Inside The (Lunch) Box

Some recent lessons in packing school lunch in collaboration with PlanetBox!

Hi friends,

New year, new you(?), same lunch packing routine.

If you are a Green Spoon reader, it will likely come as zero surprise that the challenge we hear about most often is the five-times-a-week conundrum of packing your kid’s lunch. The insane time crunch of the morning coupled with the pressure to assemble a maximally nutritionally balanced meal (especially in January!)—not to mention the likelihood that it will come back battered and largely uneaten—it’s a classic lose-lose parenting situation.

As our kids have gotten older and further into their school careers (“careers”), we’ve continued to hone our lunch-packing chops with the help of PlanetBox, our partners on today’s post and makers of our favorite lunch and snack-packing gear. PlanetBox containers are all of the things we look for when we’re buying things for our kids’ meals: not-plastic, not-leaky, and very, very thoughtfully designed. Our favorites are The Rover and The Launch—the sections break down the abstract concept of LUNCH into a handful of discreet compartments to fill—but we love the larger, stackable sections of the Explorer (especially for pasta leftover lunches). For snacks, we both use the 2-in1 Day Tripper or the ingenious double-sided Trailhead almost every day, and as soon as our daughters are reliably coordinated enough to handle soup in a semi-unsupervised group setting, we’ll be making a beeline for the insulated thermos.

Since school lunch is an ever-moving target, we wanted to share a few of our recent learnings as well as a shopping list we’ve been using this winter—plus a protein-dense French toast recipe that doubles as breakfast and lunch. Trigger warning: Fanny’s daughter is an unusually dependable vegetable eater—and generally doesn’t touch her lunch when it contains a more traditional “entrée” (pasta, rice, etc.) these days—so don’t let these lunches shame you. Just use them as some gentle inspiration to give edamame or a mini pepper a shot—your kid just might like them…

Happy ‘26,

Greta + Fanny

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• Pitted Castelvetrano olives, always. Kids like salty, punchy, big flavor!

• You Love Fruit organic fruit leathers

• Pomegranate seeds. Jewel-toned, sweet and sour. What kid can resist?

• Mini sweet peppers, mini Japanese sweet potatoes, mini Persian cucumbers. The mini-er the better (and crunchier!)

• Frozen shelled (or unshelled!) edamame beans. Fun to eat and pure protein.

• Babybel cheese (Babybel supposedly makes an organic version but we’ve never found it in the wild. Have you?)

• Flour and corn tortillas (for there’s-always-a-quesadilla insurance policy)

• String cheese or slices of mild cheese like Jack or Havarti.

• Egregiously out of season berries that we continue to buy because we know that our kids will always eat them.

• Winter citrus! Especially clementines and little Kishu mandarins (the best seedless, easy-peel tangerine on earth, in our humble opinion—you can buy them from our favorite producer online HERE). Tangerines are the perfect size for a lunchbox. Honorable mention to Cara Cara oranges for great flavor and pinkish color.

• Amara smoothie melts. Made with coconut milk, fruits and vegetables only!

• Roasted seaweed snacks.

• Alvarado Street Bakery Sliced California Style Complete Protein Bread for seed/nut butter and jam sandwiches. The bread is made with sprouted whole grains and lentils and pinto beans and feels like a good way to shoehorn some added nutrition into lunchtime.

• Little Sesame Hummus

• Mushroom jerky or jerky-jerky (this is the one we learned about from Laila Gohar’s Cub Street Diet)

• Kabocha squash for roasting and scooping out.

• Dried apricots and other dried fruit. Once you taste these whole-fruit “Royal Medallions” you’ll never go back.

• And check out our post from last year with a whole slew of off-the-shelf snacks we buy and pack in our kids’ lunches…

Ok, onto some recent school lunch learnings…

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A symphony of beige for Fanny’s daughter! Leftover roasted kabocha squash mash, leftover french toast (see recipe below), and a Babybel cheese is joined by ever-popular carrot sticks and yellow bell pepper batons for all their hummus-dipping glory! The PlanetBox Rover Little Dipper for the win!

A PB + J made with Alvarado Street Bakery Sliced California Style Complete Protein Bread and some blueberries is rounded out by—you guessed it!—more carrots and peppers, this time with a white bean purée (canned white beans blitzed with garlic + olive oil + salt)

One of the major takeaways from this lunch-packing cycle has been that “main courses” are largely ignored. In other words, when Fanny’s daughter gets a scoop of the rice she was loving the night before in her lunchbox, for reasons unknown, it’s left completely untouched. Ditto a great pasta. Ditto a fab curry. Ditto ditto ditto… The only way around the despair (other than packing a PB + J every day of the week) seems to be more of an “array of snacks” offering, a kiddie antipasto plate, if you will. Cut up vegetables and fruits, with the occasional bit of cheese, bean dips, olives, mini muffins, some salami or cold cuts if your kid is into them, etc.

Grated carrots and apples with a squeeze of lemon and a dash of olive oil. Olives, duh. Mini roasted Japanese sweet potatoes and Tokyo turnips (leftover from dinner) and two beet-raspberry mini muffins (a recipe test in action). Cucumbers….because they’re green.

The alternative title for this section is “Don’t fix what ain’t broke.” If your kid is into quesadillas (for example) this week and is eating them in their lunch, ride that wave until it’s over!

Ah, the quesadilla: a last-minute packed lunch classic. It’s always tasty (even when cold, somehow), always welcome and (almost) always consumed. Plus carrots, edamame, pomegranate, persimmon slices and leftover roasted sweet potatoes.

Oh hey, what’s this? Another quesadilla, this time on a flour tortilla. Did the recipient give a crap that she’d had a quesadilla in yesterday’s lunch as well? Nope. Plus leftover blanched broccolini, frozen edamame (defrosted quickly in a splash of boiling water), cucumbers and blueberries.

Well, well, well, what do we have here? A quesadilla, but this one has leftover black beans smashed into it, too. Plus edamame, and sliced mini peppers, fruit salad of oranges, grapes and blueberries, blanched Tokyo turnips and carrots that aren’t regular carrots, they’re cool carrots (cut in a flower shape with these little cuties).

This is a particularly protein-packed version of a beloved classic, which means we feel good about sending our kids off to school with a belly full of it and feel just as good putting any leftovers in their lunches. At home we drizzle with delicious Just Date date syrup.

Ingredients

• 2 large whole eggs

• ½ cup cottage cheese

• ¼ cup of whole milk

• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

• ½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon

• ¼ teaspoon of grated nutmeg

• Pinch of sea salt

• The zest of one orange

• 2–4 tablespoons of butter

• 4 slices of bread (you can use Alvarado Street Bakery or Ezekiel breads for even more protein, but whatever bread you have around will do!)

The Method

1. Combine all ingredients aside from the butter and bread in a high-speed blender and process until very smooth.

2. Pour the batter into a shallow dish large enough to fit your bread.

3. Place the bread into the batter and let it soak for 5 to 10 minutes (depending on how thickly sliced or stale your bread is), flipping it over at least once to get both sides equally saturated.

4. Heat a griddle, or a nonstick ceramic or cast iron pan to medium-high and add a tablespoon or so of butter. When it’s melted, add the soaked bread and cook each side for around 5 minutes or until delightfully browned. Turn down the heat slightly midway through. Repeat with the remaining butter and bread, if necessary.