packing a lunch

Well, that little silly quiz thing got quite a bit of response (and no, I don't think Club Sandwiches are necessarily my mortal enemy - it's just funny, I think, because PB&J is the classic "kid" sandwich, and club sandwiches are, in my mind at least, about as grown-up as a sandwich can get).

Soon it will be time for me to start carrying lunches to school again.

I was trying to think about what I took as a school kid - I know I always packed a lunch and never bought - the olive-green steam-table green beans that were a regular 'vegetable' in the "bought" lunch scared me, as did the super-rubbery jello (I don't know of anyone actually EATING the jello cubes; they were mostly used as toys.) I remember once sitting at my table (we had little tables-of-four in junior high school) talking with my friends (or rather, the three other people who would deign to sit with me at lunch - my former BFF having recently been accepted into the "popular" clique and not wanting to be seen with me any more. And yes, I'm still kind of bitter about that - and it's probably why I never ever had someone I regarded as a "best friend" ever again), when a cube of red jello came flying out of nowhere, bounced off the center of our table, and made it to the center of the table next to us.

And they put soy - or something that had hulls in it anyway - in the hamburger patties.

So I carried my lunch from home. I think I kind of alternated between a couple different things - peanut butter, cream cheese sandwiches (yeah, I was kind of a weird kid), and sometimes something in a "cold pack" - either cottage cheese or cottage cheese and fruit (again: weird kid. I don't know too many people who willingly ate cottage cheese at 12).

My brother was even worse: for a couple years all he wanted was jelly sandwiches. And not just any jelly; my mother's homemade apple-mint jelly. (Oh, I'm sure he had other things in his lunch - he wasn't malnourished or anything).

I remember lunchboxes. They were cool until, I guess, about 4th or 5th grade. First, I had Disney, then I had Peanuts, then I had a plain tartan lunchbox. Then I carried my lunch in a paper sack. It seems like metal lunchboxes - after years of being declared a Dangerous! Hazard! are coming back, at least as kitsch pieces for generation Xers (I saw some for sale at, of all places, the Books A Million recently. It didn't explicitly say on them NOT FOR CHILDREN'S USE so maybe they are being offered again for kids). I never cared too much for plastic lunchboxes.

(If I were about 10 years younger and about four times cooler than I am, I would have bought one and used it for my lunches. But I don't think I can get away with that kind of club-kid, "I'm self-consciously being immature!" thing any more.)

I carry a lunch pretty much every day to work, now. It's cheaper than eating out, probably healthier (most of the restaurants here in town, you order at by speaking into a large fiberglass advertising-character head), and I don't lose my parking space.

But - you know, it's kind of boring. And sometimes kind of depressing: oh, here I am at my desk again, eating lunch number 45 of 180 for this year.

I don't put a lot of thought into my lunches. Which is probably why they're kind of boring. The typical, rarely-deviated-from pattern is this:

yogurt
some kind of fruit or salad in a little tub
granola bar
maybe a bit of cheese, or a hardboiled egg if I happen to have one on hand
maybe some crackers
a tiny square of chocolate or a cookie.

Not very much, and yeah, I'm usually hungry when I get home around 4 or so. But - I'm packing my lunch at 6:30 am, I've already been up an hour and a half and done my workout and gotten cleaned up and dressed, and taking the time to pack an elaborate lunch just feels - I don't know, it just feels like yet another chore so early in the morning when I still have the real chores of the day ahead of me. (And as for packing the night before - I've tried it; it doesn't work. Sandwiches, even when refrigerated, become gluey and unappealing after an overnight plus six hour stay. And some nights I don't get home until 9 pm - so it would be yet another chore at the end of the day).

I have discovered a few things that make lunch a little happier.

Like those tiny triangular "Laughing Cow" cheeses. They taste fairly good, they seem to keep okay even without refrigeration (one of my colleagues has a little refrigerator in her lab but I'm always competing for space - of course she needs room for her lunches and little bottle of milk, but one of my other colleagues also fills it up with the weird natural-foods-store soft drinks he likes.)

And dried fruit. Not just raisins - figs (which freak people out for some reason; they're all, WTF is that? WTF are you eating?). Prunes (yeah, you can make jokes, but they're sweet, they have nutrients, and they don't get squished in a lunch kit). Dates (extremely sweet but a couple go a long way)

And those "100 calorie" packs of stuff. Yeah, I know - as someone who rolls her eyes at the increasing nannydom of our food, who rants about things (actually, I haven't yet, but will) like Hershey's "disclaimer" about "enjoy this in moderation only!" on their chocolate products, I still like them. Why? Because, number 1, they're easy. I can have a bunch of the boxes lined up on the shelf, and I can just reach in and grab whatever thing I feel like that day - cheet-os "asteroids" (uh-huh, huh, huh, huh) or little cookies, or goldfish - whatever. And I don't have to portion it out and pack it and wrap it and all that. And that's a good thing, first thing in the morning.

Yeah, yeah, I know - I should buy the "bulk" bag of something and some kind of reusable washable plastic container and do it the environmentally-friendly way. Except the problem is, the "bulk" bag and the container sit on the shelf because I don't have the energy at 6:30 am to weigh out all of my foodstuffs for the day. So I'll drive less, or something, to make up. Bite me, Gaia.

One of my colleagues brings those "healthy" frozen dinners (there is a freezer in the breakroom fridge but it's across the building from me). But. meh. I don't want broccoli from the Ice Age with my lunch. And usually I'm actually not hungry enough to want "Chicken Divan made Light!" or whatever.

And I'm just not that big on sandwiches. Part of it is the "eww, it's been sitting six hours!" sense. But part of it that I'm just not crazy about cold cuts. I will take a peanut butter sandwich from time to time (especially if I have good whole-wheat bread on hand), or if I have egg salad on hand (sorry, Ann Althouse, but I love the stuff) and a good shot at getting space in the fridge, I'll take a little jar of egg salad and two pieces of toasted white bread

It occurs to me that I should give my fussy-eater rundown of what type of bread is acceptable with what type of sandwich.

Peanut butter is pretty much good on anything. It's best, IMHO, on a good whole wheat or on something like Anadama bread (the problem with Anadama bread is you have to bake it yourself, or find someone to bake it for you - it's not commercially available).

Peanut butter sandwiches that are intended to be eaten alongside of a bowl of chicken soup (which is actually a pretty good meal combination) should be on white bread. And always crunchy peanut butter for me.

Egg salad pretty much has to be on white bread, toasted. And it gets cut diagonally. (Peanut butter is cut up-and-down).

Cold cuts (which I don't really care for and rarely eat - once in a while I'll eat turkey or ham or maybe roast beef, but none of the "weird reprocessed" meats) are best on some kind of bread with character. Marbled rye is best, but it's hard to find good marbled rye here. And roast beef is best if there's a little steak sauce to put on it.

Pimiento cheese is best on very thin bread, either white or wheat. But it needs to be thin bread!

Grilled cheese can ONLY be made on white bread. It's kind of like pizza - you can't have a decent whole-wheat-crust pizza. (And I've tried. Oh, how I've tried. It's just not right. It's like whole wheat pasta - the health food types tell you it's just the same, it's just as good but it ISN'T. I'd rather eat pasta only once or twice a month and have the real, semolina, kind, instead of getting some kind of sandpapery imposter a couple times a week). And it should be JUST cheese - no tomatoes, no ham, no spinach (dear God - I once ordered a grilled cheese in a restaurant and they brought me a "grilled cheese Florentine" - it had all this pureed spinach crap on it. Now, don't get me wrong - spinach has its place - but that place is NOT on a grilled cheese sandwich, and ESPECIALLY when it says nowhere on the menu, "Your sandwich will come 'enhanced' with flabby cooked spinach in cream sauce.")

And NO MAYO! Can you believe that some people put mayo on a grilled cheese? I was traveling with my family (going to a family wedding) and we stopped at this fast-food chain place (Culvers, or somesuch) that's only found in the Upper Midwest. They had a "grilled cheese deluxe" on the menu. So I ordered it. It came with tomatoes (no biggie, I could pick those out), but the bread was slathered in mayonnaise. No! Wrong! Ick! At least WARN me first - if they have to put warning labels on frigging POPCORN, they should at least say somewhere on the menu: grilled cheese comes with bread soaked in mayo.

Not that I'm a total mayo-hater. It's good on turkey, it's a necessary component of egg salad, I've even been known to eat it on a hamburger. But it does not go with cheese. (Isn't there some kind of dietary law about that: "thou shalt not combine two sour dairy products in one sandwich"?)

But anyway. It was hot out, and I was starving (my family's travel MO is "drive until someone is near death from hunger/thirst/needing to pee, and THEN stop), and I will admit that even though I was in my 30s at the time, I did shed a few hot tears over the travesty that was that sandwich.

I was also once served a chili dog that had mustard on it. I consider that also to be deeply wrong. Fortunately, I was in a position to dump the dog and get something more edible in that case.

Yes, I am a profoundly picky eater.

So anyway. (And no - I am not "that" customer at the restaurant. I rarely if ever send things back. And I'm not the kind of person to make koo-koo special requests. All I ask is that I be told up front on the menu if there is some weird, unexpected ingredient that shouldn't be there. Like - if you're serving a grilled cheese sandwich with spinach on it, at the very LEAST call it "grilled cheese Florentine" on the menu, to cue your patrons in that they're in for a surprise.)

But back to packed lunches. Maybe yogurt's a little boring and predictable. And maybe the "100 calorie packs" are just the CYA of the processed food industry (or so some claim). But at least I can be sure of getting a mayonnaise-free and cooked-spinach-free lunch when I want one.