School Lunch Ideas

School is starting in just a few weeks and the mom of one of Princess Naked Toes' friends was asking for school lunch ideas outside of simple sandwiches.  So I thought I'd share here, including a few ideas of how I use THRIVE for school lunches.

Chicken Nuggets

Heat up in the microwave and then put into thermos

Homemade Pizza Lunchable

Make pizza dough and form into mini pizzas and cook in oven until cooked through.  Put a couple in a ziploc bag; Put pizza sauce in a small container and mozzarella cheese into another container.  Add a spoon to spread the sauce with.  This is their absolute favorite lunch!

Chicken Noodle Soup/Spaghettios/Ravioli

Heat up and put into thermos.

Leftovers

If it's one of my girls' favorite meals, I can heat it up and put into the thermos.   You should see their faces when they realize they have lasagna in their lunchbox.

Homemade Lunchable

Buy thick-cut turkey or ham from the deli as well as sliced cheese.  Add some wheat things and you've got a homemade lunchable.

And of course there are sides.  In addition to chips, our favorites include fresh fruit like a banana or sliced bananas, sliced apples, or sliced pears.   We also like string cheese and individual applesauce.  Sometimes, we'll send sliced cucumbers or baby carrots with ranch dressing to dip it in.

We've tried gogurts and yogurt in a small container but have found that the THRIVE Yogurt Bites work so much better for our girls.  The yogurt bites do not need to be kept cold because they are freeze dried (and I don't rehydrate them).  If they don't eat all of it, it's not wasted, unlike regular yogurt and gogurts.  What they don't eat, I keep in the container and send with them again the next day.  We've been eating the Strawberry yogurt bites but I recently got some of the Pomegranate ones and they're even better.

Princess Smiles-A-Lot is not fond of the texture of freeze dried foods without them being rehydrated.  Princess Naked Toes is a different story.  So her lunches will include THRIVE Pineapple (FD), Sweet Corn (FD), and Mango (FD).

Smiles-A-Lot will take the Pineapple if I also send her with a container of water to rehydrate it while she eats.  She just dips the pineapple into the water for a few seconds and then eats it.  I don't rehydrate when packing her lunch because then it has to stay cold and she likes it freshly rehydrated.

What are you sending with your kid for lunch?