Filling but cost effective lunch

EssexHebridean

If you enjoy bread, absolutely no reason to cut it out, but mix up your fillings, the type of bread you use, what you have alongside it. I usually have a filled roll (bread made with 2/3 white flour and 1/3 wholemeal) with meat or cheese, a portion of cherry or baby plum tomatoes, and some fruit - and that works well for me. I eat my breakfast at work too, so tend to have that around 0915, then usually have lunch just before 2pm  - that means I don’t have too long a break before getting home and cooking tea for 7-7.30pm. I’m not a big daytime snacker, but you could think about something like houmous and veg sticks if you are,  Graze do tasty boxes with 4 different snack portions in - all sorts of things from dried fruit, roasted nuts and seeds, flapjacks, all sorts of options - you choose the sorts of things you like and can opt out of stuff you’re less keen on, and they are reasonably priced for what you get. Those would also work well for snacks during the day.

Emily_Joy

Rosa_Damascena said:

Mark_Glasses said:

When I first started working my mum would make me a packed lunch. It consisted of 4 croissants, a chocolate bar, a packet of crisps, a cereal bar, a cake bar, a rice krispie square, a yoghurt and a pot of jelly. 

Looking at this list again, I'm finding it difficult to believe - and believe me I could happily eat bakery products and sweets all day. I could just about stretch my imagination to breakfast, lunch and an evening snack to cover a 12hr+ shift but seriously, nothing fresh in there?

Me too, eating so much processed food on a regular basis would have caused me health problems of all sorts, including depression. 

RHemmings

I buy packet curries and packet rice to heat up in a microwave at work. I also have cutlery and a plate in my office cupboard. From a local Asian supply store, I can buy packaged curries for about £1.10 each, and I find that a whole packet of rice is too much, so, for example, half a packet of Aldi brown rice with the curry with the other half going into the work fridge for tomorrow. So, maybe about £1.50 or a bit less for lunch. 

Also, I cook up lots of frozen meals to take into work. I leave them on my desk to defrost a bit during the morning. These meals include curry and rice, but also pasta, (veg) shepherd's pie, fried rice, and other things. I don't cost up how much they each cost to make, but probably the £1.50 from above is in the ballpark. For frozen meals, I've started preferring to freeze them into glass containers that I buy at B&M in town. Aldi currently sell slightly bigger (I think) ones for less money (£3.99) as one of their time-limited specials, but I think those ones are actually a bit big for me. With the glass containers, I free the food in them, defrost and heat up in them, and eat straight from them at work. While I could do the same with the microwave-safe plastic containers that I have, I just prefer to eat off crockery or glass.  

I make sure that I keep a supply of the packets at work. If I work late one evening, then I can eat one of those meals at work as my dinner.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
EDIT: Oh, I've read the OP a bit more carefully. Eating the above outside could be a bit more of a challenge, though, I carry my heated up food around the buildings I'm in, and depending on the distance the OP has to go, that may be feasible for them. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm going to see how it works heating up a meal in my office building, then carrying it down to the tables near to the local river to eat. 

Otherwise, I would recommend wraps and I think I'm going to give that a go too. Wraps made at home and brought in. For me, I don't eat many home-made sandwiches and hence they don't get boring for me as I'm not eating them every day. Wraps bought from a supermarket and filled at home. I don't mind eating bao buns cold, and as they can be filled with all sorts of things I'm going to give those a go as a sandwich-style bring from home lunch. 

I've noticed a developing culture of younger people paying very large amounts of money (to my eyes) for lunches, when I know that they aren't well off financially.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Rosa_Damascena

RHemmings said:

I buy packet curries and packet rice to heat up in a microwave at work. I also have cutlery and a plate in my office cupboard. From a local Asian supply store, I can buy packaged curries for about £1.10 each, and I find that a whole packet of rice is too much, so, for example, half a packet of Aldi brown rice with the curry with the other half going into the work fridge for tomorrow. So, maybe about £1.50 or a bit less for lunch. 

                                                                                                              

I really hope that your workplace provides a separate / recreational area for lunch? The smell of hot food in the office would drive me mad, its supposed to be a working environment not a kitchen. If people ate this kind of food at their desks it would be grounds for me to up the ante with curry to quit.

Katiehound

You don't need to buy wraps- you can make them very easily, essentially something like pancake  which you can then freeze in a stack with paper between.
 Jamie Oliver made some in one his recent series'.
Flour tortillas- if you google recipes appear

Flour, vegetable oil, salt. Cheap as chips- no need to buy

Mark_Glasses

Thanks for all your replies. There's a lot here for me to digest (excuse the pun) and too many replies for me to respond to each one.

To give an idea of cost I pay 75p for a loaf of bread that does 7 sandwiches and 39p for jam which does around 30. I use butter for lots of things so can't really quantify but assume cost to be minimal. I buy a 6 pack of crisps for £1.25 so per lunch we're talking around 11p for bread, 1p for jam and 16p for crisps so that's 30p per lunch.

I know I would have to pay more for something more substantial maybe over £1 given that a single croissant at the Tesco near work costs that alone. I do think £4 would be too much to spend on lunch though.

The only reason I eat a sandwich is because it's cheap and convenient to eat out and about. I'm very much open to other things.

Regarding what my mum used to pack me, are we saying it wasn't the quantity of food that made me feel bad but what I was actually eating?

It was only for 2 months but I'll never forget how I felt when going back to work after lunch. Now I think about it I wonder whether my mum was trying to put me off said food in the knowledge it would only be for a short period of time. I can only eat fresh croissants these days and struggle with pre packaged ones. I don't think I've eaten a cereal bar, rice krispie square or pot of jelly since. I very rarely eat chocolate too. I still eat crisps and yoghurt but the crisp flavour I used to eat was Worcester Sauce which I used to love but have since gone right off them.

TheCheerleader

Hi Mark, for the same cost you could switch your bread and crisps to supermarket value range, replacing white bread with whole meal, with the small savings replace jam with either tuna, egg or cheese. It will improve the nutritional value and help fill you up better.

TheCheerleader

You could also use the tuna with cold cooked penne pasta, add mayo and use old takeaway containers for convenience.

RHemmings

Rosa_Damascena said:

RHemmings said:

I buy packet curries and packet rice to heat up in a microwave at work. I also have cutlery and a plate in my office cupboard. From a local Asian supply store, I can buy packaged curries for about £1.10 each, and I find that a whole packet of rice is too much, so, for example, half a packet of Aldi brown rice with the curry with the other half going into the work fridge for tomorrow. So, maybe about £1.50 or a bit less for lunch. 

                                                                                                              

I really hope that your workplace provides a separate / recreational area for lunch? The smell of hot food in the office would drive me mad, its supposed to be a working environment not a kitchen. If people ate this kind of food at their desks it would be grounds for me to up the ante with curry to quit.

There are separate areas for lunch, and I have a private office. I'm already eating curry, so that would not be upping the ante. None of my colleagues have mentioned food smells, and I believe they would if it were a problem. 

MrsStepford

Cheeses, deli meats (preferably without nitrates and nitrites), olives, pickles (preferably lower salt ones), hardboiled eggs, canned fish and seafood, wraps, crispbreads, crackers, 85% cocoa dark chocolate, all sorts of fruit, cottage cheese, houmous, tzatziki, taramasalata, guacamole, seafood sticks, prawns, any raw veg that you like e.g. broccoli, carrot, celery, avocado, tomatoes plus mayonnaise (keep in fridge),