Nourish Your Kids With a Real School Lunch

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Packing a healthy lunch for your child is fun, easy, and frugal. You'll feel good knowing you are providing the best for your kids while they're away and your kids will feel thier brightest if they eat nourishing food while at school. The following lunch ideas have been tried by my kids with "thumbs up".

Easy Meal Ideas for a Real School Lunch

Yogurt Parfait:
Whole-milk plain yogurt such as Fage or Seven Stars Farms mixed with 1/2 tsp maple syrup per 6 oz serving and a tablespoon or two of grain-free granola packed in glass yogurt jars.

Homemade and Healthy "lunchables":
In a stainless-steel container like this, pack a handful of rice crackers (my kids love Nut thins), or homemade almond-flour crackers, thick slices of grass-fed cheese, and sliced salami or pepporoni (I like Applegate Farms brand).

Nutrient-dense Sandwiches:
Useing plain rice cakes, truely whole-grain sourdough bread, grain-free bread, or lettuce leaves, fill your "bread" of choice with homemade egg salad or tuna salad, made with canola-oil free mayonnaise.

Snacks:
Homemade trail mix of roasted almonds, dried cranberries, cashews, shredded coconut and salted pumpkin seeds. We also really like Organic Valley, whole-milk colby jack cheese, or any good string cheese. Fresh fruit and vegetables such as strawberries, zucchini strips, or carrot sticks make a nice snack, just make sure you pre-cut them, or, from my experience, you'll have some sad looking veggies coming home in the lunch box, untouched.

The best drink to pack is pure water, or whole milk, in a cool looking container, of course (like this one perhaps).

I used to pack juice boxes and milk boxes, but check out the nutritional info on these. One serving has 27 grams of carbs, which is more then a bowl of ice cream, not to mention they are made with UHT milk which is pretty gross-tasting unless you douse it in sugar.

Here's my dirty secret to getting my kids to eat thier lunch... dont. pack. dessert. I know, it sounds like kind of a bummer, but my kids are young, and get only 15 minutes to eat lunch. When I do pack dessert they only find the time to eat that, and nothing else. I don't pack empty calories snacks like chips, crackers, snack bars and the like.

Check out one kid's description of a traditional, healthy Japanese lunch:

"...One day we had make-your-own-sushi... We made it by covering dried green seaweed sheets with rice. Then I added some small fish, egg, and soybean spread called Nato to the rice. We also had a delicious squid stew with quail eggs. To drink, we had milk. Our dessert was an orange. After lunch we brushed our teeth using the sinks in the hall..."
How inspiring!

I'm sharing this post with Cheeseslave's Real Food Wednesday and with the Nourishing Gourmet's Pennywise Platter!