As I’ve mentioned before, I like lunches that I can prep an entire weeks worth of on Sunday’s because doing it throughout the week becomes annoying and sometimes forgotten.  I also don’t like the thought of buying lunch everyday because that gets ridiculously expensive really quickly.

It’s also why, most of the time, if you hear me talking about what I eat for lunch, it’s either some sort of salad or pasta salad or something that I made a huge batch of for dinner the weekend prior that I portioned out for lunches. They’re easy to prep ahead and easy to just grab and go at lunch.

Last week when I was trying to think of what I wanted for lunch, I was thinking I wanted something that would be relatively healthy and easy (obviously).  Then I decided I really wanted sandwiches this week for something different because I don’t really do a ton of them.

Then it became the fact that sandwiches aren’t something that I can really make a ton of at once and keep in the fridge.  I mean, yeah you probably could, depending on how you store it and what you put on the sandwich.  But you still risk something wilting or the bread getting soggy from all the sandwich contents.  I’ve done it before where I just assemble the sandwiches in the morning before work…but making lunch at 6:20am is also not that appealing and it usually means I’d wind up buying lunch at least one day because I’d be too lazy to make lunch.

:sigh: Welcome to how things process in my brain.

But damnit, I wanted a good sandwich.  So, I bought the stuff for sandwiches still not knowing how I was going to work this but I was sure I’d figure something out.

And I did.  Suddenly the idea came to me to make like little “sandwich kits”, almost like a Lunchable but for a 30 year old.

Now, I’m sure this is no revolutionary idea and others have likely thought of it, but I thought it was pretty darn helpful, so I decided to pass on the love.

All it is, is me taking every ingredient of the sandwich, putting them in their own little baggie and then putting everything together in a quart size storage bag that I can just pop in the fridge (all on top of each other or standing up together to save space) and then just grab a bag really quickly in the morning.  Then at lunch, just quickly assemble everything and in about 3 minutes, lunch is ready.  Frozen meals take longer than that in the microwave, so 3 minutes to put together a fresh, healthy lunch isn’t bad.

I kept the sandwich pretty simple and, obviously, you can make this with any kind of sandwich. But I just used one of those Sandwich thin bread/roll things with low-sodium/fat turkey breast, pepperjack cheese, cucumbers for a little crunch, and baby spinach.  I keep a bottle of low-fat ranch dressing at work that I used for the spread (if you’ve never had ranch dressing on a sandwich, you should try it, it’s really good) so I didn’t have to worry about that.  But, if that’s an issue, places like Target and Amazon sell condiment cups with lids in bulk that you can just stack next to the sandwich kits and grab them every morning.

Every component was placed in their own little zipper baggie and then each smaller bag was placed into a quart size storage bag.  The quart size was perfect for me, but if you’re going for a bigger sandwich, use a gallon size.  I used all snack size baggies for everything, except for the cheese slices; that got a sandwich bag.  And I didn’t bother to use an extra bag for the bread, I just put that in the quart size bag as is.

So, you have a nice little package like this:

Then you can just pull everything out and assemble your lunch faster than you can respond to an email.