The food plan for school

School starts next week, and I'll need to pack a lunch for every member of the family, plus snacks for preschool, plus snacks to tide us over on the nights the kids are going to dance classes, plus I want to avoid the dreaded dinner hour melt down.

So I'm working out a plan. A list of standard lunches sounds good to me - no floundering about as to what I want to put in the lunch box in the morning. This picture was my rough draft on the frige white-board, but I've swapped a couple of things and put the meat sandwich on Tuesday so we can observe Meatless Mondays and be vegetarians on Mondays.

I've also assigned snacks for Hypatia that will go well with her leftovers from lunch. Her preschool requires a snack, and if the child shows up without one they will feed them one - at $3 a pop. Since she arrives at preschool at 1pm, it will be her leftover lunch and the little side pocket snack I'll pack. And then we have a dance class after school two afternoons a week, so on those days I'll need to have juice and a snack for the kids, because Carbon is always hungry and cranky after school.

My next planning step has been to draw up a chart of all 7 days of the week, am and pm, and write in the tasks that need to be done ahead of time, such as hardboil eggs, make hummus, chop veggies the night before, etc. And I've added a few standard dinners, such as always having a beanpot in the slowcooker on Wednesdays, which requires remembering to soak beans overnight on Tuesday nights.

I get my bakery CSA on Wednesdays, and I pick up my farm CSA on Fridays at the Farmer's Market, which is a good time to buy meat for the week from the local pasture guy who sells there. Then I can look over what veggies I got and make menu plans for the week to utilize those vegetables, and I can go to the regular grocery store to fill in the holes on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. The CSA ends in October, so I'll adjust the plan then.

And I think we'll stick to either having Sunday dinner at my mother-in-law's or going out on Sunday evening - no Sunday cooking for this girl. :)

It's a plan. Fingers crossed that this keeps us on a more even keel.