Great lunch box recipe!

Sharing one of my current favourite lunchbox recipes with you today. This one is in Sarah Wilson's I Quit Sugar for life book. I've made it a few times now and it's a great sugar free sweet treat. I've done a few variations of it but I'll share the original recipe with you today straight from the book. This version contained peanut butter instead of macadamia's but my children prefer the original recipe.

Sugar free baking

Just a quick share, I need to bake this recipe again before I share it as this was a first attempt but the kids liked it so that makes it a HIT in my books.

Sugar free Weetbix, Coconut and Cacao slice

Free lunch box planner just for you!

I've developed what i believe to be an effective lunch box planner. I'm sharing it for you on the blog today in the hopes that you may find it to be a handy tool to use. I'm not very 'tech savvy' so it's not perfect and I will take note of any feedback that i receive.  Please let me know what you think.

Free: Lunch Box Planner

Fruit, veggies, a wrap and some pretzels... Sounds good

In today's lunch box we have a Caesar salad wrap, pretzels, veggie salad (spinach, carrots, celery and cheese), a lovely mandarin and a little sugar free coco nutty granola treat.

How much food do i send my child to school with?

I got to talking to a mummy friend today about lunch box capacities and it got me thinking about the question "how much food should i send my child to school with?". I started to wonder about how to approach this and hopefully find an answer, this answer will obviously vary slightly from child to child depending on their age and appetite.
Our children spend the school hours away from us, this in most schools is around 7 hours, so if there are approximately 14 waking hours in the day (allowing 10 hours of sleep at night), the school hours will amount to around 50% of our children's 'eating time' being spent away from us. This means that approximately 50% of what our child needs in a day will be consumed at school. In our home we have breakfast, school lunch, afternoon tea and then dinner or we will have an early dinner and then an evening snack. To me this means that they need to be having a variety of foods that are healthy, nutritious and filling. Remember my food philosophy is all about moderation (you can check back on that post here), however i did find some information on the Eat for health. gov website that will help me break it down and give you a little bit of an idea. I am going to focus on children aged 4-8 as this is the demographic that my children are in currently.
This is what they should be having:

Children aged 4-8  

(Serves per day)

• Vegies, legumes/beans:  4 1/2  
• Fruit: 1 1/2 
• Grains: 4 
• Meat etc., eggs, nuts, seeds : 1 1/2  
• Dairy*: 2-3

   * This website says to feed your children reduced fat dairy, DO NOT feed your children reduced fat anything. Fat is good, sugar is not.

So this is what they would be having approximately at school

• Veg etc.: 2 1/4
• Fruit 3/4
• Grains: 2
• Meat: 3/4
• Dairy: 1- 1 1/4

What is a serving size?

Vegies, legumes/beans

A standard serve is about 75g (100–350kJ) or:

• ½ cup cooked green or orange vegetables (for example, broccoli, spinach, carrots or pumpkin)
• ½ cup cooked dried or canned beans, peas or lentils (preferably with no added salt)
• 1 cup green leafy or raw salad vegetables
• ½ cup sweet corn
• ½ medium potato or other starchy vegetables (sweet potato, taro or cassava)
• 1 medium tomato

Fruit
A standard serve is about 150g (350kJ) or:

• 1 medium apple, banana, orange or pear
• 2 small apricots, kiwi fruits or plums
• 1 cup diced or canned fruit (no added sugar)

Grains

A standard serve is (500kJ) or:

• 1 slice (40g) bread
• ½ medium (40g) roll or flat bread
• ½ cup (75-120g) cooked rice, pasta, noodles, barley, buckwheat, semolina, polenta, bulgur or quinoa
• ½ cup (120g) cooked porridge
•  ²/³ cup (30g) wheat cereal flakes
• ¼ cup (30g) muesli
• 3 (35g) crispbreads
• 1 (60g) crumpet
• 1 small (35g) English muffin or scone

*Grain (cereal) foods, mostly wholegrain and/or high cereal fibre varieties

Meat etc., eggs, nuts, seeds
A standard serve is (500–600kJ):

• 65g cooked lean red meats such as beef, lamb, veal, pork, goat or kangaroo (about 90-100g raw)
• 80g cooked lean poultry such as chicken or turkey (100g raw)
• 100g cooked fish fillet (about 115g raw) or one small can of fish
• 2 large (120g) eggs
• 1 cup (150g) cooked or canned legumes/beans such as lentils, chick peas or split peas (preferably with no added salt)
• 170g tofu
• 30g nuts, seeds, peanut or almond butter or tahini or other nut or seed paste (no added salt)*

Dairy
A standard serve is (500–600kJ):

• 1 cup (250ml) fresh, UHT long life, reconstituted powdered milk or buttermilk
• ½ cup (120ml) evaporated milk
• 2 slices (40g) or 4 x 3 x 2cm cube (40g) of hard cheese, such as cheddar
• ½ cup (120g) ricotta cheese
• ¾ cup (200g) yoghurt
• 1 cup (250ml) soy, rice or other cereal drink with at least 100mg of added calcium per 100ml

(all of this information came from here)

This all seems like a lot to take in but i'm going to break it down into an example school lunch menu for you ( I haven't worked out the exact amounts in each one but you get the idea):

1/4 cup carrot sticks with hummus dip

1 apple cut into slices (skin on)

A chicken and spinach wrap

Squeeze pouch of yogurt

OR

A piece of corn on a bed of spinach

A mandarin

An English muffin pizza with ham, cheese and no added sugar tomato sauce.

Sweet potato chips.

As I mentioned earlier, all children have different size appetites so you will need to adjust this to what you think your child needs. You can always throw an extra banana, apple or container of carrot sticks in their bag as a 'just in case' snack. If your children are getting this type of food at school, and then the rest of their serves of the essentials at breakfast, afternoon tea and dinner time they should be functioning at their very best. In my opinion their sugary 'treats' should be saved for the weekend, by all means add in a 'no added sugar' sweet treat to their lunch box ( i do). There are some great recipes out there. But, again you will need to do what works for your family, i did mention that we are on a journey to cut right back to very minimal added sugars so i will encourage you to also not regularly have these foods in your children's lunches and offer better choices as alternatives.

In the lunch boxes today

A salad wrap, an apple sandwich with peanut butter, pretzels, carrot & cucumber and some puffed corn.

Making better choices

Firstly i need to tell you that i'm not a foodie, a fitness fanatic or a nutritionist. Anything that i share i have either researched myself using books, the internet (and yes sometimes google is wrong) or i have learned from other people. I have my own opinions but believe others are entitled to theirs because of this i would like for you to take the parts of what i'm sharing with you that fit comfortably with who you are and your goals in life and then just discard the rest. That doesn't seem daunting, does it?
Making better choices is a concept that i learned from the prep teacher last year and it's a phrase i use a lot with my children now. It relates very well to selecting what to put in children's lunch boxes. There are everyday choices and then there are better choices. Some of your everyday choices might be great and maybe just need to be packaged a different way (if you are following me down the litter free path) but some you might be feeling a little twinge of internal debate about whether you could be putting something with a bit more nutritional value in instead.
I wanted to share my food philosophy with you, it's an oldy but a goody and its just tweaked slightly to suit my views. It is this:

"Eat everything in moderation: except for those things that have no nutritional value, eat very little if any of these and follow the 80/20 rule"

To break it down.

Part One:" Eat everything in moderation"

Pretty self explanatory, i believe that portion control is a major issue for a lot of people so if we can work out how to self moderate with our food we are already a step closer to our goals. We as parents are also responsible for what we feed our children and how much of these foods they have access to so keep this in mind.

Part Two: "except for those things that have no nutritional value, eat very little of these"

The only thing that we consume that has no nutritional value is added sugars. They have absolutely no benefits to our bodies and, in fact, we don't have an automatic shut off with sugar as we do with every other food. When we eat sugar our brain tells us that we want more and more. Our bodies also have no clue what to do with these sugars as we burn what we can off in energy but the huge excess is just turned into fat. In cave man days sugar (in the form of berries etc.) was harder to come across so they binged on it to get them through harsher times. Sugar is a sometimes-if ever treat. I eat sugar (in the very first post i did mention i'm not a martyr), sometimes a woman needs a chocolate bar but i make a very conscious decision about how much i have and how often i have it. Feel free to research more into this if you like, my suggestion is start with Sarah Wilson's 'I Quit Sugar' books or blog.

Part Three: "and follow the 80/20 rule"

This is a pretty new concept to me personally, i'm guessing it has been around for a while but it's pretty straight forward. If you are making the better choices, as explained above, 80% of the time then the other 20% of the time you can allow yourself a little bit more freedom. For example, if for the whole school week you have filled your children's lunch boxes with fresh fruit and veggies, homemade (sugar-free) goodies and minimal processed/packaged items then i say go ahead and give them chips from a packet on the weekend or a takeaway lunch treat. We have movie night every Friday night and I let my boys pick one thing to share with the rest of the family as a 'movie night treat'. I still believe we need to moderate but we can relax a little on the weekends.

My ideas are never harsh and i don't believe that they are suggested without good reasoning. I would never frown upon anyone who doesn't make the same choices as i do, i would rather use gentle encouragement and education to see if becoming more aware can inspire better choices. I'm flattered if you are still interested and are still reading this blog and i hope that you might be getting something good out of it. I lead by example with my children and i would never expect for them to live any differently to the way that i do. Writing this just fuels the fire and cements my goals, keeping me on this path to a (hopefully) long and healthy life. Always remember: Fuel Smart, Fuel Strong.

Here's a picture of some funny carrots that we 'grew' ☺