Making lunch when the pantry is bare

Well, we never really get to that point here in America, do we? Even those of us who hover in the reduced-price school lunch socioeconomic segment of the population usually have a little something hanging around the fringe of the fridge. Even some of the people who stand in line at the food bank aren’t so hungry that they’ll accept a free loaf of wheat bread when they prefer white. (And those who do take it sometimes wind up tossing the wheat loaves in the parking lot on the way to the cars that they can still apparently afford to drive. This information comes secondhand but off-the-record from a food bank employee.)

 So yeah, while my first thought yesterday was “we don’t have anything for lunch,” what that really meant was we don’t have any of the usual lunch stuff, like boxed macaroni and cheese. Or bread. (Ironically, one of the reasons we remain breadless this morning is that the K-Mart where we bought milk and Little Caesar‘s pizza last night after the kids‘ taiko drum class was out of wheat bread. All they had was white, and we decided we‘d rather go without than eat white bread.)

But we did have oranges, really juicy Honey Bells Grandma and Grandpa brought back from Florida last week. And a few low-fat oatmeal cookies I’d made the day before. That could be a lunch right there, especially if you had a glass of milk with your cookies, but we were out of milk, too. And growing up as an American, I kept trying to envision some kind of sandwich to  fill out the plate. Finally, poking in a couple of Tupperware containers, I discovered one chicken patty and the remains of some biscuit dough. I cut the chicken patty in three equal peace-sign segments and dropped each piece on a spoonful of biscuit dough, then topped each of those with a chunk of store brand cheese loaf I’d previously cut into half-ounce chunks, followed by another spoonful of biscuit dough. (Actually, I was using a rubber scraper by the last one, it really took every smidgeon of dough to make these chicken-cheese biscuits.)

So naturally, the kids thought this was the greatest lunch we‘d had in weeks. Normally they practically spear each other with forks to get their fair share of a package of chicken patties, but because the biscuits obscured their vision, I don‘t think they even realized they only had a third of a patty, so they didn‘t feel deprived.

And with the free oranges, 58 cents worth of ingredients for the chicken biscuits, and 7 cents for each homemade cookie, the total cost for all three home-schooled kids lunches came to 65 cents. Less than 22 cents each. Nearly half the cost of Rowan’s theoretical 40-cent reduced-price school lunch, if we were ever get around to filling out the paperwork.