If ever children have a finicky food preference, it will be outed the moment it is placed between two slices of bread. It is a morning – or evening, depending on how busy the day is – endurance test in many households and is often enough to defeat most parents. It is a thankless task. No wonder we resort to the default position of vegemite, or peanut butter, or Just Tomato Please, stuffed between white bread, crusts removed. We send our children off to school, ever hopeful that this, today, will be the day they eat it all up.
To help you gird your loins at the prospect of having to make lunches nutritional and interesting for the rest of the back-to-school year – and truthfully, because one more day of ‘just Devon and tomato sauce sandwiches please, with the crusts cut off and cut into triangles’ is going to send you into a foetal position on the kitchen floor – here are some suggestions to get you going. It’s not perfect and I know that a suggestion of peanut butter – or eggs, or fish – will not be ideal for all of you especially where schools have banned such items from lunchboxes, but hopefully there should be enough in this list to encourage your children to eat up.
We can but hope. In the meantime, feel free to add your own suggestions to the list.
– ROAST VEGETABLES Use vegetables like roast potato, pumpkin, carrots and kumera and use Turkish bread or foccacia for a meal that will stick to your ribs. If you want something lighter you can use zucchini, eggplant, capsicum and tomatoes which should all be thinly sliced, tossed in oil and a squirt of white wine vinegar and baked in a 170°C oven for about 45 mins to an hour. Top the bread, add some fetta or hummus, some onion jam and a squirt of lemon juice.
Top Comments
Mum made my lunch everyday, except Friday, tuck shop day. We always had sandwiches (cheese and pickle, tuna patties and sauce, meat loaf and sauce, vegemite and cheese) but sometimes we got a piece of leftover penne lasagne (my fav!). She always had homemade cake or biscuits, and fruit with a frozen juice box to keep it all cool. My little one is now 2 and in day care. Lucky to have a fridge and microwave for reheating. He gets all sorts! Tuna mornay, spaghetti Bol, stirfry. They have a no junk policy, so lots of fruit, yogurt and little containers of salami, cheese and carrot sticks, piklets, muffins, rolled up polony etc. I just mix it up. What ever he doesn't eat goes back in his lunchbox so I have a good idea of what he has eaten.
Our school doesn't have fridges in the classroom , some teachers get the children to bring their bags into the classroom so it's an ice block and nothing that can get too funky in the heat.