Dare I say the dreaded words “back to school yet”? By my calculations we’re now past the halfway point in the school holidays and in my desperate attempts to be organised by September I’m starting to think about all the things that I need to do before Little Miss C goes back to school on 3rd September. There’s more (bigger) uniform to buy and water bottles to name. A book bag to find and school shoes to polish. With her being at Infant School she qualifies for free school meals come September which will not only save us money, but also mean that I don’t have to get a lunchbox ready every day.
I’m very conscious though that this luxury will end when she moves on to Junior School though so when Sainsbury’s Back to School campaign challenged me to come up with a fun, creative balanced lunchbox meal I readily accepted. When LMC has had school packed lunches for her nursery year they were always sandwich based so I wanted to do something a bit different. There are some great sandwich alternatives on the Sainsburys Inspiration website but I also wanted to take inspiration from a book I featured on Ladybird Tuesday a few weeks ago – Packed Lunches.
These days Pinterest is full of photos of Bento style lunch boxes where mums (and it is mainly mums) are almost at competitive levels with their lunchbox creations. Some of them are complete works of art, yet I’ll be honest and say that I’m not sure how much Little Miss C would actually appreciate something like that. Yes, it might make her smile, but I know that it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s eat things.
As far as I’m concerned a packed lunch needs to be:
- Practical to eat and easy to assemble
- Cheap
- Healthy
- Enjoyed by children
- Fun
You also need to remember that many schools have rules about what can and can’t go into packed lunches. At our school, there must be fruit of some sort, no sweets or chocolate, no nuts and only a small cake or other pudding.
So, with all this in mind I set about coming up with a retro plan – not that my four year old has any idea what retro means, to her it could be food from yesterday rather than the 1980s!
Our Retro Lunchbox contains:
- Cheese and chive sandwich roll
- Cowboy pies
- Baked hot dog
- Mandarin segments
- Teddy bear cupcake
- Apple juice
The cheese and chive sandwich rolls are made with simple soft cheese and a sprinkling of home grown chives. Tied up with a chive they almost look like they’d be found in a sushi box. The kids here didn’t recognise them as sandwiches at all when I served them up today.
The recipe for cowboy pies comes from the Ladybird Packed Lunches book and combines two of the things that children love – baked beans and sausages. I used ready made shortcrust pastry and then this was filled with baked beans mixed with sausage meat.
They taste absolutely delicious and the fact that I had left over bean and sausage mix and pastry means that we’ll be having a pie version for dinner tomorrow night which I’m looking forward to greatly.
Baked hot dogs couldn’t really be much simpler. Take a slice of white bread with the crusts cut off. Spread with margarine (and mustard or pickle if you don’t have fussy kids like mine). Roll the bread around a thin pork sausage and then bake in the oven for 30 minutes. You end up with a lovely crispy roll and a cooked sausage inside. The kids absolutely loved these.
When it comes to fruit, LMC likes oranges, but struggles peeling them on her own, so a little pot of mandarin segments is a great alternative.
The teddy cupcakes are simply based on my toddler cupcake recipe but I used a spoon of Nutella on top instead of making icing and then decorated with white chocolate buttons and raisins. The plan was to make them look like teddy bears, but LMC was convinced they were pigs instead!
LMC seemed to love the retro lunchbox I put together for her today. The question is can I just hang on to these recipes until she goes to junior school or do I need to revise them more before then?
Disclaimer: We were sent a Sainsburys voucher to buy our lunchbox ingredients with and a lunchbox to put it all in for Little Miss C.
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