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Although I typically fix a hot lunch for my kids each day, during our summer break, I instituted one do-it-yourself lunch day a week. This was a day when each child (ages 10-16) was responsible for fixing his or her own lunch, which usually involved heating up some leftovers or fixing something simple — like scrambled eggs, ham roll-ups, or Ramen noodles.
I didn’t think I would carry that over into our school year, since I didn’t want them to have to take time away from their job of getting an education to fix lunch, but I discovered that it really doesn’t take that long and they’re learning some important life skills in the process.
Depending on what our schedule is like, we may not have one do-it-yourself day every week, but most weeks we do. Rather than complain, the kids actually seem to enjoy it. Some fun ideas for do-it-yourself lunches for kids of a variety ages include:
- Sandwiches or wraps.
- Mini-pizzas (built on bagels, flat wraps, or tortillas)
- Ham roll-ups
- Soup
- Scrambled eggs
- Salad
- Left overs
- Pizza bread (pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese, and your choice of toppings on half a hamburger or hot dog bun or half a sub roll)
- Salad
- Homemade “lunchables” (turkey, ham, or pepperoni on square or round crackers topped with cheese)
- Macaroni and cheese
- Frozen pizza
- Cheese quesadillas
- Hot dogs
- Loaded potato bar (Just fix the potatoes ahead of time and everyone adds their favorite toppings.)
- Omelets (My son is a master omelet-maker.)
- Tacos or nachos (Again, make the meat ahead of time or just use beans instead. Put out the toppings and let everyone create their masterpiece.)
- Kabobs (Provide skewers and a variety of meat, veggies, and/or fruits.)
- Tuna salad (My oldest makes the tuna and the kids eat it on crackers more often than on sandwiches. I like it on a sliced tomato.)
What are some of your family’s favorite do-it-yourself or easy-to-prepare meals?
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When I was younger, my favorite cook-it-myself meal was a pizzadilla–all of my favorite pizza fixings inside a folded-over tortilla. Later on I graduated to stir-frying a plateful of leftover chicken, onions, and rice–the chicken was already cooked, so I only had to worry about reheating it. 🙂
PB&J and snacky lunches (fruit, veggies, cheese, nuts and seeds) we also love the homemade lunchables. Getting natural meat and organic crackers also cuts out alot of crap found in the store bought ones.
Your wrote: ” I didn’t want them to have to take time away from their job of getting an education to fix lunch” But shouldn’t teaching them to take care of themselves be one of the things we SHOULD be teaching them? My 13 yr old fixes dinner for the family once a month. And both he and my 8 yr old fix their own lunch most days of the week.
Yes, it is one of the things we should be teaching them. However, not at the expense of academics. Since we tend to do the majority of our work later in the day, I had previously felt that having them fix their own lunches took away from their school time and was a bit lazy on my part.
As I said in the post, I have since seen that this isn’t necessarily true and having the kids fix their own lunches is not time consuming and is, in fact beneficial.
We keep things pretty simple here. If we don’t have any leftovers, we have sandwiches-roast beef, chicken, ham, egg, or tuna salad, pb&j. We also can have all of the above on a tortilla, or we have bean burritos. We occassionally have homemade pizza for lunch. And we generally have either some fruit or a salad with lunch. Thanks for sharing!
Blessings,
sara
Where did you get those awesome trays? Honestly, I’d like to have those for every day use anyway to teach my son some portion control. Wouldn’t be bad for me, either. 🙂
Gabrielle,
I have trays kinda like those from Walmart. They are divided into three parts and come in bright colors. My kids love them especially when they get to have picnic lunch out in the backyard. They just have to watch out for our chickens who will hop up on the picnic table and snatch their food!
We love to eat egg salad, homemade hummus or pimento cheese (recipes on my blog on crackers. We also will have roll ups without the wrap, just roll meat and cheese together with a toothpick, often with a side of honey mustard for dipping. Course you can’t beat grilled ham and cheese with soup when it’s cold. Or how about hot dog soup (cut up hot dogs in tomato soup). We also have a pizza soup recipe that I need to post about. The recipe is so easy because it starts with spaghetti sauce. When I’m feeling flush with time (rare) I will make burrito bowls for lunch, but that’s mostly for dinner. I just find there is so little time in the middle of homeschooling, fast and simple is best!
Those actually aren’t my trays. That’s a photo from Flickr, but I got a set of similar trays at Target a few years ago.
We like to do hummus and peanut butter as dips with cheeses and a veggie plate (my kids, age 7 and down, love to prep that). My kids also like to make a fruit plate or salad for most of our lunches.
Another favorite around here is breakfast foods, like waffles and pancakes.
Thanks for sharing! I love the plate idea and thanks Gabrielle Yoder for asking where to get these trays! These would be great for portion control and teaching the food pyramid.