Sunny Side Up Nutrition

A cooking, nutrition and family feeding blog to simplify your life

Lunch

Coming soon!

Lentil Salad with Feta Cheese and Salami

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Easy Lentil Salad

HI. Elizabeth, here.  It’s been so warm and humid here in the DC area, it’s hard to believe it’s mid-October.  I love fall and am looking forward to some cool, crisp days like today.

This Lentil Salad with Feta Cheese and Salami is just the recipe for still-warm fall days. It’s also hearty enough for cool days.   As I mentioned in a recent post, these Trader Joe’s Steamed Lentils are one of my favorites.  You can typically find them in the refrigerator case on a top shelf above the vegetables.   In our house, we use them either cold in a salad like the one below or heated and served with rice and some grated cheese.  My friend, Amanda adds caramelized onions and rice to them.

This recipe is so easy!  It really only takes a few minutes to make.  I love to have it for lunch on mixed greens. It also makes a nice side dish.  This salad is one of those items my kids still haven’t tried, but I keep offering it. If you have toddlers, preschoolers or even young elementary age kids, you might offer this salad deconstructed.  They’re likely to be more receptive to the individual ingredients.  And remember, even if your child doesn’t try a food after seeing it many times-don’t give up.  They might just try it eventually.  When they do, you’ll want to jump up and down and cheer, but resist the urge.  As hard as it is not to cheer, remaining neutral creates a low pressure environment for trying new foods.

Lentil Salad with Feta Cheese and Salami

Easy Lentil Salad…

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What’s For Lunch?

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Elizabeth, here.  I hope you had a chance to read Anna’s recent post about the importance of eliminating diet talk from schools. And did you see our new resource to share with teachers and coaches?  It makes it so easy to reach out and share your beliefs about food with anyone who works with your children.

Has everyone settled into the new school year?  If you’re anything like me, it’s the time of year you get stuck in the lunch-making-ho-hums.  I don’t love packing lunches and get tired of it pretty quickly!  As a way to prevent the ho-hums and mix things up a bit, I thought I’d share a few more ideas for quick and easy lunches to add to the LUNCH LIST.  

What’s For Lunch?

Leftover Pizza, Clementines and Homemade Oatmeal Craisin Cookies

Lunch Leftover Pizza, oatmeal cookies, clemintines

A teenager or older child would likely need at least two slices of pizza depending on the slice size.  (These are actually quite small. I had to cut this piece of pizza in two to fit it in the container).  Or add a Greek yogurt or some trail mix to lunch if there’s only one slice per older child.  For younger children, make a hole in the top of the clementines to make it easy for littler hands to peel them, or just peel them before putting them in the lunchbox.  

Leftover Pizza, oatmeal cookies and clementines

I love these Sistema lunch cubes as I mentioned here a few weeks ago.  They have plenty of room for a full lunch.  And the fact that the container closes between sections means less likelyhood the pizza or cookies will taste like clementines and vice versa.

Sistema Container

My youngest loves leftover pizza for lunch!  This makes me happy because it’s so easy and it really satisfies her.  …

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3 Favorite, Easy Back to School Lunches

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I love seeing all the back to school pictures this time of year!  (I’ll post a back to school picture once both kids have gone back to school.)  I can’t even believe it, but our 14 year old started high school on Monday.  Naturally, I’ve been thinking about what to pack for school lunches.  I settle into making the same lunches pretty often. I’ve definitely done that this summer.  So, I thought I’d start the school year off with some lunch ideas to share over the coming weeks. Hopefully, these will also be helpful to you and your family!  In the midst of all this meal planning, don’t forget to think about meals and snacks for yourself, too. 

Lunch, like all other meals and snacks doesn’t need to be perfect! There’s so much pressure to feed ourselves and our kids in some perfect way. At my house, the containers we use don’t match and I sometimes use plastic baggies. And my kids will eagerly tell you I’ve been known to forget to put things in their lunch bags, like utensils or even food. At some point last year, I got a text from Caroline during the day with a picture of the empty Thermos I put in her bag.  I forgot to add the food!  

3 Easy Lunches

One of the easiest lunches for me to pull together is lentils, rice and grated cheese.  I love these Trader Joe’s Steamed Lentils!   You can heat them or serve them cold (recipe for a lentil salad coming soon). All you need is some extra rice, or buy precooked, frozen rice to mix with the lentils and a little salt. I heat the Thermos by filling it with boiling water from our electric water kettle.  You can also use hot water from the tap. Screw the lid on the thermos and let it sit while you make lunch. Heat the mixture for 1-2 minutes on high in a microwave safe dish. The time will vary depending on your microwave. Remove it from the microwave and stir in about a 1/4 c grated cheese. Empty the hot water from the thermos and add the heated lentils, rice and cheese.

Easy back to school lunches…

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Favorite Everyday Salad with Mustard Vinaigrette

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Everyday Salad

Anna and I were recently brainstorming topics to share with our readers.  She mentioned her clients often ask her how to make a good salad and suggested I write a post about salads.  So, I thought I’d go ahead and share my family’s Favorite Everyday Salad.

We all love salad in our house!  But that hasn’t always been the case.  It’s one of those examples of food I kept serving even though the girls didn’t touch it for years.  They’d eat apples dipped in mustard vinaigrette or cucumbers and carrots dipped in dressing, but no salad. I followed (and still do) the Ellyn Satter Division of Responsibility that Anna talks about in Family Feeding – The Long Haul.  Letting kids decide what and how much they’ll eat of what’s offered allows kids to use their internal and intuitive cues….

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