Lunch

Hibachi chicken rice bowl

Name: Hibachi chicken rice bowl
Prep time: 2 min
Cook time: 2 min
Total time: 5 min
Yield: 1 servings
Cuisine: American

The school lunch this whole system is built around. Five minutes on Sunday per box, nothing on a weekday.

Steps

1
Rice on the bottom, cold
1 cup cooked jasmine rice, spread flat and completely cool before the lid goes on. Warm rice under a lid steams itself and by Tuesday the bottom is gluey.
Common mistake: Building the box while anything is still warm. Everything cools on a tray first, then it gets assembled.
2
Chicken beside the rice, not on it
About 4 oz of the hibachi chicken alongside rather than on top. Sitting on the rice it sheds sauce downward all week and you get one soggy corner.
3
Broccoli and carrot in their own corner
Half a cup of broccoli and a few carrot sticks in the third corner. Cooked broccoli gives off water as it sits, which is the other thing that ruins the rice.
4
Sauce travels separately, always
Yum-yum or extra soy in a small lidded cup, added at the table. This is the single difference between a lunch that comes back empty and one that comes back half eaten.

Cook the hibachi chicken recipe once on Sunday and five of these take about twenty minutes total.
Pack the box with an ice pack. USDA says at or below 40F, and a school bag in Florida is not that on its own.
Sesame seeds and a squeeze of lime at the table wake it up on day four.
No microwave at school is fine. Cold hibachi rice is genuinely good, which is more than can be said for most reheated lunches.