Shake Off the Food Fatigue
It’s getting late in the year, and you’ve literally made around 200 lunchboxes and 300 dinners, with as much food variety as you can muster… it’s fair to say you’re feeling food fatigue! How do we keep up with he fresh, wholesome, home made foods without running ourselves ragged? After all, we’ve also got to keep up the after school activities, the housework, and our regular jobs too!!
At IntoYou, we condone whole foods, real foods, and home made; what we like to call “nude” foods. They’re nude because there’s no additives, no chemicals, no anything! Even though it sounds difficult, it is actually significantly easier because we only ever need to stock real food in our cupboards, and we get variety from eating more seasonally. For example, my kids are eating mulberries morning, noon, and night right now because they’re in season and available in abundance for free straight off the trees around Collaroy Plateau!
In keeping with this, please find 5 lunchbox ideas, and 5 dinner ideas below that you can rotate per day over the final few weeks of school, then collapse exhausted on the couch for the next 6 weeks holidays!
Lunchboxes
In this lunchbox: a lunchbox friendly whole food bar, apple slices, toasted cheese and hummus sandwich (cool it completely before packing it so it doesn’t sweat), purple carrot sticks, mandarin, tomato. See what we mean by easier? it’s so simple to throw real food in these boxes!
Sweet potato in a sandwich press. It can then be salted and used as “chips” or spread with hummus or cream cheese and used as a sandwich.
On wholemeal sourdough hummus and cheese, a boiled egg, capsicum sticks, a pear, carrots and asparagus…
Zoo pasta and passata, cherry tomatoes, apple and strawberries, celery and carrot
Rice cakes with cheese and vegemite, cauliflower, carrots, and broccoli, pumpkin, Food to Nourish banana bread, falafel balls…
Home made sushi, celery and beetroot hummus, nut free bliss balls, boiled egg, asparagus, rice crackers and roasted chickpeas, cherry tomatoes.
Beetroot hummus wrap, banana bread, blood orange, mandarin, cauliflower, carrots and broccoli
Dinners
Grated carrot, purple carrot, tomato, peas, pumpkin, butter beans and vegetarian bolagnese with wholemeal penne.
Chicken fried rice with peas, pumpkin, tomato, and carrots
Build-you-own burgers (can also be wraps and tacos). In this case Evie chose falafel, tomato, cucumber, and hummus. We also offer cheese, beef slices, kale, grated carrot, sliced beetroot, and mashed pumpkin.
Three veggies cut differently (yes, variety can start that small!): carrots, cucumber, purple carrot. Kale, broccoli, Jerusalem artichoke and vinegar. Zoo pasta and Mexican bean chilli (with out any chilli). It’s worthwhile mentioning that Maia only eats vinegar because i do, and Evie only eats it because Maia does. Peer pressure is HUGE.
What’s wrong with the old “meat and 3 veggie”? NOTHING! Just make sure the meat is organic (ie. no hormones, antibiotics, worms, parasites, or pesticides that’s in regular meat), and the veggies are colourful and well scrubbed! In this meal: chicken, broccoli, brussel sprouts, tomato, asparagus, purple carrot, and home made hummus. I’l mention here that Maia has only just started eating asparagus after MONTHS of presenting it on her plate. She didn’t like the brussel sprout but that’s okay because she swapped it for more carrots from Evie’s plate, and i know she’ll eat it eventually if I DO, and in front of her too!
Build-your-own pizza. For pizza we play with bases; we have made cauliflower base, spelt, gluten free, and regular old wheat! We use real mozzarella sliced, and the kids throw whatever else they want at it. Often they make faces or landscapes, which encourages them to chose different vegetables to create them!
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