I’m far too lazy to cook. Occasionally I’ll pack a lunch-- or rather, I’ll buy deli meat and then make lunch for the week. I’m far too lazy to make one sandwich at a time, so I’ve found a quick way to do them in batches.
This process takes about 15 minutes. Lay out 3 slices of bread, grab meat A (i.e. ham) and place, next item (turkey, cheese, whatever) and place, etc, along all three. So, rather than building a sandwich, just grab 3 slices of each thing at a time and lay them down to parallel 3 sandwiches. It’s less tedious, if not immediately faster (instead of reaching, picking around to get one slice, etc; you take three at a time, in the same time frame, and take an extra second to lay them out on three slices of bread).
If you use mayo or mustard or anything, of course, it’ll soak into the bread and go bad; the easy fix for that is to paste it between layers of meat and cheese (I put it on each cheese slice). The meat will also offer moisture into the bread; you can start and end the sandwich on cheese if you want, I tend not to and it’s fine. The last problem is that refrigerated bread is texturally different from fresh bread; but hell, you’re packing lunch, it’s going in the fridge anyway. What do you want, a fresh-made sandwich that stays fresh-made for 5 days?
So yeah, rather than 10-15 minutes in the kitchen 4-5 days a week packing lunch each night, I do 3-5 in a batch that takes 10-15 minutes itself, maybe 1 or 2 minutes longer overall. Surprise, I don’t pack lunch a lot, and when I do there isn’t much variety; a week’s worth of sandwiches made up ahead of time, when I’m not so damn lazy.
So, the question then, is what do you do to cut down on lunch packing time? I have cast iron cookware (including a wok), a KitchenAid Artisan 325W mixer, a toaster oven, a rice basket, and a 2-4-6 quart slow cooker at my disposal. I prefer to spend under 60 minutes in the kitchen for something that lasts 3-5 days (this means I’ve spent 45 minutes over the wok making stirfry dishes for 3-4 days worth before); the 3 hours it takes for stock to boil down doesn’t count, I’m not in the kitchen for that crap, it’s on auto-pilot. And yes, I bake my own sandwich bread; esoteric bread recipes are completely viable, since one batch can last 2 weeks and bread freezes well.