Okay, let me first say that I’ve heard moms say stuff like “I never would have been this excited about food prepping before kids”. Well I’m the F-ing freakshow who has always loved crap like this. In my wildest college fantasies I was wearing a fancy robe and waking up at dawn to a clean house and hot coffee before settling in to a day of uninterrupted tv watching and crochet. But I digress.
Over the last few months I’ve been really working hard at lowering our grocery spending and prepping food, and I’m pretty impressed with myself. I’ve cut that shit IN HALF. I can always do better at the prepping part though. On the weeks that I don’t prep lunches ahead of time I pay for it. Over the last few weeks I’ve been slipping. And before Christmas I was super busy and I put way too much pre-packaged food into the kid’s lunch and a lot of it didn’t even get eaten. It was shameful. So I’ve been wanting to get back into the habit of prepping lunches on Sundays. And because last week I did a ton of batch cooking for the freezer, I had today to hang out with family, make my own dog and cat food (I’m wild!) and prep lunches.
So yeah. I made my own cat and dog food. It’s not the first time I’ve made dog food, but it is the first time I made cat food. I used a vet’s recipe, so I’m excited about that. And because this was my first time making it and there were a ton of odd and stinky ingredients, I felt kind of like my 8 year old self, mixing chocolate milk with crackers and hot dogs and calling it a recipe. *My pet food recipe included none of those ingredients, by the way.
I’m not telling you what was in my recipe. Because bitches be judgy. But if you want to do some research for your own pets you can email me and I’ll tell you where I found my info.
But back to the topic at hand. Batch prepping lunches. My go to lunch for G is salami, fruit, crackers, and maybe cheese. I like to pack salami in little glassine bags wrapped up into a neat package. Because washi tape is my life blood. And because there’s no plastic involved. I packed cinnamon rice crackers the same way, and I also prepped little 4 ounce tupperware with blueberries from the freezer. I actually pre-packed mini baggies with blueberries and hid them in a (labeled) yogurt tub in the freezer so that I can make my next prepping day even quicker. You guys last summer I picked something like 40 pounds of no spray blueberries and I’m SO glad that I did. You can never have enough blueberries. Store bought blueberries are garbage. I actually hated blueberries until I moved to Oregon and went blueberry picking with one of my BFFs. Picking blueberries changed my life. Really.
So anyway, those amazing, mind blowing blueberries that I picked- they cost me $0.99 PER POUND. You know how much those are at the store? At the farmer’s market??? AT WHOLE FOODS???? So yeah, when Eric said “I think you have enough blueberries,” I said “LIKE HELL I DO” and I kept picking and now I have plenty of blueberries for baking blueberry muffins and putting in the kids’ lunches and making pretty purple smoothies. So let this be a lesson to you- if you have the option to pick your own anything this summer- DO IT! Next year I’ll double my harvest.
Tomorrow is Monday and I’ll get an extra smidge of sanity because I won’t be panicking, looking for food that will pass G’s pickiness test and I won’t be rushing to add money to his lunch card because I’ve got an entire week all packed up and ready to go. So here’s to a smooth Monday morning for us all!
