Ideas for School Lunches

I bet all of you moms reading this are morning people and just love to slave over your kids' lunches in the morning. I know, "Yea right!" 

I've come up with a great way to give you one less thing to occupy your mornings with. Most of the time, my kids want a sandwich in their lunch so I thought about how I could crank out the sandwiches that didn't take up too much time in the wrong time of the day. So, I pre-make dozens of sandwiches, cut them (square for PB&J, triangle for tuna), and place them on a large cookie sheet and place them in the freezer for a few hours until frozen solid. Then when they're frozen, I put them in large zip-lock bags. So when you're gathering lunches in the morning, all you have to do is take out how many squares or triangles you need. By the time lunch comes around, they're ready to eat! Doing sandwiches this way solved a small problem for me. Serenity couldn't eat a full sandwich at lunch, but a 1/2 wasn't enough. So now I can just pull out 3/4 of a sandwich and I'm not wasting. By the way, I make a bunch of these at night when I'm watching TV. :D

For other quick snack/side items for kids' lunch, I go to Costco and buy bulk veggies, fruits, crackers, etc and divide them in snack bags. I do that at the beginning of the week, so I can just grab the bags and go.  I love to buy Trader Joe's style "go-gurt". There's no "horrible" ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, etc. You can also stick these in the freezer and just toss one in the lunch bag on the day of school. Makes the mornings quicker!

When my oldest first started school, I bought the best thermos possible. None better than a wide-mouth Stanley. They run about $20-$25 unless you can get them on sale, but worth every penny! Sometimes I will heat the previous night's dinner and stuff it in the thermos. It's not just luke-warm by the time they eat it at lunch, it's still hot!

I have a few recipes I will share to help you utilize the thermos. My kids' favorite thing to get is a pizza pocket. A home-made pizza pocket! Again, I make these in bulk and freeze them just like the sandwiches. Then the day I want to use them, I just heat them in the microwave and shove it in the Stanley Thermos. 

So here's the recipes. Another *TIP*, pre-make rice in a rice cooker (I have a 5 gallon bucket that I mix brown basmati rice, black rice, quinoa, and jasmine rice) and once it's done, stick about 2 cups in a ziplock bag and stick in the freezer. You can thaw it in a few minutes when you need to make the following recipe or when you're using it for another dish.