Thursday, May 17, 2012

Hot Lunch: In the Kitchen with the Sous Chef

The kid has a very interesting relationship with food as he tends to become obsessed with a particular food item; luckily it’s usually something healthy. Whatever food he is obsessed with, he’ll ask to eat any chance he gets before he gets finally tired of it. The problem is that he doesn’t always find a new item to replace the old one with so easily.

For a long time, the kid was eating a sandwich for lunch – more specifically, an organic nitrate/nitrite-free salami cucumber sandwich. I tried to switch things up many times, but he didn’t want to hear anything about it. A few weeks ago, he clearly got tired of his salami cucumber sandwiches, but it was hard to come up with a new lunch, and he often simply didn’t eat lunch and brought the sandwich back home. Yet, he refused to take anything else. He did make up for it by eating a big snack/late lunch when he got home though.

Then, one day, he said that he wanted hot lunch. His school has a good hot lunch program with local, organic food, but since it’s almost the end of the school year, it’s a bit late to sign up. Plus, I prefer making our food myself.

So we brainstormed and decided to make hot lunch ourselves. We bought a new lunch box, a thermos, and went shopping for the ingredients together. We made a simple pasta dish with onions, mushrooms, peas, a few tablespoons of half & half, and Parmesan cheese, and so far it is a hit. Now I’ll just have to find a way to convince him to switch things up…

If you want to check out how our cooking/assembling went, you can check out (parts of) our (long) video (which we made at the end of a looooong day…).


Questions: Growing up, what was your favorite lunch? Did you buy lunch or take it from home? Any funny lunch stories you’d like to share? I don’t remember much about my own lunches as they were pretty boring sandwiches. The kid’s older brother once “collected” sandwiches in his backpack when he was in middle school. At the end of the school year when I cleaned out his backpack, I think I found about ten completely rotten sandwiches…. I still get a visceral reaction when I think about it…

Be well,
Andrea