Yesterday on the ride home from a friend’s house, Liam firmly stated that he did not want chocolate and sardines packed in his school lunch. I agreed to his request. I had no idea what he was talking about.
I have re-vamped lunches this year. Will and Liam like foods that crunch. Their senses are centered and their focus is sharpened by goldfish, carrots, apples, pretzels, and potato chips. Liam washes down the crunch with his chocolate soy milk. Will gulps Gatorade and gets a protein hit from the insulated bag I have waiting for him in the car after school: Cheese slices snuggled up against an ice block.
They love cold, cold cheese, preferably right out of the fridge. They haven’t developed the taste for room temperature cheese. Eating sweaty cheese out of a lunch bag? I might as well be packing chocolate and sardines. Yesterday, I discovered that a slice of bologna sweats in a lunch box just like cheese does. And, sweaty bologna comes home untouched.
To decompress myself from lunch stress, I’ve taken a step back and acknowledged what history has shown. Liam might remember to eat one or two things as he’s chatting with his friends at lunch time. Starving after school, he demands food. I open his lunch box and there is his 3 p.m. lunch. As for Will, he prefers food in smaller doses. Recognizing hunger, he grabs food throughout the day and appreciates that cold snack in the van. Will & Liam eat to live.
Neither boys eat sandwiches. As a kid, I depended on that wonderful bologna sandwich for lunch. On white buttered bread with ketchup. And for pure decadence, if there were plain potato chips in my lunch, I tucked them into the sandwich, on the ketchup side. I loved that crunch.
Crunch. That reminds me... A friend picked Liam up from school yesterday, and she offered me a kind of homemade toffee that was heavenly. To make it, she covered saltine crackers with butter and sugar and chocolate. The microwaved result was chocolate-covered toffee!
Ahhh... 0therwise known as chocolate and “sardines.”
(Do you have suggestions for a crunchy lunch? Please, please, find this big yellow box on my Facebook page and leave your suggestions in the comments!)