Are you getting tired of my ideas for making meal and snack times a little more fun? I hope not – I have a lot of them to share! But, today will be the last post on this topic for now!
A variety of ideas suitable for school lunches and/or snacks:
~ Cut the crust off a piece of soft bread. Spread with something like egg salad, add a long piece of cucumber, celery, zucchini, or pickle. Roll it up and slice into spirals.
~ Instead of using the flour tortillas to make “wraps”, use lettuce leaves. Fill, or allow your child to fill, with a variety of items such as leftover cooked chicken,turkey, or ham, shredded vegetables like carrots, peppers, or cucumbers, shredded cheese, chopped hard boiled egg, nuts, seeds, sprouts – use your imagination! You can add a dab of Greek yogurt or some salad dressing if desired (or serve with dip on the side). Roll up into a bundle.
Flickr, Matej Novak
~ Most kids love dips! A great “on the go” idea for dips is to put a serving of dip down in the bottom of a cup that has a lid. Then fill the cup with your cut up vegetables and put the lid on. It’s self contained and easy to pack in a lunch or to take along in the car as a snack between school and sports practice.
~ My daughter’s favourite after school snack was apple dippers. Core and cut up an apple (we left the peel on!). Serve with a small dish of peanut butter (you can mix in a bit of honey if you wish) as well as some kind of seeds, crushed nuts, raisins, craisins, granola, crushed cereal, or my daughter’s favourite – wheat germ. Dip the apples first into the peanut butter and then into the other items. Tasty, good for you, and with my hypoglycemic daughter, it provided a great boost of protein too!
Flickr, Way Tru
~ When you’re making pancakes, cook up a few extra that are silver dollar sized. Keep them in the freezer until you need them. Use as a wrap or the base of an open faced sandwich – spread on jam or peanut butter and add seeds, nuts, or bits of fruit.
~ Salad in a bag: Give your child a resealable bag and let them fill it with their choice of salad fixings like lettuce, tomatoes, and so on. Seal up the bag and put in their lunch bag along with a small container of salad dressing. At lunch time, they can pour in the salad dressing, reseal the bag, and shake to toss the salad!
~ Taco in a bag: Put the following into your child’s lunch bag – a bag of Fritos or Doritos or something similar – one of those small snack sized bags. OR you can put your own tortilla chips into a resealable bag like you did with the salad above. Then add containers (or baggies) of cooked seasoned (as for tacos) ground beef, shredded cheese, and other favourite taco toppings like chopped tomatoes and lettuce. Your child can open up the bag of chips and then dump in the other ingredients and eat right out of the bag!
Flickr, Like_the_Grand_Canyon
~ And what I think turned out to be my best lunch time idea ever…Mom-ables! You see, until my daughter entered school at age 4, she was the best eater ever. She loved all kinds of healthy foods and really had never even tried most of the less nutritious ones. Then suddenly, there she is in a classroom surrounded by kids and all of their sugar laden yogurt tubes, chocolate sandwiches (we lived in a predominately Dutch area and this apparently was something very common for them). and Lunchables. Oh the appeal of the Lunchables! I had to come up with some ideas to counteract all of this and that’s when I started making Mom-ables. I bought some divided plastic containers with lids from the dollar store and made up labels on my computer saying Mom-ables, designed to look very much like the Lunchables logo. I’d fill the sections much in the way I might for a muffin tin meal – crackers or mini pitas, small pieces of cheese and/or meat, pickles, cut up vegetables, dip, cut up fruit, and so on. My daughter loved it. She felt like she was still getting something really special – similar to the Lunchables that her friends were getting and yet unique…AND while the choices in her friends’ Lunchables were limited by store and product selection, she could have her favourite foods in hers (watermelon or strawberries were a big hit!). Her friends even started going home and asking their parents to make Mom-ables for them!
This blog post is part of a month long series. It's part of a blog hop of sorts - many different bloggers are taking part,presenting a variety of topics in a 31 day series. To catch up on the days in this series that you may have missed, go here: http://cynchronicity.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/31-days-of-family-fun-the-basics/ To check out the other 715 (wow!) participants, go here: http://www.thenester.com/2011/09/31-days-participants.html Oh and while you're here, if you like what you see, I'd love for you to become a follower/subscriber of my blog!
[…] Day Eight: Even More Fun with Food: http://cynchronicity.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/31-days-of-family-fun-even-more-fun-with-food/ […]