Creative Sandwich Ideas for Healthy School Lunches
Almost every kid loves a good peanut butter or grilled cheese sandwich, but every day? Not only is it boring, but it doesn’t encourage nutritional variety, which is key to a healthy diet. Rather than fill up pages with sandwich “recipes,” we’ve opted to give you some sandwich ideas:
- Cashew or almond butter and honey on 12-grain bread
- Add dried cranberries and walnuts to your favorite chicken salad
- Stuff a salad in a pita (keep the dressing on the side if it’s going in a lunch box)
- Give them a Gobbler! Turkey, cranberry sauce, and a thin layer of mashed sweet potatoes or leftover stuffing
- Grilled vegetables with goat cheese on toasted wholegrain bread make for a tasty and healthful combination
- Grilled portabella mushroom with melted Swiss cheese, avocado, and honey mustard is a big hit with the older kids
- Instead of the standard mayonnaise or mustard, use pepper jellies on ham, turkey, and chicken sandwiches
- Skip the bread and use some Boston Bibb lettuce leaves as sandwich wrappers
- How about a fruit sandwich? That might even make for an interesting new breakfast; slices of your favorite fruits between thin slices of our Banana Bread, for example.
Sit down with your kids and ask them to brainstorm sandwich ideas with you. You might be surprised by the combinations they come up with. One of our personal favorites was when a four-year-old put peanut butter and cheese in a sandwich and loved it. We’re not saying it was healthy, but we admired the kid’s sense of adventure, and as long as he has that he’ll keep trying new things and broadening his palate, which ought to be a primary goal for every parent.
Excerpted from Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children
Loved the Ideas? Pin for later use 🙂
