The cheapest packed lunch is the one you did not cook separately. Making slightly more dinner and putting a portion aside is easier than any meal-prep routine, and it costs nothing extra in effort. What it does require is a bit of discipline about when the portion is set aside, how it is cooled and how it is treated the next day.
Set it aside before the meal, not after
Portion out tomorrow’s lunch when the food comes off the heat, before it goes on the table. Food that has sat on a serving dish through dinner, been picked at with used cutlery and then scraped into a box at nine o’clock has had a much worse evening than a portion put straight into a container. This single habit does more than any other for leftovers.
Cool fast, chill hard
Get the portion cold quickly: shallow container, lid off until the steam stops, then into the fridge within an hour or two. A deep tub of hot stew put straight into the fridge with the lid on cools slowly in the middle and warms everything around it. In the morning it goes into the bag straight from the fridge, cold, with a frozen pack sitting above it, which is what bags like the ones at MEXS are actually designed for.
Reheating: once, properly, or not at all
If you reheat at work, it should be until steaming hot right through, once, and eaten immediately. Weak microwaves that produce a warm outside and a cold middle are the real hazard in offices, and stirring halfway through is not optional. If the machine cannot manage that, eat the dish cold by design instead of half-warming it.
The smell test does not work
The belief that food is safe if it smells and looks normal is comfortable and wrong. Spoilage organisms that make food smell bad are largely different from the ones that make people ill, and a portion of cooked chicken rice can be well past sensible while looking and smelling exactly as it did on Monday. Judge leftovers by how they were handled and how long ago, not by sniffing the box.
Which dinners make good lunches
Some meals are better the second day, and some should never make the journey.
- Chilli, dal, ragù and casseroles: reliably better cold or reheated
- Roast meat sliced cold with pickle and bread: excellent
- Rice dishes: fine if they were cooled fast and kept properly cold
- Fish pie, seafood and shellfish: not worth carrying about
- Anything battered, fried or crisp: soft and sad by lunchtime
Three days, not five
Cooked leftovers belong in the fridge for a small number of days, not a week. If Monday’s dinner has not been eaten by Thursday, freeze it on Tuesday rather than hoping. Reheated food should not go back into the fridge for a third outing; that is where most household food poisoning stories actually begin.
Cooking with tomorrow in mind
Once you accept that dinner is also lunch, small changes pay off. Season a touch more assertively, since flavours flatten when cold. Keep sauce and starch separate if the dish will sit. Cook an extra handful of vegetables rather than an extra portion of meat, because vegetables carry the second day better and cost less.