My actual weekly lunch schedule, an extra snack, and the most foolproof Fruit Leather you will ever meet

So my piranhas cherubs have been in school for two weeks now.

Now, all my kids do cross-country running (a couple of them, quite seriously), and one does karate as well, so we have daily practice sessions. I’ve had to double up on snacks to send them so they can last all the way to dinner time without eating their friends, their coaches, or each other.

Because when they haven’t eaten, I don’t want to be the one going into The Cage …

 

 

So! I took a minute this week to pick through my once-thriving snack basket and freezer, and here’s the snack-wise damage:

• My fruit leather stocks have been decimated.
• I’m still doing okay on snack bars (mainly because I made double batches of three of my favorite recipes just before classes started).
• We’re doing alright on apple chips, because I had the awesome forethought to threaten the kids with hard labor coax my angels into replenishing the stores themselves earlier this week. God bless their sweet, coaxable hearts.
• I’m desperate for smoothie pops. We are completely out, and you don’t understand how important they are. Like, if I throw them in the general direction of the horde when it approaches after cross-country training, I MAY have enough time to escape with my limbs intact – particularly because they will have just run for the last hour and a half, so I have a bit of a head start. But I really need more smoothie pops.

Long story short, this may be the time to take three minutes to evaluate your own snack bins, and make a quick list of anything you want to replenish. Because running to the store ten minutes before school starts for goldfish crackers, or sending a raw potato in a lunchbox … that’s a rough way to start a day.

And realize that my list of snacks is actually very VERY quickly (and easily!) replenishable, if all you’re doing is snacks and no lunch entrees. The dehydrator and the Food Processor practically make’em for you, because they’re awesome like that. (As a matter of fact, I’m urging my food processor to run for president next term. I think its chances of winning are excellent.) And, unlike the lunch entrees themselves, you can expect to produce an entire set of several batches of snacks to last you a month, in well under an hour.

So here’s a reminder of the snacks we’ve seen so far, and a glimpse at what I just did yesterday to keep me out of The Cage …

• Clear-Our-Your-Cupboard Snack Bars
• Ridiculousy Easy Cinnamon Apple Chips (from Round One)
• Strawberry Fruit Leather (From Round Two)
• Strawberry Smoothie Push-Ups (From Round Two)
• Mushroom Chips (From Round Three)
• Bagel Chips (From Round Four)
• Chewy Dried Pears (From Round Four)

 

I also posted my recent menu … “A Week in the Lunch Trenches”.

 

 

To send to school, use a double ice pack and lay pops between packs. Enjoy, you awesome ice-cream-in-your-lunch-packer, you!

 

 

The Easiest, Most Foolproof Fruit Leather You Will Ever Try

aka
Autumn Sweet Potato-Apple Fruit Leather

 

I’m not even kidding. If Fruit Leather intimidates you, or if you’ve EVER had a bad experience with a mushy batch, THIS is the one you want to try. The sweet potato-and-apple base is far less “wet” than other blended fruits, super easy to spread (and therefore, easier to keep consistently at the same thickness). It’s also takes much less time in the dehydrator, so not necessarily an all-day project – I made my batch this time after work, easy peasy.

 

Plus, there are two super easy shortcuts to go about doing this:

a) The first is premade apple sauce. You can literally throw a jar of premade apple sauce on your dehydrator tray, and call it a day, if you like. Now, this isn’t typically what I do, because of the second easy shortcut …

b) The Instant Pot. I put two sweet potatoes and a handful of apples that had seen better days in there (with all the last stone fruit of the season being so delicious, the apples in our produce basket haven’t been getting nearly the love they will in a month or two). Within ten minutes (fifteen, including pressurizing), all of the above are ready to throw in the Food Processor, and five minutes after that, my trays are loaded and set to make a huge load of idiot-proof Fruit Leather. Which is awesome, because sometimes I can be a major idiot.

Of course, you can always nuke your sweet potato if you’re using jarred apple sauce and don’t want to pull out the Instant Pot. You can also bake the sweet potatoes AND apples if you want to go from scratch but don’t own an Instant Pot. Whatever works for you!

My Fruit Leather, pictured above, was completely done at 4 hours, except for my one “heavy-handed” tray that required an extra hour. Make sure to peel off the trays while still warm, and cut into strips or wedges with kitchen shears. You can place onto strips of parchment paper to roll up and store in an airtight container.

 

 

A WORD ON FREEZER SPACE

I admit, I have a lot of freezer space. I live with four adult-sized appetites, and one healthy child-sized one, and I tend to freeze and pack 20 weeks’ worth of food for all the kids at a time. Plus, once upon a time, I used to do this regularly for dinners as well as lunches.

So, I have a freezer upstairs for regularly-used items, then a downstairs freezer for frozen lunches, and a separate chest freezer (like this one) for when I’m feeling particularly go-getter-y (or for when I make Thanksgiving meals ahead of time because I have the stupid schedule). I call the chest freezer my Sexy Beast, and I make my hubby apologize to it if he doesn’t treat it with an appropriate level of tenderness.

The FDA does specifically say that a closed, full freezer will maintain its temperature for 48 hrs without power (a half-full one will maintain it for 24 hrs), so food does not need to be thawed or refrigerate or transferred anywhere, as long as you keep the doors closed. So even if your power goes out Saturday, your lovingly-prepared lunches should be safe till Monday when the repair guy comes! Just sayin’ …

Now, you certainly don’t have to have this. We’re going to work on how to maximize your packing strategies in order to best use your space, and we’re going to use flash freezing and labeling techniques that make my heart skip more than Ryan Gosling (who, for the record, has NOTHING on vacuum sealing). But you should plan on being able to fit two jelly roll pans or large cookie sheets into your freezer at once at any given time during your prepping. If you can’t do that, it may be worth it for you to take a look at getting yourself a separate freezer – not necessarily your own Sexy Beast, but maybe something a bit smaller and inconspicuous, that can still guard your hard work (and only cost you an extra $0.75 or so per lunch if you hold 4 months’ worth of meals for one person in it, right?).

 

 

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