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' ☺

Picking a box

I do believe that the most important part about preparing great school lunches is finding a versatile, sturdy and interesting vessel to carry said lunch in. In this post I plan to showcase a couple of variations of lunch containers and give my personal opinion of them. I know a lot of people may not think it's a big deal, but those of you who know me personally can probably see a bit of an advertising campaign coming about a certain product (that we will get to later). Remembering that this is all just my personal opinions based on mine and my children's experience.
There is one factor that will always sway me towards certain products and this is my huge belief that we should at least attempt to send our kids to school with 'Litter Free Lunches' for the majority of their school week. This can seem like a bit of an extreme thought if you are a parent who believes that they are strapped for time and finds it quickest to be able to throw a few packages of food and a cling wrapped sandwich in a box, but I'm here to prove that there is another way.

So lets get to these lunch boxes.

#1
The basic square box

These come in many different colours and sizes, are fairly inexpensive to buy and can be sturdy enough to last a few good droppings. Big negative: they aren't really ideal for litter free lunches. There are ways around it, for example using smaller containers inside the box. But this can seem a bit painful.

#2
The duel compartment box.

These are still rather similar to the basic box, it can give you a little bit more of an option when it comes to the possibility of providing a variety of food options as you can separate morning tea and lunch if you like. However you would still need to package items separately either using plastic wrap or smaller containers.

#3
The multi compartment box

These two are rather similar and I quite like them both. I have used the blue one to pack a lunch for myself and it was plenty enough for me. These two both discourage the use of plastic wraps as food will stay in each compartment. The nudie food mover (the one with the orange and yellow containers) are my second choice in a kids lunch box (you can get bigger sized ones). They can both still be a little on the fragile side being plastic and having removable lids (i had to use a rubber band on the blue one to keep the lid on). I also think that sometimes having too many containers to open can be a bit of a turn off because usually the kids spend more time playing at lunch than eating so they are likely to forget about anything that takes too much time to access. In saying that I would still much prefer these over a lunch full of small packages. They are both still decently priced and are definitely the type that I would recommend if you aren't willing or in a position to purchase the next product, (which is my personal favourite).

#4
The 'Planet Box' (specifically The Rover)

These lunch kits are by far the best lunch vessels I have ever come across. They are decently sized, made of extremely durable stainless steel, they look great and they inspire fantastic lunches. They require no plastic wrapping of food so are perfect for litter free lunches! I did say that we have no litter in our lunches most of the time, the only exception is if we have a squeeze pouch of yoghurt, but I would like to try the reusable pouches. They come with two stainless steel containers (a big dipper and a little dipper). They can also come with a carry bag which has a pouch for a drink bottle and an extra pocket which fits the big dipper container in it for an extra snack. Now the negative, and yes there is only one, they are expensive. They retail at $59.95 for the complete set including the lunch box, the two dippers and the bag. Also they are an American product and there are very few Australian retailers of the product which means you need to pay expensive postage. There are some available in Australia now and I will add a link to the retailer but I think your choices are limited. We have had ours for over two years now and they have been dropped, kicked and tossed around and they are still complete (if I didn't mention it earlier i have two boys so you can imagine what they have been through). They are a fantastic investment and they generally come home completely empty.

I hope this gives you a bit of insight into making a lunch box choice. In the end you will need to choose what works for you and your family. My goal in this journey is to help you to feel enjoyment in creating a nutritious and preferably litter free lunch for your loved ones so that we can fuel them smart and fuel them strong during the most important part of their day and their lives.

Making better choices for a longer, stronger future

Let me start by saying that i love my children with a ferocity to rival any other and i know i'm not alone in this. Of the seven billion plus people on this earth there are plenty of parents who feel as much love for their children as i do for mine. This is the reason that i'm on this journey.
What is "Fuel Smart, Fuel Strong" and what does it have to do with loving our children? I'm a mum first and foremost and as of last year i became a school mum with my oldest boy going off into the big wide world and starting prep. I've learnt a whole lot by having one of my babies leave the nest. There have been many positives and a few negatives. One of these negatives being the shocking revelation of what is contained in a child's school lunch box. I've seen and heard a few that have caused my jaw to drop including left over takeaway (think the big yellow 'M' word), chocolate biscuits (i mean half a packet of Tim Tams straight out of the backpack) and lunch boxes full of package upon package of sugary treats, consumed one after the other.When did it become an impossibility to allow 20 minutes of our morning that could be used to create a healthy and nutritious lunch for our children? Believe me that's all it takes, just 20 minutes. In that period of time i can cut fruit and vegetables, make a sandwich or wrap, add in a sweet or savory treat and any other little extras that i'm inspired to include that day. My family are on a journey to mostly remove sugar from our everyday life so it's usually a no added sugar sweet treat and i also am trying very hard to avoid packaged or processed foods but sometimes i slip up, i'm not a martyr. My goal with this is to encourage, excite, inspire and educate both parents and children into spending that 20 minutes a day to pack a wonderful healthy and nutritious lunch and to maybe spend an hour or two on the weekend cooking and baking in preparation for a week of amazing lunches. I plan on sharing recipe's, lunch box planners and anything else i come up with or find to help along the way.
We as parents are solely responsible for the way our children view food and the habits that they establish so we need to feel as though providing our children with the fuel that they not only require, but also they deserve, is a top priority. In addition to that, i not only want you to feel like you should plan and pack these great lunches, i want you to feel excited and inspired to do so. I have established my goals and i am well on the path. I still have plenty to learn but i also have plenty to share. I don't want this to become an intimidating idea that makes you think you will have to spend hours agonizing over what to feed your children everyday, that's where i come in. I am hoping to provide plenty of ideas as i know that there will be days where you feel creative and inspired and there are also days where you feel completely uninspired and need someone to think for you.   I believe that awareness is everything, because once you learn something you can' t unlearn it so even becoming aware of the choices we are making can make a huge difference. I hope that you, dear reader, would consider sharing my goal to fuel our children smarter and stronger and that you share your journey with me and others in the hopes that we can make a difference in the lives of our precious children.