Except this is the first year it is totally vicarious. This is my first post-graduation-no-school-in-sight-for-me autumn. Bummer. I keep looking longingly at the school supplies and dorm organizers.
The Marvelous Miss Thing starts school this week. First grade. Big time. Her school does not offer cafeteria services, with the exception of the importing of fast food every day. I'm not real excited about that prospect, and quite honestly Miss Thing isn't a huge fast food fan. She likes a hamburger, but isn't thrilled with pizza and has some sort of recessive gene that makes her not.like.french.fries *gasp*. Clearly, not my good Irish Catholic genes in which we ate potatoes with every meal, and french fries were the top of the potato "yum" chart.
I have been trying to come up with more nutritious yet convenient and portable lunches. The one thing she begged for at the store were those little round pre-cut frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Well, looking at the price, I figured I could make those puppies at half the cost, plus, by using my homemade peanut butter and jelly, I was cutting down on all that other crap they put in it.
Two squishy white pieces of bread (I let the bread slide. I'm not going to use good bread for this project) cut out with a water chestnut can. Peanut butter on both sides. A spoonful of jelly in the center. (It helps if you kind of squish the bread a little bit)
Seal the two slices of bread with the tines of a fork and pop in the freezer. Puffy white PB&Js. They defrost easily. Heck, Miss Thing eats them frozen.
I felt like a super genius after this little project.
4 comments:
sign me up! those are great.
My problem with taking pb&j to school was always that it was soggy by lunchtime. Solution? Toasting the bread very lightly allowed the moisture from the fillings (and condensation from being in plastic) to not over-soak the bread.
Ahhh... but that's the beauty of the peanut butter - it forms a moisture shield from the jelly. Making your own peanut butter helps too...
We never made our own peanut butter, but my grandmother would give us her government surplus 5lb cans. That was almost always better than the store-bought, and I'm not sure why.
btw, that last one looks like a scoop of ice cream.
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