Pack your own lunch recipes - May 2017

Are you still with me?  Packing your own lunch and/or cooking in bulk to save money and avoid nasty takeaway food?

We always cook in bulk in the weekend and make all our lunches for the following week.  These are ideas for lunch or just bulk cooking.  You can find recipes from previous months here. I also share them on Instagram each Sunday or Monday night (you will also see them on the Facebook page).  I hope these posts are inspiring you to cook from scratch and take your own lunch to work - both to save money and eat better.

I'm not great at following recipes, and I'm also not good at writing them, because I tend to just use up what we have in the fridge/pantry/garden, things that are on special or we've been given at our local produce share.  I'll tell you what I made, but I'm not saying you should follow exactly, just use it as a rough guide and use up whatever you have handy too.

You might think that we just seems to eat the same things all the time.  And now that I've started documenting our lunches, it does look like that!  I don't get sick of it though.  How can you get sick of tasty, quality meat and lots of fresh veges?  That's the best meal I can think of.  No wonder we hardly ever eat out!

Week 1: Lamb curry

I've done curry before and I'll do it again, its an easy one in the slow cooker and great for using up those tougher (and tastier) cuts of meat.  This time it was lamb shoulder chops.  Recipe is the same as February.

Week 2: Roast Lamb

This is another favourite and so easy in the slow cooker.  I just brown the roast in a frying pan and put it in the slow cooker with onion, carrot, stock, bay leaves and rosemary.  After all day or overnight in the slow cooker the roast meat falls off the bone and its just delicious.  Recipe details also in February (rolled roast).

Week 3: Beef rolled roast (again!)

Yep, another rolled roast, we did have several of these last time the butcher came, and I saved them because they are my favourite, but now we have so many left, its one a month until they are used up!  These are so yummy because I made the filling from bread-crumbs, garlic and herbs.  You know where the recipe is... February.

Week 4: Roast chicken (in a power outage)

The power went out at 530pm just as I had laid down after working/cleaning/pottering all day and thinking I could get half an hour rest before going back into the kitchen!  So as it was getting dark I had to get up again and chop veges in the remaining light of the day.  Fortunately the chicken was already in the Weber BBQ and nearly cooked by then, and we have the gas cooktop for the veges, so dinner and lunch were not affected by the power outage, and it came back on around 830pm, just in time to do the dishes and clean up the kitchen!

The roast chicken recipe is back in January.  They are homegrown roosters, so rather precious (we only have 12 or so to eat each year and its a lot of work to make them!).

 Nothing new to share this month, but just posting anyway to reinforce that we keep eating similar meals each week and just enjoying that good meat and fresh veges.  What do you have for lunch?