Stretching The Dinner Budget Into Creative Lunch Ideas

  If your family is like mine we have a tendency to fall into an eating routine.  The same old breakfast and lunch choices most days.  BORING!  The other day I decided that I simply could not bear to make another one of my daughters strawberry cream cheese sandwiches or my sons ham and cheese.  We have done that like 1000 times and I was bored with it. 

 I had also come to realize that we were spending a lot on these lunch components because they ate the same thing every day I was buying the ingredients if they were on sale or not.  If you are new to budget shopping I will tell you that is a budget buster.  Since it has become my mission to pinch the proverbial penny where we can I decided to make it more of a goal to look outside the bread so to speak for lunches.  My kids are not super picky eaters but they could stand to have their horizons broadened.  They did not like the idea of simply re-heating dinner left overs for lunch.  That's dinner mom. 

  So I decided to try it again from a different angle.  This time I used different components of the last few days left overs to make lunch.  We had left over home made pasta sauce from spaghetti night, cheese from taco's and a killer deal on English muffins, so I decided on English muffin pizza of course!  Everyone including my hubby loved it.  We made a tasty meal out of leftovers and changed up the lunch blahs.  I'm going to do a lot more of this in the future.  Up next, turning taco meat into nacho's or chili.