eat well: the chronicles of lunchboxia

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Archer loves sandwiches. He loves hummus sandwiches to be precise and as a creature of habit, asks for them every day. It used to be turkey but he burned out on turkey and now he doesn't eat turkey anymore so it's hummus. Hummus sandwich + veggie (artichoke hearts are his jam) + strawberries + banana & cheese and crackers for snack. Every. Single. Day.

Fable, on the other hand, is not a creature of habit. She's down for the rotation. And very un-down for sandwiches, which has always made packing lunches for her frustrating.

My kids don't eat much meat. Save for the odd fish stick and chicken tacos once a week, they get their protein elsewhere. Eggs. Nuts. Legumes of all kinds. Quinoa.

Archer eats a lot of hummus. Fable eats a lot of almonds. Bo and Revi eat a lot of both because they are going through a phase where they will eat most things you put in front of them unless they decide that food is the worst and then they smash it all in their hair.

But back to lunches.

No meat for Fable. And no sandwiches. And no dairy because Fable is allergic to dairy. And something must be different every day because two socks should never be the same and I totally get that. It's like a puzzle, feeding her. It's like a puzzle feeding everyone, but Archer, Bo and Revi are easier puzzles. They are the huge-pieced puzzles with, like, ten pieces. Fable is a 1000 piece jigsaw. So this post is about her.

When you find something healthy that your kids love, you should probably hold on for dear life to said healthy thing and that is what I'm doing with spinach Bolani which first entered our lives in 2010 c/o our local Farmer's Market and has not yet left. (There's also lentil, potato and pumpkin Bolani, all of which are delicious but Fable will only eat the spinach one and duh, it's spinach so of course I'm all in.)

ED: Each packet comes with two Bolanis which I then slice in half so one packet of Bolani = four lunches. I can dig it. (I buy these in bulk and eat them for lunch, too, with cilantro pesto and garlic mint cheese so that my breath smells nice and awesome.)

Along with the Bolani, which I cut into slices, I pack almonds (for her snack) fruit (always different), veggies (always different) and either a banana or healthy crackers, depending on the day.

(I'm obsessed with these crackers, which is purely coincidental in that this is a post about the almonds by same company. I want to marry the nut thins and have flaxseed-hair babies.)

ED: We were doing dairy-free cheese for a minute but then Fable decided it was disgusting. Here is a photo of Fable's lunch-foodstuffs which I snapped earlier in the week, all of which were a smashing success save for the edamame which Fable is no longer into because "frozen peas are better."

Okay then. Frozen peas! Which will be nice and unfrozen by the time lunch happens. Or how about we just do cucumbers this week?

Puzzles, man. 

GGC