3 Tips for Making Easy, Healthy School Lunches

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     I’m often intrigued by all the things that have changed in the world since I was a child.  I didn’t grow up with internet, for example.  I received my first email address in college.  My children will certainly have a different experience with technology than I did growing up!  Another area that has changed drastically is school lunches.  I think I ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, juice, and packaged crackers every day my entire school career (no, it was not organic and I’m fairly certain there was a lot of high fructose corn syrup in everything).  I think you might get arrested for sending your kid with that today!  While the push to healthy school lunches is great, it puts a significant burden on parents.

Making healthy school lunches (and all meals, for that matter) has certainly been my biggest area of growth as a mom.  Because I didn’t exactly grow up with a focus on having a varied diet full of real, organic foods, I didn’t really know how to prepare healthy school lunches or other meals for my kids.

To read more about what a teacher has to say about her students’ school lunches, please click here.

I searched and searched the internet and ended up compiling a bunch of tips and recipes (thank you, Pinterest).  Now, many years later, preparing lunches barely even seems like a chore.  And, generally speaking, my kids enjoy their lunches and their lunch boxes come back empty.

I’m hoping you can benefit from my many growing pains when it comes to healthy school lunches.  The purpose of this post is to share:

Mrs. Type A’s Top 3 Tips for Healthy School Lunches

1. Use your freezer….for everything (yes, everything)

I’m very passionate about doubling recipes and freezing leftovers.  This is the basis of how I feed my family healthy dinners.  It works for healthy school lunches too, though a little bit different than for dinners.  For lunches, I tend to:

• Freeze sides such as applesauce and hummus in an ice cube tray and then, once frozen, put in a plastic bag.  Then, the night before, take out a couple of the frozen squares and put in the fridge.  By morning, they will be melted and all you need to do is stir a bit (so it’s no longer square shaped)
• Make sandwiches (actually bagel and hummus is very popular in my house) and then freeze them.  Again, the night before, I just take out the pre-made sandwich and put into the lunch box.  It’s defrosted by the next morning and ready to be eaten at lunch.  I think this would work with chicken salad and tuna salad sandwiches (but for some reason all my kids tend to eat is bagel and hummus…no complaints!)
• Keep frozen vegetables.  Vegetables that have been flash frozen are a great item to keep in your freezer.  I tend do put a scoop in the lunch box the night before and, again, they defrost by the next day.  This works really well with broccoli, cauliflower, peas, and carrots.  I’ve tried it with frozen fruit and it’s always mushy (you’re better off using frozen fruit for smoothies, in my opinion)
• Store frozen rice, bread, buns so you don’t have to worry about your current stash getting moldy.  There’s nothing worse than going to get a hamburger bun for the patty you just made, only to realize the bread is covered in mold!

2.  If you do cook, make it stretch

Since my schedule is always so hectic, I try to avoid cooking just for lunches.  I either pack leftovers from dinner or whip something like a sandwich together (see above).  That said, there are some things that my kids just love and there’s peace of mind knowing they’ll eat all their lunch that day.

In my family, ground meat (turkey, sometimes beef) is a utility player when it comes to school lunches; I get a good ROI for investing time browning ground meat.   I typically cook 2 lbs at a time.  The 1/2 goes in one pan with some taco seasoning.  The other goes into another pan with marinara sauce to make meat sauce (it’s certainly not going to be a prize winning meal, but it works well for healthy school lunches).

Then, I freeze both sets of ground meat.  For the taco meat, I typically make what I call a “deconstructed taco.”  A scoop of the frozen meat, some shredded cheese, tortilla chips and perhaps some guacamole.  For the meat sauce, I may boil some pasta or — if I’m really lazy — I’ll get a scoop of the frozen rice I’ve made.  Either way, by the next day, there’s a fairly edible defrosted lunch.  It’s so easy to cook ground meat, and I get probably 10 lunches from this 2 lbs!

3.  Always have frozen cooked chicken

I always keep cooked shredded chicken in the freezer.  It can go with so many things (i.e., in a soup, on a salad).  It can also serve as a great contingency plan for lunches.  In a pinch, you take a scoop out of the freezer into the lunch box, and add some BBQ sauce.  What an easy healthy school lunch!

I typically get 1 lb of organic chicken breast and sprinkle some salt and pepper on top.  Then I drop it in the Instant Pot on the Poultry setting.  20 minutes later, it’s done and I shred it up with a fork.  Once it cools off, I load it into a freezer bag and store.  I probably eat it most days of the week on salads or in a sandwhich, but it’s there for kids lunches just in case!

OK, so how do I actually make healthy school lunches with the information above??

To make this advice actionable, here is an example of how I’m planning lunches for this week (based on the day my child would eat it, not the day I would actually make it…which would usually be the night before):

Monday:  Taco meat, shredded cheese, corn chips, broccoli

Tuesday:  Meat marinara sauce with rice, carrots with hummus

Wednesday:  Bagel hummus from freezer, applesauce

Thursday:  Quesadilla with taco meat in it, cauliflower

Friday:  Meat sauce with pasta OR Instant Pot chicken with BBQ sauce, peas

ALL items in these healthy school lunches above are put into the lunch box the night before frozen, except the pasta!!!

Do you see how easy this is?!?!?  SO many healthy school lunches with so little cooking!!!  I just cooked once!

I hope these tips were helpful!  Please let me know what you think and if you have any tips of your own to share for healthy school lunches!