School Lunches

Now that the kids are back in school after the nice two-week Christmas break, it's time again to think about school lunches. Monday's and Tuesday's school lunches were easy: left-over meatloaf and chili from the previous nights' dinners were tasty and welcome school lunch fare for my kids. I always love it when we have just enough dinner left-overs to pack lunches the next day.

There are plenty of days, however, when I need to pull a fresh idea out of the hat, and I like to challenge myself by cooking up what my husband calls "little designer meals." I've been known to stand in the kitchen at 10 p.m. at night, sautéeing chicken strips, so my kids can have chicken satay with peanut dipping sauce for school the next day. They like that and it makes me happy.

I don't even know how and when this all started. When I went to school, there was no school lunch program. The only thing you could purchase in school was milk or chocolate milk. Everyone bagged their snacks and lunch, and that usually meant a piece of whole fruit for a snack and sandwiches for lunch. My mother liked to pack sandwiches using the hearty, whole grain bread better known as "Vollkornbrot" in Germany. You can purchase that type of bread, vacuum-packed and imported from Germany, at many places here. The other day, by the way, in my favorite grocery store, I overheard a woman telling someone how tasty that bread was and her husband chimed in saying, "and it's as hard as a brick!" Well, I'm getting sidetracked here, but there is some truth to what he said. You have to have teeth to eat that kind of bread.

Back to school lunches. When my older daughter was in first grade, "selling" her on taking a home lunch to school took a few marketing skills and some willingness to compromise. Of course, I wanted her to eat home lunch every day, but she loved the idea of pushing a little tray through the lunch line and choosing what she wanted to eat. In my opinion, there were too many overcooked, starchy and sugary foods available, but it didn't matter to her. She wanted to eat the way most of the other kids were eating. So we compromised. Every week I allowed her to pick up to two school lunches and the rest of the time she was to take a home lunch. She circled the two lunch choices on the school lunch menu every week, so I knew on which days to prepare home lunch, and on which days not. This method worked for us, not only with our older daughter, but also for her younger sister, until they approached middle school age.

At that time, they had both grown tired of the French toast sticks, hot dogs, and corn dogs and preferred food from home. I happily obliged, and even though it's challenging at times to create an appealing and nutritious lunch day in and day out, I know exactly what my kids are eating. They still have their lunch accounts at school, too, and will occasionally ask if they can get an a la carte item, such as a bag of chips or an ice-cream sandwich. I always say, "yes," to those requests because I know what they have in their lunch box and believe that always being denied some unhealthy foods will make those items even more desirable. I'd rather my kids get an occasional "fix" and avoid overdosing when unhealthier food options are suddenly available.

I should create a category on the blog just for school lunches because it's nice to have some tried and true combinations to fall back on. We've always called our older daughter the "long-neck" (that reference goes back to all the Littlefoot movies we watched when she was young) because she's definitely our "leaf-eater," preferring vegetarian food options most of the time. Her sister, on the other hand, has been labeled the "sharp-tooth" because it's all about meat for her. She needed a lot of training to eat her greens!