Shortcuts: Creative options for school sack lunches

Mary Ann Kauckak/Columnist
Published: August 20, 2008

Sharpen the pencils and start stuffing those brightly colored backpacks. I can hear the school bells ringing!

Right about now we are all saying, "Where did the summer go?" In any case, it IS gone. Visions of school lunches drift through our heads as we ponder what we'll pack to provide a midday energy boost. Is your scholar a picky eater, a "surprise me" charac-ter, or a same-o, same-o individual?

My editor politely asked me to consider this topic, so I obliged her and put my thinking cap on (even though my boys are well past school age). I'm sure many of you line up the bread, jelly and peanut butter in assembly-line fashion and make sandwiches for the entire week. I'm happy for you if that works!

The rest of us are challenged. Weighing the food options offered in schools and taking the palates of youth today into consideration, I offer you the following solutions.

Universally, I believe most kids like cereal. When I go on vacation, I find those individual portions of cereal sold in cardboard cups quite handy. Why not use them for school lunches? If I'm not mistaken, you can still buy milk at school so that is not a concern. Cereal cups are lightweight and come properly sealed.

After confirming with a teacher-friend that milk and yogurt are available in school lunch lines, I suggest packing bite-size cubes of fresh fruit and baggies of granola to pour over school-bought yogurt as a nutritional, low fat solution for lunch.

Remembering back to grade school, my boys liked flour tortillas rolled up with peanut butter and jelly inside. Tortilla roll-ups with thin deli-cuts of meat or cheese are another option. Throw in a packet of mustard for dipping.

In past columns, I have suggested fruit or meat and cheese kabobs only to find out that sharp bamboo skewers may be "foreboden" in some school environments. Solution? Use a thin plastic cocktail straw!

Experiment with adding something new to PB & J like raisins, dried cranberries, banana slices, mini-marshmallows or paper thin apple slices.

Roast skinless drumsticks— a baking sheet full—dipped in barbeque or teriyaki sauce and bank them for the week or freeze for later. Or, just remove the drumsticks from that weekly rotisserie chicken you grab in the deli, store them in the freezer and have them on hand for that lunch you forgot to pack the night before. Remember, school is no longer "out for summer" as in the familiar Alice Cooper song … it's here for the duration!

Mary Ann lives in Lake Ridge. Her third cookbook, "SHORTCUTS, TOO," is now available at Salt & Pepper Books in Occoquan. Send questions or comments in care of this paper at P.O.Box 2470, Woodbridge, VA. 22195.