MmmmMac & Cheese

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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…)

7 Comments

Breakfast Bars – Amp Up or Fuel Up?

Last week a friend suggested we take a deconstructed look at breakfast bars.  As a working mother of two under four, her mornings are busy and rushed yet she wants to provide a healthy start to her kids’ day.  One day in a pinch, she picked up a nationally recognized brand bar for the following morning’s breakfast.  Ten minutes after eating the bar, her son was bouncing off the walls.  That little self-proclaimed “health” bar, had turned a quiet morning into a wild, stress-filled kickoff to the day.

Aren’t school mornings challenging enough? (more…)

20 Comments

Pudding Cups – Cup of what?

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…)

6 Comments

Corn Syrup Roll-up – Where’s the Fruit?

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…)

55 Comments

Join the Lunch Box Loop

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…)

2 Comments