Today we’re going to talk more about packed lunches, whether they’re for your kids at school, your hubby or yourself at work, or even for pre-made meals at home.
So, last time I talked about taking the lunchbox that you’re going to be using, drawing the shape with however many compartments it has, and then choosing categories for each compartment. I mentioned the main method of carrying the food, whether it’s a sandwich or a wrap or something, and then all the other categories we talked about, such as deli meats and cheeses for the protein. We talked about some raw vegetables or salad ingredients. We talked about fruit, and then dairy, whether it’s cheese or yogurt, and a little dessert or treat, and whatever other categories you feel like or think of – maybe something like olives. This episode is simply going to be practical examples; anything that I’ve done, or things I’ve seen others do and I like the sound of.
You may be the kind of person who wants to have a few set options – perhaps the same five that you do every week. You have a lunchbox drawing for each of those, and you do the exact same thing each week on that day. Or you may be the type of person who prefers to have just the categories, and then add whatever you can find or buy for whatever categories you need on each day. Have you got cheese in the fridge? Have you got yogurt? Have you got grapes? What fruit have you got? That method has less planning and more ideas for things in the categories for you to pick from at the time.
It’s sometimes harder to think of things at the time, but looking in your fridge certainly helps. I would probably be more the second example – just using whatever I can find for that category, but it’ll still certainly help me to draw in advance and have a general idea of what I’d like to do. Maybe one day it’ll be wraps, one day it’ll be pita breads, one day tacos, and one day sandwiches. Then I’ll put those with all the sides that I have available.
So, here’s some lunch ideas. You could use some little mozzarella bowls or mozzarella chopped into cubes, and add some baby tomatoes or half tomatoes, a few basil leaves, and a bit of salt on top. Then for the main part of your meal, you could make a sandwich, using lettuce if you prefer not to have wheat. You take a big lettuce leaf, and then put a slice of smoked salmon, spread some cream cheese on top, season it with salt and pepper, and then put another lettuce leaf. Then, if you want, maybe you could roll the whole thing in a wrap, and then slice it up. Then for dairy, you could do a little bit of yogurt. You could have some raspberries and blueberries to sprinkle on top. Then some kind of little treat, like a little piece of chocolate, or whatever you have available.
Another idea is to take baby tomatoes, little wedges of cucumbers, and pieces of feta, and put them on little skewers or cocktail sticks. That can be your salad portion. You could peel a naartjie, an orange, or any kind of citrus, and put the wedges into a compartment for your fruit. For the main part of the meal, you could have a croissant or a bagel, and make some chicken salad with mayo and perhaps celery, cucumber, or apple topped inside it, and put that into the croissant. If you put butter on the croissant, and you want to protect it from getting soggy from the filling, just put a lettuce leaf or a slice of cheese on each side, and then the filling, the chicken or the tuna salad inside that. This works great both with a croissant and with a bagel. The tuna and the cheese go really well together. Perhaps you can use cream cheese if it’s a bagel – tuna salad with cream cheese. Then cut up that croissant or bagel and put it in your lunchbox.
As you already have dairy in this case, your cheese and your feta, then perhaps you could use some seeds and nuts to make a little trail mix. Maybe use some raisins, cashews, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds. Put something like that in another compartment, and then do a little treat. You could put chocolate chips into the trail mix. Here’s another easy treat to make – take a little bit of dough or puff pastry, and put little bits of chocolate inside it. Put that in muffin cups, bake it, and then you’ve got yummy little chocolate treats.
Of course for any of these categories, you can buy snacks at the grocery store to use, but this definitely decreases the nutritional value of the lunch and seeing as it’s something that our kids or husbands eat a lot of, it’s a good idea to make it as nutritious as possible, and to use as many whole foods as possible.
Just to mention here, you could also go a really simple route for lunch, and that’s to make a hot meal. As I mentioned last time, we recently bought a heatable lunch box for my husband. You put a little water inside, and it steams for about 40 minutes to warm the food. Then that’ll be all ready for his lunch, and he doesn’t have to use an office microwave, or wait in a queue until something’s available to heat the food.
We’ll do things like chicken curry with rice and butternut, beef stroganoff with green beans and mashed potato, or beef meatballs in gravy – any of the types of meals that we often have for dinner. When you have a little bit leftover, just simply pack a lunch meal, put it in the freezer until you need it, and then transfer it into the dish for reheating. In fact, the heatable lunch box comes with little stainless steel bowls that you can put straight into the freezer. We’ll put rice and veg in one, and meat in the other, and then it’s easy to put into the lunchbox and heat on the day when necessary.
Okay, now let’s go back to some ideas for packed lunch boxes in categories, because I think it’s really fun to do it that way. Some generally heated meals can still work cold, like chicken curry and rice, and perhaps the person doesn’t mind eating it cold, but generally it’s nicer to have that kind of thing hot. Something like homemade chicken nuggets could work in a cold lunchbox as a finger food. Or maybe you could do little barbecue chicken kebabs, or cold pieces of barbecue chicken. Those all work great.
The salad I mentioned at the beginning with the mozzarella balls and tomato is a type of Caprese salad. Maybe you make it by alternating slices of a larger tomato with some mozzarella slices and some basil leaves, perhaps with a little basil pesto sprinkled on top. You could have a container of strawberries for your fruit, and then something like a chicken mayo or tuna mayo salad in a container on its own, just to be eaten like that. Then you could have either some rice crackers, some wheat crackers or even some corn chips to dip and scoop your chicken or tuna salad up with.
You could do some type of nacho. You could have corn chips in one compartment, and then a bean dip, either with some beef mince or without. You could add some sour cream to that mix, and some salsa. Just have a compartment with the dip, and a place to put the chips to dip.
Then there’s bread or a dinner roll with some butter, cucumber, lettuce, and ham or some kind of deli meat. Sliced cheese is always delicious on the side. In a different compartment, you could put sliced red peppers. Some people prefer them cooked, so if you just cut them up and bake them with a little olive oil and salt, then those are great, but you can have them raw as well. You could slice some apples and put in some almond butter ready to dip in, or you could put some hummus with cucumber and carrot slices ready to dip into it.
Another way to use a compartmentalized lunch box is to make a big salad. In the main compartment, you would put shredded lettuce, maybe some sprouts, and some diced cucumber – anything that’s the base of the salad. Then in the other parts you could add things to the salad, like some feta in one compartment. You can have some kind of cooked meat, such as pieces of barbecue chicken, honey chicken, or whatever you like to add to your salad. You could even do something like grated carrot, or butternut. In one container, you can put some seeds that you’d like to add to your salad, or some cashew nuts. In another compartment, you could put basil pesto or a mix of olive oil and balsamic vinegar – pour in one of the little salad dressing containers. Put in anything that you’re gonna use for the salad, and the person can build it from the different compartments. They would take each item and put it onto the salad and mix it all up before eating it, but then it prevents it from getting soggy and becoming mush.
You could also take crescent shaped roll dough and put some cheese slices and meat into it. Wrap the dough around them, and then bake it, and you get a nice little enclosed pastry with your ham and cheese.
In a Mediterranean style box, you could have Pita bread wedges. It’s easy to tear up pita bread, or naan bread. Add a little olive oil and salt, and toast them in the oven. That makes them really delicious. Then you can have a compartment for hummus, some pitted olives in another compartment, some cucumber slices, cherry tomatoes, and feta cubes, and then the person eating the lunch will just dip into the hummus with any of the options. You could also add some whole chickpeas to that box.
Another idea would be to have some sliced grilled chicken with some hard boiled egg slices, and then celery sticks and hummus, and some nuts like almonds. Then the chicken slices, the egg, and the almonds are finger foods, and the carrot and celery can be dipped into the hummus.
In a snack-like box, you could put some slices of apple and pear, some berries, some pieces of deli meat or other meat, some cheese cubes, and any other finger foods. A fun one would be cracker stacks. Take a little cracker, put a little piece of cheese on top and a bit of deli meat, and then have some kind of dip again, like hummus or cream cheese, to dip it into, along with some carrot and cucumber sticks.
Chicken pieces are definitely a go-to as well. If you don’t want to do processed chicken nuggets, then just do grilled chicken breasts with a little bit of barbecue sauce, and then something good to dunk it into, like a dunk sauce made with mayonnaise or whatever you prefer. Then add some fruit and veggies, and you’re good.
It’s also good to add wedges of cheese if you’re not using cheese in the other parts of your meal, or a good amount of yogurt with some maple syrup. Greek yogurt, maple syrup or honey, and berries on top – that’s very nutritious.
Then you can do mini pizzas. You can use any kind of instant pizza base, like pita breads. Then you can have a little marinara sauce to rub on top, and a topping like sausage, cooked mushroom, or pineapple, and a little bit of cheese to sprinkle on top. You could do melon balls for the fruit compartment, sweet melon, green melon, watermelon, or even melon chunks, which are easier than the balls. Falafel with tzatziki is also a great option for a lunchbox.
When I feel like I need inspiration as to exactly what to put in, when I have the general idea, but I want more specific ideas, then I’ll look at photos. I search for “lunch boxes”, or “Lunchables”, or “Bento boxes,” and then I just look at pictures and it gives lots of ideas. There are things like crackers with boiled eggs, some celery, carrot, blueberries, and orange slices, or little sandwiches with meat and cucumber, grapes, almonds, a little bit of cooked broccoli, and some crackers on the side.
You can do some chicken cooked and sliced, some sliced apple, and then some bread with butter, or with olive oil and balsamic to dip it into. Instead of plain vegetarian kebabs, you can make kebabs from maybe a baby tomato, a piece of cheese like feta or mozzarella, and some rolled up deli meat on each cocktail stick. Then on the side, you could have some baby carrots, some chopped apple, and some cut up red pepper, with maybe a couple of boiled eggs or crackers as well. The easiest treat to use, which is also the cheapest, is probably little chocolate chips – just put a few chocolate chips in a compartment.
A deconstructed wrap is a good way to have a lunch. You could have either small wraps, or torn up wraps in your lunchbox, and then in one compartment you could put some ground beef mince. You wouldn’t do bolognese, as that’s too full of sauce, you’d do a dryer one. You could do shredded lettuce in one compartment, chopped tomatoes in one, and shredded cheese in another. Or you could do the wraps with some shredded chicken in one compartment, some mayonnaise to mix with in another one, or perhaps that could be already mixed in. You could have some sliced cucumber, and again, some shredded cheese and lettuce always goes well in a wrap.
The simplest is always going to be a sandwich, and you can experiment with this. Like I mentioned in the previous podcast, there’s so many different kinds of bread you can use, whether it’s toasted or plain, whether it’s sourdough or not, whether it’s a croissant, a bagel, or thin waffles. It depends on what the person you’re doing it for enjoys, but generally it’s great to have as many things on the sandwich as you can. You should have something crunchy like lettuce or cucumber, something juicy like tomato, and then your meat, or maybe a few different meats. Have different layers; your layer of cheese, and perhaps some mayonnaise or mustard or whatever they like to have to make it interesting and unusual. Even grated carrot can go well on a sandwich. So, go wild with that.
One more strategy to try and think of ideas is to think of airplane meals, which I’m going to do an episode on in the near future. Think about what you get on an airplane. You’ll get your hot meal, which will be something like mashed potato and meatballs, and then you’ll get your little cup of yogurt, you’ll get a little bit of cheese, maybe a laughing cow cheese, or a bit of cream cheese, some crackers, a roll, and something to drink. Maybe you can add a little juice or whatever you’d like.
It all depends on how healthy you want it to be, how convenient you need it to be, how much time you have, and what your budget is, but it’s always inspiring to just look at pictures or videos for ideas. I find the videos quite long-winded, and I like to click through them, so that’s why I prefer to look at photos, but anything that gets your creative juices going is great.
I find to be the most effective strategy to be planning out your meals to be similar for the days of the week. Perhaps Mondays could be wraps, Tuesdays could be sandwiches, Wednesdays could be croissants or bagels, Thursdays could be deconstructed salad or deconstructed something else, and Friday could be whatever you feel like. Then it gives you a starting point, and you can add whatever kinds of proteins, fruits, vegetables, and et cetera that you have on hand.
It’s also helpful to choose one or two proteins to prepare for the week, and have them in your fridge. For example, you could do grilled chicken, or chicken in the crockpot that’s easy to shred, some kind of corned beef, or whatever you like to make. Then when it’s in the fridge, you can add it to a different style of meal each day so it doesn’t become boring. You can add it sliced on a sandwich. You can add it shredded with mayonnaise to the deconstructed salad. You can put it on the wrap, and et cetera. Then you’re preparing less, but still making your lunches interesting. Of course, if you need meat at the last minute and you don’t have anything in your fridge, tuna is always a lifesaver to have in your pantry.
I hope this helped a little bit to inspire you with making your lunches, and good job for always doing that – it’s not easy.
