8 Fun and Healthy Back to School Food Ideas for Children
19th August 2016
It’s nearly back to school time and the daily chore of packing lunches is looming large. No need to worry though, it’s easy to pack a fun, healthy lunch that your children will enjoy with these simple ideas and tricks!
THE MAIN EVENT
Shake up your sandwiches by switching from bread to tortilla wraps when you fancy a change. Pile up a wrap with your favourite sandwich fillings, roll it up and cut it into bite size pieces to make it extra easy to eat. We like to sneak a bit of super healthy spinach into ours.
Food is always more fun with eyes! Split a mini Babybel cheese in half and dot with an edible food pen or a touch of food colouring to make eyes for a funny face bagel. Add a cherry tomato nose and sugar snap peas for hair and you’ve made a fun lunch in less than a minute.
You don’t need fancy supplies to make lunches cute for your children, just raid your kitchen cupboards for cookie cutters and make fun sandwiches in a snap. We filled ours with cream cheese and jam, such a yummy combination!
Children love a ‘build your own’ lunch and cracker stackers are a fun way to give them some control at lunch time. Cut shapes from cheese and ham using mini cutters and let the children stack them up on crackers just how they like them.
ON THE SIDE
The lunch box is a great place to boost your child’s fruit and vegetable intake. Make those veggies as appealing as possible with these fun but simple ideas:
Use mini cutters to cut shapes from cucumber and carrot slices and swap them around to make cute vegetable coins. Call them pirate treasure and children will love them all the more!
Turn their 5 a day into a colourful garden for lunch. Zig zag round a kiwi fruit with a sharp knife and pull apart to make flowers, cut flower shapes from carrot with a mini cutter and fill in the gaps with extra fruit and veggies, beautiful! We added sugar snap peas, strawberries and blueberries to ours. Don’t forget to pack a little spoon for the kiwi!
AFTER SCHOOL SNACKS
The school day food doesn’t end with lunch, you’ll need some healthy snacks to keep the hungry hoards at bay until dinner time too! Here are two of our favourite ideas:
Cool down after a day at school with these colourful frozen rainbow fruit kebabs – they’re super easy to put together, why not stash a stack of them in the freezer ready for hungry children! Check out my recipe here.
Fill the children up with protein rich roasted chickpeas as a healthy alternative to crisps. Drain a tin of chickpeas, drizzle them with oil, bake them for around 30 minutes at 200°C then add herbs and spices of your choice to flavour. If you want to get the children involved too for an easy family cooking project, you can find a free child friendly recipe sheet to print out over on the Eats Amazing site.
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