Lunch Ideas for Kids

I HATED school lunch when I was little. I hated baloney sandwiches. I hated peanut butter and jelly. I hated salami. I hated the cold lunches the school provided, I hated the hot lunches more (Salisbury steak, fish patties--bleech!!). It's a wonder I didn't starve. So it broke my heart when a lunch lady searched me out to tell me my son almost never ate the school lunches. And this was Kindergarten! I was not going to have him go through the same. Over the years I have cultivated some great recipes and tips for lunch ideas for kids to make sure my children were getting nutrition in the middle of the day.

Before going into recipes, let me say, making lunch for your child is NOT just good tasting food. Make lunch appealing and easy--as well as tasty--and your kid's friends will be asking you to make their lunches too!

Here are few things to think about in your school lunch-making strategy.

1. Presentation. Really it matters! First, creating food items that look interesting, colorful and pretty just taste better. For instance, you could serve a sandwich with bread and meat. Or even prettier, a sandwich with colorful red, green and yellow veggies as well as meat. Or multi-colored marble bread instead of white. Or using cookie cutters to make shapes out of the sandwiches. Use your imagination--ideas will flow!
   
2. Easy to Eat. If possible, make the food easy to eat. A a sandwich cut in quarters is often easier to manipulate than sandwich on a whole slice of bread. Sending an orange is easy for you, sending a peeled orange in a container or baggie is easy for them! You want to make sure they eat the lunch, so when possible make it easy for them, considering their age and the time they have for lunch.
   
3. Container. This can make all the difference on the type of lunches you can send. The investment (less than $15) in nice containers that hold in the cold or heat will increase the range of lunches you can send. Have a kid that brown bags it? There are disposable styro and paper containers that will keep a wide variety of foods beyond sandwiches.
4. Routine. You will make lunch making INFINITELY easier by planning it out lunches at the beginning of the week and getting all the materials you need. You will make your mornings SO MUCH easier and lunches more complete by prepping most the lunch the night before. Get into a routine and it is easy to have your child take over some or much of lunch making duties. And keep ALL lunch items in their own separate, special spot so you are not looking for things in the morning. And regular rotation of meals can life simple for you and comfortable for you child when he or she knows what to expect.
   

I'm not going to list recipes here, there are some other great places for those. But here are some ideas for easy meals that work well in hot lunches for kids.

Note: you need to have some type of container that will keep the lunch warm such as a thermos or hot food packaging. See the next section.

One pot meals tend to transition well to hot lunches. These are meals like casseroles (tuna casserole, lasagna, chicken and broccoli and rice), pastas (spaghetti, baked spaghetti, pasta al fredo), and stews (beef stew, turkey stew, chicken and dumplings)

There are many ready-made, pre-packaged dinners that you can buy in the freezer section that can be microwaved in the morning and put in a furnace. The portion size is right and the amount of work and clean is manageable!

Soups can be a nice addition to a lunch. Add a sandwich or a small salad, your child has a lunch that really hearty. A quality thermos will keep the soup warm until lunch time, just make sure you heat it very, very hot before putting it in the thermos.

Also look at your leftovers from dinner--some might work really well for hot or cold lunch the next day. Things like spaghetti and casseroles are great. Meals like fried chicken or pizza are good hot or cold.

With good planning you can pack every food group in the food pyramid into just a single sandwich! This is what I try for:

Meat and Beans (proteins)

• fish like tuna or sardines
• low fat meats are best like turkey and chicken. Chicken can be in the deli style or just a piece of chicken from last night's dinner cut up.
• For non-meat stuff: Don't forget, nut butters like peanut butter or almond butter are protein!
  
• Other proteins for sandwich stuffing: "meats" made from tofu (soybeans); bean sprouts (adds some nice crunch)
• Don't count out eggs. Hard-boiled egg slices are yummy on a sandwich, or just go with egg-salad sandwiches (if the weather isn't hot!).
  

Grains

OK the sandwich bread is the your grain. Plain white bread doesn't have as much of a nutritional bang for the buck. Experiment and try other breads. Breads made with whole grain like whole wheat, oat, rye, etc. give better health benefits. Generally, the darker and or chunkier, the better it probably is. But you want to check the ingredients and look for whole grain or whole wheat ingredients.

Vegetable

Start by piling up the the sandwich with leafy greens. Again, the darker, generally the more vitamins. For instance, Iceberg lettuce (that light green stuff in fast food salads)--not much nutrition, but baby spinach leaf--full of Vitamin C and iron (and the baby version has a milder taste).

Consider these other veggies to enhance the flavor and nutirion of the sandwich. Just slice them up and pile them on. If your kids fight you on the veggies, try shredding them to help the taste blend in better and use their favorite salad dressing on the sandwich instead of mayo.

• baby carrots
• green peppers
• broccoli
• watercress
• asparagus
• celery
• cucumbers
• zucchini
  
• sliced avocado
  
• mushrooms

Make morning easier by prepping the veggie the night before.

Fruit

This may be a hard thing to include on the sandwich. Officially, tomatoes count here (they actually are a fruit), so slice some up to provide vitamin C and antioxidants. (Hint, shake tomato slices over the sink to get the seeds and juice out so it doesn't make the sandwich soggy.) Other fruit possibilities:

• apple slices (espeicalliy good with tuna and peanut butter and jelly[PB&J])
• bananas (especially with PB&J)
• shredded pineapple (try with tuna or chicken salad!)
• raisins or dried cranberry
  

Milk (Dairy)

The first option is cheese. And you don't have to stop at pre-packaged American cheese slices! You can find sliced cheese in other flavors: cheddar and colby are bold and cheezy; munster, provolone and swiss are milder and smoother tasting. Shredded chesse like Parmesian, mozzella, and asiago add flavor with few calories. Thick cheese spreads (made with real cheese) can also be a nice change.

Other dairy you can add to a sandwich can be cream cheese or sour cream. These are best between meat and veggie layers, not on the bread layer, so an not to make the bread soggy.

Fat

You probably don't need it on the sandwich (the meat and bread may have some and very likely the dairy). But this comes in the way of many of the condiments you'd use. Mayonnaise or salad dressing (spread on the sandwich or mixed in the meat) has it's share of fat in oils. Salad dressings are a great change from mayo. Mustard doesn't have any fat--feel free to load up. And while sugars are not technically fats, they taste good (even if they don't really add nutritionally-speaking) so go with the ketchup, barbeque sauce, jelly, honey, and sweet and sour sauce.

The ubiquitous sandwich is a standard for a kid's school lunch, not a new idea. But you don't have to stick with the old standards. Try new ideas out at home first, before sending off to school!

You have 2 ways to go with this: brown bags or a lunch boxes. I won't go into the ecological effect here, I just want to point out tips:

Lunch boxes

Get a roomy lunch box, it is good to have more space for lunches that may have more bulk. You want a lunch box with material that expands. Metal or boxes lined with a hard plastic shell. are not so great. Those like a tote or are have a soft form will give you some leeway when you have a bulky container.

invest the $15 at the beginning of the school year for a good thermos that keeps food hot. For the conservation minded, buy your child his or her own set of lunch cutlery, cloth napkins, and reusable bottle for beverages (8 oz is often good enough).

Brown Bag

If this is the method you need to use for your child, here are the things you want to stock up on:

• large paper bags (you know they come in different sizes. Find stores that carry larger ones.)
• paper napkin
• bottled water, the junior/kid sizes
• juice boxes
• plastic cutlery
• styro cups and bowls, 1oz, 2oz and 4 oz (for fruit cups, hot lunch items)
• foil
• plastic wrap
• if you collect packets from restaurants (from ketchup to hot sauce to honey) here's where you can use them

Restaurant supply stores and warehouse clubs are good places to look for most of these items.

If you want to do hot lunches with a brown bag it is is not out of the question, however, not everything will be doable. For instance, fried rice would stay reasonably warm in a styro bowl (sitting in a cold locker for 4 hours). Soup, however, almost never stays hot in these containers, no matter how much you wrap it.

The meal your child eats in the middle of the day should replenish them from the morning and rejuvenate them for the afternoon. But you're not there and kids don't always eat their lunch. Improve the odds. Be creative with your lunch ideas for kids--not just in menu but in presentation and variety--you will find a kid who is well nourished.