Introduction
Evening follow HIVE community and fellow parents out there. I stumbled across this photo while I was looking through my wife's extensive photography library the other night. I just loved the abundance of colour in the photo.
I remember when my wife took this photo, she was sharing it with a school mum as they were discussing healthy lunch box ideas for the kids. I am so proud of my wife and how much time, attention and research she puts into creating healthy food for our family.
The Lunch Box
I remember my lunch boxes growing up as a child, they definitely were not as colourful or healthy as the ones that my wife puts together. We used to get peanut butter and jam sandwiches, a packet of chips and maybe a piece of fruit. The odd Friday we would be lucky enough to get tuck shop money, I always used to get the hamburger and a chocolate flavoured milk. Yum, I can still remember how much I loved those hamburgers.
My wife on the other hand, has got lunch box making down to a fine art. She has even shown me the ropes and taught me some tricks, so that I can help create these masterpieces from time to time.
It all starts with the lunch box. My wife has trialed a few different lunch boxes over the years. Some have been very well-built, but have not been big enough, others have been big enough but their quality has been lacking. The purple lunch boxes in the photo have been just perfect. They are very good quality, easy to wash in the dishwasher and they have well-sized compartments that fit all the food we like to give our children.
In each of the compartments we like to cover all the food groups:
- Vegies - We use one compartment for chopped up vegies, like cucumber, capsicum or carrot.
- Fruit - The fruit compartment in this photo has chopped up rock melon. We also do chopped apple, kiwi fruit or watermelon. When in season, the kids love stone fruit like peaches, nectarines and plums.
- Carbs - These lunchboxes have avocado wraps as the carb, which is one of their favourites. They also have a piece of lamington as a little sweet treat. Sometimes we will give them sourdough sandwiches, homemade quiches, or fried rice.
- Dairy - For dairy we normally give them a yoghurt pouch, cheese stick or some cheese with crackers.
- Snack - The snack compartment is a bit of a wild card. They have a piece of corn each in this lunch box, but it could be anything from a choc-chip cookie to a few dried dates or some sultanas.
The compartments are great as making the lunch box every day becomes so much easier when you know that you just need to put each of the food groups into the different compartments, it takes all the thinking out of it.
The other crucial factor in making a delicious kids lunch box is the ingredients and that is where my wife shines.
Quality Ingredients
Quality, quality, quality! I have shared in my previous posts, that no matter what you do in life, focusing on quality is key. If you are writing a HIVE post, renovating a piece of furniture or buying your food, always focus on quality.
The photo above is an actual photo taken by my wife 'the photographer' when she was creating stock photos for her business. The fruit in the photo is the actual fruit that we eat. As you can see it all looks amazing and tastes just as good.
All the fruit and vegetables that my wife buys are sourced from a local, family owned fruit and vegetable grocer down the road from our house. They do it the old-fashioned way. It is very simple store that does not spend much on marketing or advertising, they just focus on providing great quality fruit and vegetables and people come from all over to buy their goods.
Other than fruit and vegetables, my wife spends a lot of time researching healthier alternatives to buy off-the-shelf, like the fruit pouches and cheese sticks, etc.
Where she excels the most in my opinion is in her cooking and baking. For those of you who have read my previous posts would have already got a glimpse of my wife's talents in the kitchen. For lunch boxes she will make mini zucchini quiches, polenta bread, fresh savoury muffins, you name it, she can create it.
In Summary
To close out the post, basically what I am saying is that my wife is amazingly talented and our children are spoilt, hahaha! Jokes aside... Kids lunch boxes can be a lot of fun and actually quite easy if you focus on the basics:
- Buy a good quality lunch box with decent size compartments.
- Buy good quality food across all the food groups and make the lunch box all the colours of the rainbow.
Simple! Good luck to all the parents out there, your kids will thank you! 😄
