Little Mashies Lunches
We all want to feed our children the best food possible but often we are really short on time and this means we have to be able to grab and make things quickly. It is my mission to make it easy for you to feed your kids healthy nutritious food so I am sharing what we do in the hope that you get some ideas to apply to your family.
First of all the lunchbox you use can make a difference. We always use a bento lunchbox (our Little Mashies bento is available here) because it tends to speed up the process of preparing lunches. It has five food compartments and one for a treat or for sauce.
This means we can easily add a mixture of:
- Carbs
- Protein
- Dairy
- Vegetables
- Fruit
- Salad
- Healthy Fats
Even if your child is not yet in preschool, kinder or school bento boxes can be a really easy way of preparing food in advance for the whole day, and a really convenient way to serve it without having loads of washing up. Bento boxes allow you to keep a regular routine with the food you provide your child and give you the opportunity to slowly add new things in. What do I mean? It's the same way you wean kids off sweet store bought yoghurt.. slowly! You give them the yoghurt they like (in your bento or Little Mashies pouches), and every 2 days you take out one spoon of the sugary brand and substitute it for the plain yoghurt brand or your home-made yoghurt. It gets them used to the taste slowly without them noticing. If they complain you add one spoon of the sugary one back in for a few more days and then take out half a spoonful next time. Here are some awesome yoghurt recipes you can try. I know it sounds dramatic and like hard work but I promise you it really is very easy and it is a strategy that works for all kinds of things!
We have used this strategy many times, not just for yoghurt. Here are some examples:
- Introducing salad to the dinner plate and to the lunchbox
- Changing over from dairy milk to non dairy milks
- Adding chia seeds into yoghurt, porridge, smoothies and cereals
- Moving from predominantly sweet vegetables to a greater variety
- Adding spinach to smoothies
- Adding probiotics (kefir) to yoghurt
It's really easy to make changes in your children's diet if you do it slowly little by little. No kid is going to be happy with losing their sugary yoghurt or smoothie and being offered something plain instead. Sugar is like a drug, we all love it! That's why you have to do it very slowly so they don't even notice.
Today in our Little Mashies lunchbox we have:
1. Some dhal with quinoa and rice, broccoli and carrot. You can find our favourite dhal recipe here.
2. We've got half a home grown mandarine that we bought from Byron Farmers Market.
3. Fresh chopped salad sticks including carrot, capsicum & cucumber. We usually have these with a frozen ice cube of dip (you can see how we do that by going here)
4. Avocado sandwich on paleo bread by Almond Road Bakery, you can read about them here.
5. We've got a salad of grated carrot and beetroot. This is also really yummy if you add chopped mint leaves and pieces of chopped orange.
6. In the treat compartment we have goji berries, inca berries and tigernuts. Tigernuts of course are not nuts. You can read all about the benefits of tigernuts in a previous post.
7. In the Little Mashies pouch today we have some chia pudding. We've got loads of chia pudding recipes that you can get from a previous post.
Check out our previous lunchbox posts by clicking on the images below: