 Hey everybody, welcome to the Wallach Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video is going to be a homeschool show and tell. The homeschool show and tell is an open collaboration hosted by Abby from Rude and Rest and Myself. Our goal with the homeschool show and tell was really just to show that there's not one right way to homeschool. And we do that by bringing homeschoolers together from around the world to share their take on a specific topic. This month's topic is homeschool lunch lady or homeschool lunches. Now, I don't know about you, but the one thing nobody told me when I started homeschooling was that it wasn't going to be the curriculum that was difficult or expensive. It was going to be the food. Like literally I find the feeding of the kids and the people and the cost, the hardest and most expensive part of homeschooling altogether. So if you like me find it difficult, you are in luck because all of us are going to be sharing our takes on homeschool lunches. So make sure you check out the playlist in the description to watch more videos to get tips and tricks and what other moms are doing. Now for me, lunch is hands down the hardest meal of our homeschool day because it normally falls smack dab in the middle of the homeschool day. Breakfast is always before. It's also the easiest meal for us. Typically, Kevin does a protein shaker smoothie. Emily and I do yogurt and fruit. Really, really simple, really, really easy, very self-sufficient for everybody. Dinner is always kind of a meal plan. We pretty much eat the same thing every week on a different day like Mondays or pasta, Tuesdays or tacos. So it's really not that complicated and that's always at the end of the homeschool day. But lunch falls in the middle of the homeschool day which means that it kind of messes everything up. Like if we have to stop for me to make lunch or prepare it or if we're not all hungry at the same time and I'm like, okay, Emily's hungry now. Let us stop what we're doing and feed her and then I'm hungry 30 minutes later and now we have to stop again so I can make something for me. It's just complicated. It's always been complicated and the solution for that is meal prep. Like that has been the solution for as long as I can remember. Years ago, I started doing a snack box with Emily. I would make snack boxes up and I would put them in the refrigerator and she basically could graze on that all day long. She's always been a grazer. But now I'm meal prep for everybody for the week. So the first thing that I do when I'm meal prep is typically put a bunch of chicken breasts in the Instapot and cook them and then once they are cooked, I put them in the KitchenAid and shred it and we do so many things with that. So Kevin likes chicken and rice. He also will do like chicken tacos. We will do chicken barbecue sandwiches with the shredded chicken. I like to make a chicken buffalo dip or a chicken salad or like a chicken taco dip kind of thing. All of these are weak time lunchtime favorites for Kevin and or I and we just pick whatever we're in the mood for. So like for example, this week he's doing chicken and rice and I'm gonna do a chicken buffalo dip. Emily still really likes a snacky lunch so that is what I make for her most of the time. Some sort of sandwich, lunch meat and snack type of things because again, she's a grazer. She's gonna eat on that throughout the day versus just sitting down and eating it all at once more than likely. So I'm gonna kind of sort of bring you along and we are going to meal prep for our homeschool week. So you can kind of get an idea of what that looks like. Like I said, the first thing I do is cook some chicken breasts in the Instapot and then once it is cooked, I am just going to take those chicken breasts and put them in this kitchen aid because it is so much easier and faster to shred this way than by hand and I'm all about convenience. All right, so now that that is shredded, we're going to take some containers of rice and just add some of the shredded chicken to it. Kevin already cooked his rice in a second Instapot. I don't eat rice. So I don't even attempt to try to cook it and know what I'm doing, but he does. So I dish it up once he has it cooked and then we just take some of the shredded chicken and add it and then all he'll do every weekday is basically just reheat this. So this is his lunch. Okay, so now with the shredded chicken that is left, I'm gonna make my lunch and this week I'm doing the Buffalo chicken dip. I'm slightly obsessed with it. It also has amazing macros, at least the way I make it. I will put the recipe, if you will, in the description. It is for two servings and then I multiply it by however many days we're gonna be home that week. So sometimes I'll only make enough for four servings and this week I'll be making enough for six servings. It's five ingredients, so super simple and then depending on the mood I'm in that day, I'll either eat it with some chips or veggies, like celery and cucumbers and things like that. Either sweet peppers is also really good but it is my current obsession so this is what we're making this week. Like I said, chicken salad is also one I really like and there's basically the taco chicken dip that I do is this exact same thing. I just use salsa instead of buffalo sauce and taco seasoning instead of ranch seasoning and then I add black beans and corn. It's also very, very good. Okay, I weigh everything because that is the easiest way for me to track this and my fitness pal, one of my weight loss journey or my healthy journey, whatever you wanna call it. So it is basically shredded chicken and then it is cottage cheese and the key to cottage cheese at least for me because it grosses me out is to blend it. So as soon as I bring this container home from the store, I stick an immersion blender in it and blend the entire container so it basically just looks like sour cream or thick yogurt. Anyway, so that's the key for me to get cottage cheese in because it's kinda gross. So it's shredded chicken, cottage cheese, plain Greek yogurt, that's a lot of Greek yogurt because I like it really creamy. And this is also six days worth, so keep that in mind. And then it is buffalo sauce and I'm gonna go ahead and tell you that I'm a wimp. So if you like spicy things, you might wanna add more buffalo sauce to the recipe that I'm gonna leave down below. You may even want to double it. If you're a wimp, you should probably try the amount that I use. I don't really like spicy stuff. And then it is just ranch powder. All we have to do now is mix it up. Then the last person's lunch I have to make is Emily's and like I said, she does a snacky lunch. So our favorite boxes to store hers in are these easy lunch boxes. We have the one that has the one bigger one, a medium size and a small one. This is what I would use if I'm gonna make her sandwiches. I'll do it like a sandwich, maybe a fruit and vegetable. That is also the one I like to use when I'm traveling. And then we also have this one that has five compartments. So for smaller ones and kind of a larger one, this is what I'm gonna be using today because she requested basically like an adult lunch bowl. So I have some chicken lunch meat and some hand lunch meat and cheese and some fruits and veggies. And I'm just basically gonna prep all this. So she makes this super, sorry, that's a little loud. She makes this super easy. And she'll just tell me like this is lunch meat I want. These are the fruits I'm in the mood for and that's what she's gonna eat all week long. Some of her other favorites are like a pizza lunch bowl. So crackers, turkey, cheese, fruits and vegetables. We've also both gotten into like a Mediterranean. So some grilled chicken if we have grilled chicken left or shredded chicken if we have extra. And then veggies and tzatziki and simple meals makes like a Mediterranean herb cracker that goes really well with that. Sometimes if she did not get her Greek yogurt for breakfast or didn't eat it for breakfast, she'll just eat that for lunch and skip a lunch that's day. So I only ever make her like four or five of these boxes that way if she's not in the mood for it or if we're not home or she's not as hungry because I don't know if it's just me but one day she'll eat me out of house and home and the next day she's not eating at all. That way I haven't prepped a ton and I have a lot of leftovers. So that's what I try to do for her. Those are some of her favorites. I will also link a blog post that I wrote a few years back in the description for like homeschool snacks because we have been using boxes similar to these for years for snacks and lunches. And so I have kind of a list of some of our favorite supplies and snacks and what she likes to eat. So I'll make sure I link that in the description as well. Here are her two lunch combinations this week. And just like that, we now have lunches for all of us for the entire week and I spent about an hour and a half making everything. I'll spend probably about 30 minutes cleaning up the kitchen but that two hours on a Sunday night saved me so much time, frustration and headache during the week. Plus the interruptions are almost nothing, at least not when it comes to lunch because I can just say go grab a box out of the fridge and when I'm ready I just put a little bit of dip in a bowl and Kevin can eat when he's ready and it just makes our week go so much smoother. Now I would absolutely love it if you would leave me all of your homeschool lunch snack and meal time tips down in the comments because I and everyone else are always looking for ways to make meals in our homeschool more efficient.