If you are a parent and you pack a lunch for your children to take to school every day, chances are it’s not your favorite job. It can be easy to fall into a rut of serving the same few things in your child’s lunch box. Lisa Leake of 100 days of Real Food recently posted pictures of 20 different school lunches she packed for her children. Check it out here and see if you can find some new ideas.
For the last few years, I’ve been putting a squeezable yogurt in my children’s lunches every day. When we did our 10 days of real food challenge, I had to give up this habit because of the added sugar. Even though I always chose organic yogurt, I came to realize just how much sugar was added in order to make it taste good to my children’s spoiled palates. For the last month, I’ve been putting other things in their lunches in place of the yogurt.
Now I’m excitedly awaiting the delivery of this product from Amazon, which will allow me to make homemade smoothies for my children and send them to school as part of their lunches. I think they’ll enjoy homemade squeezable yogurt if I can find some good recipes for smoothies. Suggestions are welcome – please post your ideas in the comments below!
I have a great recipe book on smoothies I will let you borrow…but this one caught my attention because of the mango sorbet you just made.
1/2 c. unsweetened light coconut milk
1 1/4 c. diced fresh pineapple
1 frozen banana sliced
3/4 c. passion fruit sorbet (use your mango instead)
Combine the coconut milk and pineapple in a blender. Add banana and sorbet. Blend until smooth.
Let me know the tubes work!
Thanks, Linsey! That recipe sounds great – I’ll have to try it (although it’s difficult for me to share the mango sorbet with the children).
great ideas Annemarie! I made your granola bars and chocolate bark yesterday–yummo! Also we buy the large stonyfield low-fat plain yogurt every week and then divide it for lunches adding frozen berries (plus a little honey for Luke….our sugar boy).
I’m glad you liked them, Kara! And that’s a great suggestion to add frozen berries to the yogurt. My kids only eat yogurt if it’s sweet enough to hide the yogurt tang, so I’ll have to experiment with proportions.
I’m long past fixing school lunches but I dearly loved fixing them. The other kids at school would trade my kids for (in some insurances actually buy) whatever they were having for lunch that a day. I labored over the weekends fixing LARGE (we had 4 kids) quantities of whatever I wanted and they would eat. It was frozen in pint Mason jars and placed in the deep freeze. After 3 weeks it was amazing the selection the children had and with each weekend the selection grew. Their ONLY responsibility was to take out what they wanted for lunch the night before. I remember one parent getting really irate with me at a track meet because of what I sent my children to school with for lunch. It was pretty comical, like I was supposed to apologize for being able to cook and enjoying it. When the kids got into High School, I bought a home slicer and would slice fresh homemade turkey, chicken, pork or roast beef. Their job was to get it out in time to thaw and I would fix them panini sandwiches or whatever else came to mind that they liked. Now they are all grown but still talk about Dad’s cooking and their lunches with all of their friends. If you cook and somewhat plan ahead you can fix your children affordable healthy meals that they like and all of the other kids will want. It beats whatever the school cafeteria feeds children both in flavor, price and health benefits.
Wow, Richard! Your children are very lucky. I totally agree about the cafeteria lunches – they are definitely sub-par where I live.
Here is a post with my favorite smoothie recipe – it’s green which doesn’t always go over well for kids to drink but for some reason it’s a “cool” popsicle! I have the molds myself and we LOVE them!
http://behealthybehappywellness.com/blog/2012/04/april-enjoy-your-greens
This sounds wonderful! Thanks for sharing the link. I just got the molds in the mail yesterday so I will have to try your recipe.