different types. You鈥檒l be able to choose between three or four or five different meals for lunch each time you open the door, so you won鈥檛 have to repeat the same thing over and over again.

(One good way to get started is to do two batches of food on the first two or three weekends, then cut back to one batch every weekend or every other weekend as needed.)

Not only that, if you鈥檙e making a slow cooker meal at home, the cost per meal is going to be relatively low unless you鈥檙e intentionally choosing recipes with expensive ingredients. This makes lunches quite cheap.

If you don鈥檛 eat lunches in the workplace, this is still a good idea because聽it can provide convenience meals for you. You can just open up the freezer, grab the meal you want, and heat it up to have a low-cost, tasty, homemade meal.

One tip:聽you should generally eat these meals within two months of freezing them.聽The longer you let them sit in the freezer, the more likely they are to get 鈥渇reezer burn,鈥� reducing their quality. Meals are generally still edible after the two month period, but they鈥檙e best if you eat them within a reasonable time frame.

This simple method makes eating a homemade lunch significantly easier, and since homemade lunches are often far less expensive than eating out, this can be a powerful money saver for busy people.

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