A New Plan for Lunch

Lunch time in this house is a little stressful.  Not so much for the kids but rather for me and what I'm going to eat.  I have a rotating list of lunches I use for the kids based on what they will all eat.  I'm trying to expand that but it is slow going!  BUT, if I don't plan what I'm going to eat and have the food ready to go, I end up just grabbing whatever and it isn't always good!

A friend of mine posted a link to this great video idea found HERE.

I loved the idea of having everything made into simple lunch "boxes" at the beginning of the week, ready to grab and eat.  Especially with school starting!

In the photo are the following meals:
1. Roll-ups
2. Tortilla lunchable style pizzas
3. Italian pasta salad
4. Pesto pasta salad
5. PB and J Triangles.

I liked the idea of all of the ideas except # 5 which is fine because in reality there are left overs from the other lunch ideas so I figured I could make up 5 without a problem.

I know that I will get bored with just 4 choices so I started brainstorming some other ideas and come up with a few more ideas
1. Chicken Salad
2. Cheese, crackers and good salami (again, think lunchable)
3. Ham and pickle Roll-ups
4. Ham and Veggie Roll-ups.

I'd like to come up with 4 more (yes, only 4 because I can double one up) So that I have a a three week rotation of lunches. (I've thought of one - Meatballs.  I could freeze them and take them out for lunch on a given week)

So here are a few photos from week 1:

 I started with the tortilla roll-ups.  Now, I don't have a cute little container to put my lunches in so I opted to use this stash of 21 day fix cups that someone gave me two years ago.  They worked great for portion control.  Anyway, the tortillas I used were small so I just cut it in half.  My wrap had ham, cheese, onion and chive cream cheese and some tomota on them.  I then sliced up some orange pepper and an orange.  Added some thin triscuits for crunch and trailmix for "dessert."  It was a great lunch.

Day 2 - The article showed basically a homemade pizza lunchable but, since I'm at home, I cooked my tortilla pizza :-)  I added grapes, crackers, pickled beets, a hard boiled egg and trail mix.  Now, this was way more food then I could eat at lunch, I discovered.  Josh actually ate the egg and I only ate 1/2 of the grapes and beets.  But, again, I loved this easy plan and found it to be easy to prep and easy to eat.

Day 3 - This was my picnic lunch on the day of the field trip (that I did eat because it was so hot out!)  It was also one of my favorites (I ate it for dinner!).  It's a simple pesto salad that is so tasty!