BACK TO SCHOOL: Here’s a bit of lunch box inspiration!
Becca Crawford
School starts back in a few days! Eeek!! And with that comes the dreaded grind of school lunches. I have tried to make it as easy as possible for parents to prepare nutritious, delicious yet speedy school lunches in my school lunch box inspiration ebook.
“INSPIRING PARENTS TO RAISE VIBRANTLY HEALTHY KIDS ONE NUTRIENT-DENSE MOUTHFUL AT A TIME...”
I believe that every child has the right to a lunch box filled with nourishing delicious food bursting with flavour and I am here to inspire and assist parents to do just that in less than 5 minutes.
The genesis for this book came when I was repeatedly asked my school mums: “If you don’t feed your kids processed foods or gluten, then what on earth do you put in their lunch boxes?”
This ebook contains over 60 pages of robust nutritional theory, recipes and lunch box ideas that are free of gluten, sugar, industrial seed oils, and other processed and artificial ingredients.
In this ebook I explain that when children are offered an omnivorous diet rich in nutrient-dense, whole, unprocessed, foods (being the very foods that we are biologically designed to eat) our children can grow and function properly, perform their best and reach their true potential! Children (just like adults) find it harder to be happy when they are not healthy. I set out the foundational foods that will give our children the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fats and energy they need to play, learn, concentrate and build strong natural immunity. In addition, a well-balanced lunch box with sufficient protein and natural fats will enable our children to get through the day with stable moods and happy dispositions, feeling satiated and full.
This is not about depriving our children. This is about providing real food alternatives to processed and packaged foods. This is about home-made simple and nutritious pleasures and conscious consumption. I wrote this book to give parents inspiration towards making school lunch preparation more of a joy and less of a burden.
You can also follow me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to see what my 2 chipmunks are taking to school with them on any given day for more school lunch box ideas and inspiration!
I see too much emphasis being placed on the blogosphere and media on the trendy containers and vessels that house school lunches and not enough emphasis on the actual contents of the lunch boxes themselves! Here’s my 2 cents worth on the containers I use:
+ Stainless steel is preferable (I like the LunchBot compartmentalised stainless steels containers) but I have no qualms about putting cold foods into plastic containers if I run out of stainless steel ones (life’s not perfect!). The only except to this is water bottles- I never use plastic water bottles and recommend stainless steel bottles as kids drinking bottles. I like the Klean Kanteen brand of stainless steel bottles which come in various sizes. Don’t forget to add a pinch of unrefined salt to their water. To remind yourself why it is so vitally important to add unrefined salt (eg sea salt, Australian lake salt, Himalayan crystal salt) to drinking water refer to one of my very first blogs here. You might want to start with adding only 1/8 teaspoon of unrefined salt (or even less) to 1 litre of water rather than the recommendation in that blog.
+ I use wide mouthed Thermos containers for hot food eg soups and casseroles (pour boiling water into them first to warm them up, tip our water then add the hot meal. If you do this, the contents will stay warm for 10 hours).
+ I use soft pack eskis (that I keep in the freezer) to keep animal products cold. I bought some recently from Howards Storage world. Keep these in the freezer ready on hand.
+ I like the range and selection of the above at The Health Emporium on Bondi Road, online at Emporio Organico or Howards Storage world.