PB & J Factory

Is there an easier way to do school lunch for 5 kids a day?  Obviously, paying $7.20 a day for all of them to have school lunch doesn't make economic sense.  But peanut butter and jelly is so sticky!  The sticky, crumby pile of knives every morning is the bane of my existence.  I set out to solve that problem the same way one solves every problem:  Google.  I typed in "Can I freeze a peanut butter and jelly sandwich" and got some tidy little responses.  (You can, if you spread a thin layer of peanut butter on both slices of bread so the jam doesn't make it soggy.)  This afternoon in my clean, quiet kitchen, I mass produced sandwiches and put them in Ziploc bags in the freezer.  I only had one mess to clean up, versus one mess per sandwich when you have lots of mini cooks in the kitchen every morning.  That makes economic sense!  Of course, the sandwiches are so nifty, they'll probably all be gone by tomorrow.  I already dropped one of for Golda as an after school snack to eat along with a few of the many, many snack items I stocked up on at the dollar store, which are quickly disappearing too.  Kids would be so much easier to take care of if they didn't have to eat.

I have been trying to concoct ways to make feeding the masses easier.  Since school started, I've been making dinner in the morning.  It has been empirically proven in our household that I can't fix dinner at dinnertime and stay sane.  For one thing, you have to be in the kitchen to fix dinner.  The car outside a cello teacher's house is not an ideal place to come up with a wholesome meal, unless you have David's Pizza's phone number in your phone, which I do, but he can't be fixing our dinner every night.

So, it has been an incredible help to have dinner ready to warm up, in the fridge, before the kids get home from school.  I've made a few lasagnes and spaghetti pies, sliced and diced bowls of fruit and even let the kids make jello the night before.  The hardest part is coming up with an idea.  I have to keep reminding myself that it doesn't have to be the best idea in the world every day.  Just an idea.  Ruby told me that she doesn't approve of anything based on Cream of Mushroom soup, so that makes it tricky.  Pretty much everything Mormons eat is out.  (I'm kidding!!)  My biggest hit was poppy seed pancakes.  I made them in the AM, put them in a Ziploc in the fridge, then warmed them up at 5:00 and served them along with yogurt and whatever fruit I had cut up.  For some reason, the kids liked that better than the spinach lasagne where I got carried away with the roasted garlic.  Anyway, the family is eating dinner, usually around 5:15 in case you're in the neighborhood.  Bring your own fork.  Ours are usually all in the dishwasher.