Breaking out of the boring lunch box conundrum is always a challenge and as we start a new year I turned to Foodie.com to help bookmark some of my favorite lunch box ideas and recipes. Enjoy some of our favorites, collect your own and make packing lunch boxes just a little more fun! (more…)
Have you seen the Bill Murray film, Groundhog Day? The one where he wakes up each morning to face the exact same day….over….and over…….and over again? Well, as I got up yesterday to pack my children’s lunches I felt a bit like Bill Murray (minus the dry sense of humor and experience as a Ghostbuster). Alarm goes off, I pad into the kitchen, pull out our lunchboxes, open the fridge: turkey, cheese, bread — add some fruit, something for snack. Done. (more…)
In our last post we made a whole grain alternative to a classic french pastry, Gougères. The reason I tackled these little light as air delicacies was to ultimately turn them into a fun and fresh alternative lunch box sandwich for kids. I know I’ll break out the recipe again down the road and turn them into sweet treats, fun appetizers…the possibilities are endless, but this week they’re going to become the basis for our lunch box sandwiches. (more…)
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that a a lot of kids out there like avocados. They are a healthy, nutrient rich fruit (yes they are a fruit) that are often passed off as a vegetable in sandwiches, salads, and of course, guacamole. Seeing as Cinco de Mayo is right around the corner, I realized those easy prepackaged containers of guacamole would soon be flying off the supermarket shelf. (more…)
The answer is NO. Repeat after me, No nitrites, no nitrites, NO NITRITES!!! Okay, I just had a flash back to my old cheerleading days.
Turkey deli meat is one of those things that I never really thought too much about. It’s always been the lean deli protein that came sliced, smoked, honeyed or roasted and when piled on whole wheat bread with mustard and veggies became my healthy lunch. Or was it? During this Out of the Box Food journey I’ve been looking more carefully at everything, and that needed to include turkey. I tended to choose turkey over ham because it was supposed to be healthier, right? Well, I’m learning that it’s not just about the product itself, but how the product is cured and what might be added to it that makes the difference. (more…)
Granola bars stir up quite the controversy at our house. My kids want to bring them to school for snack, but a nut-free school means no granola bars with nuts of any sort. That rules out a lot of the granola bars on the market. Then when we look at what’s left and examine what ingredients are actually in the remaining granola bars things really start to get interesting. Let’s just say we’re left with…well, not much. (more…)
What kid (or adult for that matter) doesn’t love macaroni and cheese? It’s warm, gooey deliciousness screams “comfort food” – especially on a cold winter day. But a boxed product we’ve come to know as macaroni and cheese doesn’t even contain “cheese” in the pure sense of the word. In fact, the word “cheese” is only found on the last line of a long list of ingredients. So what do we do when our kids only want “the orange macaroni and cheese”? And what if your kids cringe at the site of…ready…gasp…bread crumbs on top of baked macaroni and cheese? Is this sounding familiar? (more…)
It’s the third week of first grade at our house, and already my children are coming home with processed food requests from their friends lunch boxes. Yesterday it was for “those cups of white and brown pudding that everyone has”. Okay, guess we’re going to push pudding cups up on the list of Out of the Box Food explorations. (more…)
You know ’em, those long, sticky, peel-and-eat rolls of sweet chemicals your kids love? I just can’t bring myself to call them what they do on the package; “fruit” is just too far off what they actually are. Corn Syrup Roll-up could work. Or how about Artificial Color roll-up? To make matters worse, my kids don’t even want regular roll-ups in their lunch boxes anymore, they want the ones that stretch to nearly a foot long! So is it possible to make foot long real fruit roll-ups? You bet. (more…)
With school starting, I’ve been having a lot of conversations about what to put in our kid’s lunch boxes. This is a very popular topic at the moment. In fact, last week I participated in something called the Lunch Revolution Blog Party hosted on Notes From the Cookie Jar. The Lunch Revolution Blog Party was an opportunity for Food Bloggers to come together from far and wide, offering up their best Lunch Box ideas and recipes. Take a minute to go to Notes From the Cookie Jar and see some of the great ideas for yourself. Believe it or not, there are actually lots of delicious, fresh and EASY lunches out there that don’t involve peeling the top off a compartmentalized box of processed meat. It’s true. (more…)