| Tawra Kellam is the editor of
LivingOnADime.com.
Tawra and her husband paid off $20,000 debt in 5 years on $22,000 a year income.
|
The average school lunch cost $3/day
or $540 per year and what mother hasn’t wondered if those lunches
actually get eaten? In her book Not Just Beans, frugal cooking
expert Tawra Kellam provides solutions to jazz up those lunches and
save up to $400 in the process. Here are some sack lunch tips that
help guarantee you will be able to retire the "starving kids in
Ethiopia" lecture for good.
Those snack sized bags of munchies
cost a lot! Make your own by:
~Pre-packaging chips, pretzels,
animal crackers, vegetables etc. into sandwich bags at the beginning
of the week. (Have the kids help on the weekends.) Keep them in a
big container/basket and simply throw them in the lunch box in the
morning.
~Let the kids create their own pizza
lunch kits- Toast bread and cut out little circles with a biscuit
cutter. Add a small container of pizza sauce, cheese and other
toppings.
 ~Make fruit gelatin and pudding and
put in small plastic containers for the week. Make a large batch of
granola bars, cookies, pumpkin bread, banana bread or muffins.
Divide and put them into individual sandwich bags. Freeze and use as
needed.
~If you don’t have time to bake,
buy cookies on sale and re-package them for the week.
~Brownie bites are simple to make.
Bake brownie mix in mini-muffin pans and put three "brownie
bites" in a sandwich bag for each child's lunch. They freeze
well too!
~Fill a thermos (not glass) half full
of juice the night before and freeze. In the morning, remove from
the freezer and fill the rest of the way. The juice will be cold
when they are ready to drink it and the thermos keeps their food
cold too.
~Purchase cheese in blocks, cut into
cubes and put in sandwich bags.
~Save the extra napkins, catsup and
mustard packets you get from take-out. Use in lunches.
Before you make another peanut butter
and jelly sandwich, check out
www.livingonadime.com
for more recipe ideas.
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