Mix it up. By the time she gets home from work, Tanya Wenman Steel, an editor at Bon Appetit magazine, has about 20 minutes to make dinner and pack the next day’s lunches for her 6-year-old twins, Will and Sanger. Still, a successful lunch, she says, must combine the essential kid courses: a drink, an entree, nibbles and a treat. She always includes a protein, like a thin slice of meatloaf with cranberry chutney on whole-wheat bread, stir-fried-steak in peanut sauce or a bran muffin split horizontally and slathered with cream cheese. To add variety, she packs a different drink each day, such as a yogurt smoothie, a box of milk or an apple-cranberry juice with a wedge of lime. Steel also involves her sons in the lunch-packing process, giving them small tasks, like putting dried fruit into plastic bags. “When they do this, I find they are more likely to eat all of their lunch the next day,” she says.
Let them play with the food. To keep her teenage daughter and son interested, Sara Moulton, host of Food Network’s “Sara’s Secrets,” packs taco kits–separate plastic bags of shredded cheese, lettuce, salsa, taco shells and rotisserie chicken she buys precooked at the store. DIY snacks are also a hit with the 5- and 7-year-old sons of chef Mario Batali, who wraps up slices of cold pizza with hot sauce on the side so the kids can dip. “It’s all about fun finger food,” says Batali. In fact, a container of dip can determine whether sliced veggies get eaten or not. Moulton sends homemade ranch dressing or peanut butter; Bon Appetit’s Steel packs yogurt-based raita, hummus or salsa.
Not too many surprises. It’s great to think creatively, but even the pros say they wouldn’t spring anything new on their kids at lunch. Rick Bayless, chef of Chicago’s Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, knows getting his 12-year-old daughter, Lanie, to eat a good lunch “means giving her stuff her friends will recognize and not make fun of,” he says. The solution? Preparing double batches of her favorite home dinners, such as Chinese stir-fry, Tuscan pasta or barbecue beef, then reworking components of those meals into lunch dishes–like shredding leftover chicken and adding it to pasta. Bayless says Lanie will “eat more of everything” if he sends a few chips. Try pretzels, soy chips, baked pita chips, sesame sticks, low-fat popcorn or flavored rice cakes.
Don’t forget dessert. No one wants to pack a saturated-fat bomb, but they’re just kids, after all. You can send fruit, but select from what’s in season: apples and pears in the fall, citrus in the winter, strawberries in the spring and peaches in the summer. Steel sends small plastic bags of clementine sections or red grapes, but warns, “Never send slices of apples or bananas because they go brown; never send fruits that are too juicy, like pineapple or kiwi, because they are deemed slimy and yucky once they’ve been sitting in a bag for a while.” Mixed dried tropical fruits (like papaya and pineapple), yogurt-covered nuts or fig bars are also good. But remember, nothing beats a homemade brownie or cookie. “Anything I send to school with Lanie I want to be so good she pauses for a moment as she eats it,” says Bayless. It’s a goal even the busiest of us can aspire to.
