lunchbox ideas and other new year foodie reflections
It’s been a slow start to 2025 in our house.
We are now 10 days in, and instead of being thrust into the buzz of a brand new year, with all of its big expectations and ambitions, we’ve had more of a gradual waking up to the year ahead.
This is mostly because the kids are still off school, only returning to start the new Zimbabwean school year in mid-January - when we’ll see Little Lass joining her big brother at nursery for a couple of mornings a week. As well as this new chapter bringing with it the usual feelings of excitement, trepidation, guilt (what doesn’t, these days?) it also renews another perennial question - what can I pack for the kids’ lunchboxes that is both healthy, easy, and that they will actually eat?
The internet is great for many things, like googling your symptoms (I don’t care what the haters say, I find it very useful), or tracking flights (how else do you time airport pickups?) - but for kid food ‘inspo’ it is categorically The Worst. A quick search of ‘kids lunchboxes’ and you’ll find countless Pinterest boards and Facebook groups called things like ‘Rate my kid’s lunchbox!’. What these sources all have in common, is that their suggestions and advice is, without exception, terrible.
Make cute sandwich shapes using cookie cutters! Okay, and who is left eating the scraps of that sandwich - is that you, mum, hovering over the bin there shovelling abandoned crusts into your mouth like a helpful hoover? Make little animal figures out of rice using moulds and bits of cut vegetables! What, so my child can mash it up and bring it back home to me in their lunchbox, uneaten? No thank you. The one that induces perpetual rage in me is the ‘tortilla pinwheels’ lie - spreading cream cheese on a cold, stiff tortilla, topping with bits of cold meat or sliced up vegetables, rolling it up, cutting into pieces, and securing these pinwheels together with a cocktail stick. Show me a grown adult who would enjoy that monstrosity and I will show you a liar.
And yet, we expect our kids to eat these creations, probably placing even more pressure on them and us, precisely because we’ve gone to such lengths to make lunches ‘fun’ and ‘enticing’. It’s a weird and totally unhelpful form of self-flagellation, to believe that more effort is the same as more care. It’s actually not at all the case, no matter what momfluencers try to tell you.
Through lots of trial and error, I’ve come to realise that often it’s the lower stakes, lower effort lunches that go down easier - both for them and for you. They won’t win any prizes for originality, and how much is actually eaten varies as much by the change of the wind as anything else - but seeing as I didn’t get up at 5am to make it, I also care a little less - and sometimes that’s no bad thing… So as my new year’s gift to you, here are my top 5 reasonably healthy and appealing realistic kids’ lunchboxes:
Realistic lunchbox ideas (for a 1 year old and a 4 year old)
Drink: water, always - in their little flasks or sippy cups
Option 1
slices of cheddar cheese
a few no-salt wholewheat crackers
a couple of meatballs (I make mine with chicken mince, grated apple and sage - let me know if you’d like the recipe!)
strawberries (hulled and halved)
apples (peeled and cut into wedges)
Option 2
cheese sandwich on brown bread
a few no/low-salt crisps
cucumber slices
blueberries
oatmeal and raisin cookie (or just a chocolate chip one, I mean, whatever)
Option 3
a cheddar and cherry tomato muffin (we love this recipe)
a handful of plain or buttered popcorn
pear (peeled and cut into wedges)
yoghurt coated raisins
Option 4
a slice of wholewheat french toast cut into fingers
a chicken sausage or two (cut into pieces)
cucumber slices
a clementine (peeled)
a cookie
Option 5
a wedge of leftover frittata or quiche
cucumber slices
mixed berries
square of flapjack (we make them with oats, honey and butter - a riff of a Delia classic)
a few other new year foodie reflections…
buh-bye bread - I’ve gone back and forth on my tolerance levels of gluten in recent years, but have started 2025 by cutting it out again. Rather than missing wheat itself, I see to be missing the convenience more than anything - so many convenience foods are wheat based, and I prefer not to use replacement versions of the same thing as they just don’t hit right. Aside from ease, I think the only thing I’m really missing are pastries, but I am realising that a great alternative exists in the form of….
hello, high protein breakfasts! - no I haven’t gone full gym bro on you. Instead, I am leaning more heavily into the more widely recognised advice that cereal-based breakfasts don’t work for everyone, and that for women especially, high protein breakfasts are key to regulating hormone and blood sugar levels. I’ve got to tell you, I feel great for it. My favourite cafe now makes me eggs with beef sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms and avocado, and has also done me a beef burger patty topped with cheese and a big side salad on request. I’ve been teasing an upcoming newsletter for a while about eating for hormone health and managing PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) through diet - I promise to send this out in the next couple of weeks - not to evangelise, but in the hope that it may prove useful for someone (and at the very least, interesting).
and RIP meal prep - I’ve decided to finally retire the belief that preparing lots of meals in advance - AKA ‘meal prep’ - eliminates the need to cook daily. For a family of four, it’s just not feasible - and trying to convince people otherwise isn’t helpful! Even when I do some advance preparation in the moments where I have extra time (like marinating chicken portions, or making a batch of tomato sauce, or dal, or keema), I still have to set aside around 15-20 minutes each day to turn that food into actual ‘dinner’ - like making a salad, or cooking rice, or roasting some potatoes, or stir-frying some veg to accompany the main dish. Once we accept that a certain amount of daily cooking is an inevitability if you want to eat tasty, healthy, fresh food, then it all somehow feels a bit less fraught. So I’m now modifying my expectations: on days where I’ve prepped something ahead, it’ll still take 15 minutes to make it into a proper dinner, and on days when I’m cooking from scratch, I just need to accept that I’ll need 30-45 minutes to do it (on these days, my go to options are: dal, stir-fried vegetables, noodles, or quick traybakes: roast vegetables with sausage and/or halloumi; salmon or chicken with sweet potatoes - traybakes are especially good because it just takes 10 minutes of assembly/seasoning and then throw it in the oven).
Good luck to you as we head into a new year/quarter/term! What are you all having for lunch or packing for your kids? What are you having for breakfast and dinner these days? I’d love to hear what your go-to options are.
Shahnaz x