Four Very Good Recipes for Packed Lunch!

Tackling the age-old conundrum head-on

Hi Friends,

Oh, the great and eternal headache of “lunch,” whether packed, off-the-shelf, on-the-go, sit-down-at-home, or otherwise. Fanny, whose mom Alice Waters treated the craft of daily lunchbox packing as a religious sacrament, can attest to the fact that a kid’s lunch can be a source of endless fascination: if she only had a nickel for every time someone asked “What did your mother pack you for lunch?” (see Fig. 1).¹

Fig. 1: From the archive, Alice’s truly insane—yet impressive!—lunch Tupperware diagram (at the end of an exhaustive list of instructions) for Fanny’s loving and patient babysitter, ca. 1992. Still, there’s wisdom in the separate container for vinaigrette!

Professional or not, no matter how many times you peruse online recipes, blogs, cookbooks, moms’ groups, or social media in search of lunch-spiration, your lunch repertoire will eventually wear thin. This is an endurance sport, folks! You’ll pack your kid a minimum of 2,700 lunches before you send them off to college.

So, in light of this sobering reality, we decided to tackle LUNCH head on. And even though we know that this’ll be a topic we return to often, we feel we need to start somewhere. Consider today’s post to be the first installment. We’re not packing lunch for our kids every day quite yet, so while we don’t have tons of firsthand lunchbox experience where they’re concerned, it’s not our first rodeo. In developing this initial tranche of recipes, we established The Lunch Rules:

1. No foods that will become slime, fossil or biohazard before lunchtime (example: dressed leafy salads; toasted bread; most meats).

2. No loosey-goosey foods: things like grains, small pieces of vegetables, or super crumbly crackers that can get scattered everywhere easily.

3. Savory first. Fruit might feature, but the focus is on getting a lot of nutrition without a lot of sugar.

4. Variety is the spice of life! We want you to think outside the (lunch)box and make things neither you nor your kid would expect.

5. No reinventions of obvious classics (PB&J and Ants on a Log are doing just fine without our help).

6. Needs to be at least 60% likely to be something a distracted, potentially picky diner deems worthy of eating.

7. When it doubt, dipping one thing in another thing is always fun, at every stage of life, in every context (including school lunch). See exhibit A for further inspiration.

8. Greta grew up eating grocery store sushi from Ralph’s in her lunch most days and she loved it, loved a variety of healthy food (then and now), and loves her parents very much to this day. Ok? So let’s not stress ourselves out too much.

With these criteria in mind, we’ve taken a first swing at a few lunch “entrée” ideas: Savory Carrot Cupcakes, Multigrain Onigiri, Chickpea-Not-Tuna-Salad, and Spinach + Feta Frittata Muffins. They run the gamut of required time, but they’re all full or flavor, packed with (somewhat inconspicuous) nutrition, and fun to eat. Check them out below and let us know what you think!

Godspeed,

Fanny + Greta

P.S. A couple of the recipes require a silicone muffin pan, so before you do anything, buy something like this.