Confession Time

Let's get something out of the way right now.

I have Opinions(TM) about food.

Specifically, the food that people feed their kids. I cringe over too much sugar, too much white flour, too much processing. I wince at people who cater to their childrens' whims, making them special separate meals of chicken fingers every night to avoid the dinner table battle. I wonder why you'd buy heavily-sweetened yoghurt with lots of additives & preservatives. I look at shopping carts when I'm in line at the grocery store and silently congratulate myself for having not once bought a Lunchable.

Really, I can be kind of a jerk about preparing food from scratch, using the best ingredients you can afford.

However, I do have a confession to make, and if in the weeks and months to come I wander into sanctimonious-land you may remind me of this. Perhaps with the judicious and pointed use of a smirking emoticon.

My kids have a love affair with string cheese. AND SO DO I.

Don't worry, it's just between you and me.

You know the stuff. It's made out of rubber, probably. It doesn't taste anything like cheese. It's got lots of protein but an odd dearth of any other nutrients, vitamins, or substance.

It keeps perfectly well in a lunchbag. It's so easy to just grab them and toss them in - not only when packing school lunches, but when going on a day trip or a long car ride. From my kids' perspective, you can peel down the tops to make hair, and the wrappers on the brand we buy has pictures of little cartoonish characters made of string cheese that you can recreate for merriment.

They fill the hunger gap, especially during morning snack, and as my kids are early risers that's pretty important. Without a protein at that morning break, they'd be going from 6:30 or 7 until noon - that's a long time when you're an active kid.

Sadly I've become so dependent on them that all three of my kids now notice if they somehow get a lunch without one. Yes, even the baby. If he sees someone else getting string cheese, he will immediately start yelling like he has a diaper full of bees, pointing angrily in the direction of the wayward milk-ish stick and wondering why in hell he doesn't have one.

My kids like all types of cheese. I could easily cut up a more 'authentic' cheese into cubes, for their lunches. I could go broke buying them B*bybel. I could put my foot down and say NO MORE CHEESE.

But I already don't pack chips for them, or chocolate. The closest thing they get to a treat in their lunch is usually a homemade muffin or maybe a granola bar with a chocolate drizzle, if it's Friday and I'm feeling generous. I am not one of those moms that includes a note every day telling them that they are super and that I love them.

So, every day, three string cheeses. (I run a dayhome, and it's easier if all the lunches are ready to go when the time comes to feed five at once, so I pack lunchbags for all three of my kids every day, even though two of them eat at home.)

3 strings/day x 5 days per week + I even pack lunches during the summer = IS THERE A DISEASE CAUSED BY STRING CHEESE? IF SO, NAME IT AFTER ME.

Today's lunch: Big Kid and Middle Kid has ham & cheese wraps. (I don't buy pre-sliced ham; instead I get one of those 'pre-cooked country hams and shred/slice it myself. Much cheaper.) Little Kid has leftovers; salmon, wild rice, and peas. Snacks are bananas, dried cranberries, apples - and string cheese.

On Pizza Day

My children's school - and I only have the luxury of saying that for the rest of the school year, because The Girl is off to high school in the fall, if you want to know what time rushing by feels like - has hot lunches once a week, when they make a big pizza order. But! Should you want pizza, you will need a pizza card - a pre-bought card that entitles you to a certain number of slices - and this pizza card costs close to $40, so my children only rarely have one. Even when we can afford them, we're just too damn cheap.

Guilt!

A few years ago, you could buy pizza by the slice and so my kids DID get to take part once a month or so. But the shift to requiring a pre-paid pizza card has made it inaccessible - not just to my kids, but to a lot of other children in our low-income area. And while I don't think equal access to pizza is a huge social justice issue - it's more of an issue about the limited number of harried parent volunteers, and I ALSO don't think that my kids are all that hard-done-by for not taking part in the doughy school pizza - school lunches themselves are a landmine of issues for kids.

For example: some kids get to bring Lunchables and pop to school EVERY DAY, as I am reminded frequently by my poor, poor children, who are forced to bring (reasonably) healthy lunches to school by their cruel tyrant of a mother. Some kids bring elaborate hand-crafted lunches, courtesy of their mothers who take Pinterest REALLY SERIOUSLY. And some kids bring sparse, heartbreaking little lunches that whisper quietly of neglect, of living on the edge of hunger all the time.

"A friend of mine didn't have much of a lunch, so I gave him most of mine," said G after school, shruggingly explaining why he needed such a big snack.

The same volunteers who run the pizza program quietly fill up snack bins in each class - granola bars, applesauce cups, cookies - that all of the kids are free to take from during lunchtime. And they do: N frequently comes home with granola bar wrappers in her lunchbox that I KNOW I didn't send in with her and while I'm not enthusiastic about this nutritionally, morally I am all for this pragmatic way of helping hungry children while protecting their dignity. It is only a stop-gap measure, of course, but it's something.

And then on pizza day, I get up - dammit! - half an hour earlier than normal to make homemade miniature pizzas for my kids. It's a pain, but it's only a small piece of work on my part to keep my kids feeling included. The bigger, never-ending job is finding ways to keep all kids included in a system with limited funds, limited time and limited volunteers and problems that go far beyond easy solutions.

Today's school lunch: nothing. School was cancelled because of the extreme cold.

More prep, less stress

A lot has changed since I last blogged here. This past fall I made the shift from freelance-at-home-writing to full-time-in-an-office writing.
 
Sadly, this change did not exempt me from making school lunches.

Boo.

I did, however, have to make some modifications to my routine.

When I worked from home, I would typically crawl out of bed at 7:30 am, rush around making lunches for the kids before racing down to the school, unshowered, barely getting them there before the late bell rang.

Now that I have to get to work on time, I rise at 6:30 am, rush around making lunches for the kids and race to work, barely making it there before the mandatory morning production meeting.

But now I am SHOWERED. See? It’s totally different.

Actually, there is another big difference: I do most of the prep work at night. I get the kids to set out the lunch bags and choose one or two things that they know they want in their lunches.  Then we pack anything that doesn’t need to be refrigerated. If fruit needs to be cut up and washed, we do that at night, too. Except for apples because they will turn brown and nobody will eat them. Thanks, oxidation. Thanks a lot.

I also gather up the reusable containers we will need for the next morning. Because being unable to locate the lids that match the containers? Kind of makes me rage-y in the a.m. And the p.m. (Seriously: Where do they go?!)

All of this organization means that the only thing that’s left to do in the morning is make a couple of sandwiches or heat up some soup for the thermoses, a role that my husband typically fills now. Which is completely awesome. Because skipping the morning shower is no longer an option.

*******


What was for lunch today?

-         Chicken noodle soup

-         Crackers and cheese

-         Apple sauce

-         Sliced pears

-         Pudding

Home For A Lunch

When I was a child I lived a five-minute walk from my school.  I would go out the back door, skip down the alley, squeeze through the crack in the fence, and saunter down the well-worn path alongside the plateau area that was flooded to become an ice rink in the long, long winters.  The plateau was between two hills sloping the same way; in winter we would sled down the steep hill, hitting the ice rink, and – if one was lucky with conditions or had enough kids piled into the wooden sleds – clearing the ice rink to go down the hill on the other side, which ended in a row of fences.  To my knowledge, no one ever hit the fences at the bottom, but if they did, it wouldn’t have been a cause for alarm.  It was the early eighties, after all.  Past the ice rink was the playground with the rickety teeter-totters of which I had been bumped off of many times, the squeaky, tippy swing set, and the wooden play structure that would give you splinters if you so much as looked at it.  The field with the baseball diamond and soccer field lay ahead, and there stood the school, a dark brown brick building with ugly orange doors.  I would reverse this trip every day at noon to go home for a hot lunch. 

Lunches of my childhood were the same whether I was at home or if I “ate over”, as we called it, at a friend’s house: soup and sandwich – grilled cheese or bologna, Campbell’s Tomato or Lipton’s Chicken Noodle – Zoodles, or Kraft Dinner.  Everyone I knew went home for lunch.  In my suburban, stay-at-home mom neighbourhood, eating lunch at school – save for the occasional extra-curricular club or activity - was not even an option.  Almost everyone had a mom at home to serve them and any extra friends lunch; the few who had working moms would go to a neighbour’s house, hired expressly for the purpose of lunch provision and noon hour care.

My kids do not eat lunch at school.  They come home every day except for early-dismissal Fridays, but instead of walking I drive them, given that this hour has 55 minutes and a fifteen minute walk there and back, not to mention the attiring and discarding of winter clothing would eat the time meant for eating.  And so I pick them up every day at noon, but these days they are in the extreme minority; one little girl from Mark’s class goes home for lunch three days a week, no one else in Jake’s class of 29 does.

I worried, then, when I was asked to contribute to the resurrecting of the Ladies Who Make Lunch, that I would be disqualified since I don’t belong to the club who wearily and with great boredom pack lunches every day; I merely pack snacks for their morning nutrition break.  However, and this is true of motherhood as a whole, we are all in this together.  Whether our children eat at school or at home, lunches are like laundry: vitally necessary and tediously never ending.  We tend to the nourishment of their little souls, their little minds, and their little bodies, and a big part of that bodily nourishment lies in the noon hour munching.  We all rise to the occasion even if that occasion is a tedious, unvarying chore. 

Join us, the Ladies Who (Make) Lunch, as we navigate the muddy waters of lunch preparation.  Follow us as we swim through the ocean of sandwiches, Thermoses, carrot sticks and cookies.  You’ll find recipes, ideas, memories, and diatribes as we rage against the machine of relentless lunch making in the face of school restrictions, allergies, and picky eating.  I’m Nicole; my fellow Ladies are Beck, Janet, Hannah, and Sue.  Come (make) lunch with us!

What my sister taught me about school lunches

Historically, this has been the point in the school year where making school lunches officially becomes my nemesis. If I didn't start packing a few things the night before or, at least, preparing mentally for the morning lunch chore, I would literally wake up filled with a sense of dread that would lead to me stalling in bed, staring at the ceiling whilst willing my husband to make the lunches that day.*

I'm happy to report that this year my attitude is much more positive. And I have my sister to thank.

She doesn't know this, mind, but she said something to me when we were on a road trip together in September that I keep going back to when I feel resentment towards the school lunch preparation: Making my kids a nice lunch is one small thing I can do for them when I'm away from them all day.

Like many working parents, my sister and her husband commute a distance to their jobs every day. She is showered, and dressed, all lunches made and out of the house before my alarm clock even goes off. So when she made the one small thing comment to me in passing, it really stayed with me, you know? I get to work at home. I can wear a hat and sweats when I drop my kids off at school and shower when I come back home. Unless I have an early client meeting, most mornings all I have to do is get up, make their lunches, get them breakfast and nudge them along so they aren't late for school.

In short, I have nothing to complain about; I have no business feeling resentful about school lunches.

If you still hate making school lunches, that's okay: I would never judge you. It does get monotonous. It does for a lot of kids, too. While there are definitely kids who will only eat a small number of reliable favourites, most kids crave variety. In fact, I know several adults who really can't stand sandwiches to this day, so scarred are they from the all-sandwiches-all-the-time theme of their own primary school existence.

One easy way to mix things up is to just swap out the type of bread. So if your kid only likes ham on their sandwiches, you don't always have to serve it on crustless white bread. Last week my kids had sandwiches three times: once they had ham on sliced bread; once they had ham on mini whole wheat dinner rolls; and once they had chicken salad, made from leftover chicken breasts, on a croissant.

Here is a list of different bread products that I use in lunches:

1) Mini bagels
- Spread on your kid's favourite flavour of cream cheese
- Spread on free-nut butter
- Use as a base for mini-pizzas

2) Whole wheat tortilla wraps
- Throw in some flavoured cream cheese and veggies, roll up tight and refrigerate overnight, slice into little rounds in the morning
- Add leftover chicken or steak, shredded cheese, salsa, lettuce and you have a fajita
- I haven't tried this yet but thought of it the other morning: scrambled eggs and ketchup, maybe a little shredded cheese if your kids are into it, wrap up tight while hot and put in tin foil for a breakfast burrito!
- Spread on free-nut butter, cut a banana in half, wrap the tortilla around the banana

3) Croissants
- Cut in half with a little jam inside
- As bread for any kind of sandwich: cold cuts, tuna, veggies and cream cheese
- Slice it, sprinkle some chocolate chips inside, toast in toaster oven for a minute or two: chocolate croissant! (note: I would count this as a treat in their lunch)

You get the idea, right? Scour the bread section of your grocery store and look for anything that takes you away from plain old sandwich bread. Naan for dipping in curry, mini dinner rolls, submarine buns. If it breaks up the monotony of school lunches for your kid, they are more likely to eat their lunch. If they eat your lunch, maybe even (gasp!) tell you they loved something you made for them, it's going to feel more rewarding to make the lunches.

Positive reinforcement, baby. Pavlov would be proud.

*This has never happened.

More on those insulated thermal food container thing-a-ma-bobs

Because my daughter is a vegetarian in a class where there is a peanut, treenut and fish ban, I spent far more time than is good for me this past August trying to find the perfect thermos for her. Homemade soups and pastas are lunch box staples for us. Why, what better food is there than minestrone soup? It gives you a wide variety of vegetables, protein in the kidney beans (or chick peas), and carbohydrate in the noodles. Plus it's cheap, a cinch to make in large batches, and is delicious.

But getting back to August. We live in a small city and we looked everywhere for the perfect thermos to no avail. Sure there were old fashioned glass thermoses at Zellers and Canadian Tire, but having broken my way through more than my fair share of those as a child, I refused to lay down my cash for one. We did see numerous stainless steel Thermos brand "Funtainers," but we weren't drawn to them for a couple of reasons: 1. despite their small size, it seemed as if getting a soup spoon into them would be awkward because of the depth to mouth-width ratio, and 2. the designs we could find locally were all based on Disney movies and my daughter is decidedly anti-Disney after a couple of attempts at watching their movies scared the living bejeebus outta her. We would have slapped down money for a "Funtainer" if we could have found this one, but no one in my town carried it:Hello Kitty: you always make me smile even if you have strayed so far from your roots.

Eventually we stumbled into the uber-trendy kitchen store downtown where they assured me they were getting in a shipment of the best stainless steel food containers on the planet! --that came in great, child-friendly designs! --that also happened to be Canadian made! --and that had a fun product name: Otter Bottle! "Wha-hoo," I thought. "I gotta see these."

One week went by. Then two. Then we were into the first week of school. At long last, the shipment arrived. The result? Well, not exactly what I had hoped for but ok. In fact, they're not all that different from the Thermos-brand Funtainers and have the same depth to mouth-width ratio problem. They are Disney-free, though, and my daughter was quite keen on this one:


The design should grow with her longer than the Funtainer designs would, so that does make up for their slightly higher price. The kicker for me, though, is despite this being a Canadian company, the first thing I had to do was peel off a "Made in China" sticker from the bottom. I guess that's just the state of the world these days. Ho hum.

Now that the Otter Bottle has been in use for nearly two months, I can report back to say that it works just fine. It seems to keep her food hot enough and she still likes the shiny-pretty of the thing. My daughter has no problem opening and closing it, but I do know that another girl in her class had to get a new thermos because her hand wasn't big enough to handle the width of the lid--this was on a Funatainer and not an Otter Bottle but there really isn't a size difference between the two products, so keep this in mind if you have a child with small hands.

I bought a larger size Otter Bottle food container for myself and, while I like it a lot, I sorta wish I had gone for the smaller size, because pouring chunky soup from it into a bowl at work is a risky business of noodle-to-face splashing. Each time I feel the spray, I am reminded why the Funtainer and Otter Bottle (small size) design is optimum despite my initial misgivings about the width of the mouth.

So there you have it. My take on insulated thermal food container thing-a-ma-bobs. The point of this post: don't transfer your anxiety about your child starting school into consumer indecision. Just buy a friggin' food container already. Your child may end up hating school with a passion but at least she'll enjoy her lunch.

__________________________

Note: no companies have endorsed this post nor have I been given any kind of product, coupon or money to write it. In fact, neither company realizes I'm alive--which is just fine by me.

Freenut Butter

My son was about 20 months old when we realized he had a peanut allergy. I was eating an english muffin with peanut butter on it and he wanted to try a bite, so I shared. He broke out in hives instantly. Thankfully it didn't progress further to anaphylaxis. I hastily administered a dose of liquid antihistamine and made an appointment with our family doctor. A few weeks later we had an official diagnosis of peanut allergy with the always-present potential for anaphylaxis. He is now 11 years old and carries two Epipens with him everywhere.

I am happy that our school has a peanut and nut ban. It's not foolproof, as lunches are only checked for rogue nut products in JK and SK. Alas, having a stated nut ban is still a deterrent and it helps to protect the many children in our school with peanut and nut allergies.

I know not being able to send peanut butter is a pain in the arse for some parents. I know some kids live on the stuff. I was one of those kids who brought a PB&J sandwich to school several times a week back in the 70s. As a parent of a kid with peanut allergy, I am grateful to the many parents who abide by the no nut policy, even if they don't like it very much.

So what can you do if your kid loves the spreadable nutty goodness but you can't, or don't want to, send the real deal.

Freenut butter!

Despite what the labelling claims would persuade you to believe it is not "just like peanut butter." The two brands we have tried are made of soy and golden peas, respectively. My friend whose kids don't have allergies once had the golden pea version on toast at my house. She took a bite and then turned to me with a skeptical look. "It's clear to me that you haven't had peanut butter in a very long time if you think that tastes authentic," she said wryly.

Okay, the golden pea version is a bit of a stretch but the soy version is very close in texture, taste and smell, save for a faint soy-tastic aftertaste. And I never claimed authenticity, people. I just said that it's better than nothing!

My kids actually like the freenut butter a lot. Granted, my son doesn't remember what real peanut butter tastes like but his sisters do and they are fine with the creamy impostor. I use it just like you would use peanut butter:

- Spread it on whole wheat bread with a little honey or jam on top

- Stuff it into that lonely hollow in raw celery sticks

- Layer it between crackers for a stackable snack

- Smooth it on a rice cake with some raisins sprinkled on top

You get the idea. There are lots of possibilities. I have even baked with it. Chocolate covered bonbons at Christmas tastes very authentic. Peanut butter cookies are more of a stretch, but if you add in lots of chocolate chips? Not too shabby.

I live in Canada and both the versions I have pictured here are available through certain regular grocery stores. I know that most health food stores carry some form of freenut butter, too.

Some day my son will be an adult living in his own home. At that point my husband and I will likely invite real peanut butter back into our lives. Until then, the freenut butter is a handy substitute on those days when I haven't got a clue what to send for lunch.