{Today’s Lunchbox} Brown-Bag Challenge, Day 21 & Recap of Week 4

This month I am participating in the Brown-Bag Challenge where the Food Network’s Healthy Eats blog is teaming up with fellow food bloggers to host a month-long initiative to eat consciously and save money by packing a lunch each weekday instead of eating out. You can join here and share what you’re eating on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #brownbag.

And just like that, the Brown-Bag Challenge is over. I cannot quite believe how fast September went by. While I have been packing my lunch for years (and have been blogging about it regularly for well over a year as part of my Today’s Lunchbox Series), it was lots of fun to do it as part of a larger challenge.

This week’s lunches:

Monday was a great kale salad
Tuesday involved a wrap and green smoothie
Wednesday was kale salad with black beans and squash
Thursday included cheese quinoa with mushrooms and peas (recipe here)
Friday (unpictured) involved more quinoa with a bunch of leftover bits from the fridge, including kale, squash and scallions

Having to blog every single lunch made me think more about variety. Usually, you all see about three to four weekday lunches on the blog, which generally means the ones you do not see are clones of the ones you do see and there is a fair amount of repetition. This month made me stretch a bit in that sense, which was nice. I am going to try to stay somewhere between this approach to blogging lunchboxes and my old approach. Overall my biggest takeaway was to keep up with the variety in my lunches. It definitely made for a more fun set of options.

Here is lunchbox inspiration from other bloggers: