I have a little challenge at lunchtime - my daughter loathes peanut butter. Really and truly cannot stand it. She doesn’t like most nuts, in fact.
So there goes a classic kids’ lunch. It doesn’t help that my son would gladly live on peanut butter.
Today we came up with a compromise. She got a jelly sandwich, which she adores but I hate to make because they aren’t all that nutritious (although I do use wheat bread). But she also had to have some lunch meat. I buy the healthier kinds, not just bologna. She’s happy. I’m happy that she’s getting something healthy along with her sandwich.
The kids are also enjoying fresh tomatoes from the garden.
I’d love to hear how other parents handle lunchtime challenges. What do you like to serve your kids for lunch and how do you cope with difficult food preferences?
Technorati Tags: kids, lunch, peanut butter, sandwiches
My daughter still won’t eat peanut butter and she’s 11. Just about every day she would eat a sliced ham sandwich on white bread with the crust cut off. Nothing else on the sandwich at all. I made up for it by give her fresh fruit cups with her lunch, no chips. There were days though when she did eat just a jelly sandwich. Oh well, she’s growing up healthy!
Like me, my kids have always loved peanut butter. In fact, I still find spoons in the sink coated with it. They just spoon it out of the jar and eat it. For awhile, my oldest went through a phase: Peanut butter and tuna sandwiches. Gross. Don’t ask me where he got that idea. But he outgrew it. They eat peanut butter on waffles, pop tarts (really good with the cinnamon ones . . . it melts), bananas . . . you name it.
Tuna is another alternative. We use only nonfat mayo. and it takes the same. Also cold cuts — I buy the leanest slices of ham I can find, as well as turkey, roast beef. They love sandwiches with just the meat and cheese. They’ll eat tuna with mayo. but no mayo. on anything else. Go figure.
Good luck! It is definitely a challenge!
My 3 year old daughter is very fussy. I choose to ignore what she doesn’t like, ie I never say to her - “you don’t like beans do you?” I just keep putting beans on her plate and when she says she doesn’t like them I say - “that’s a shame, because they are yummy!”
Dinner is my problem meal, and veggies the main problem so what I do is twice a week serve a meal with disguised veggies (puree broccoli and carrot into tomato puree for pasta sauce for example - they can’t taste it if you add bacon) or zuchinni and carrot grated in burger patties. Then I know they are actually getting some veggies!
Then twice a week I present 2 veggies on a plate with her meal and say that she has to eat 1 type of veggie or she has to go straight to bed, I’m prepared to stand really firm on this but have never been forced to follow though! She can choose which one. I limit this to twice a week so we don’t have conflict every meal but she is being forced to taste veggies regularly!
Anyway, it appears to be working, she now eats corn, cucumber, potato and tried a pea last week, all without any pressure!
Sure is hard work being a parent!
I go for balanced meals as opposed to “typical” meals. For example, my son doesn’t like “sandwiches.” So for him, I make bread and butter and then give him some cut up cheese and a small pile of sliced turkey. Dd recently decided PB&J isn’t good (even though she ate it for 12 years) so for her she can have a jelly sandwich with a teaspoon of peanut butter on the side.
As long as the lunch includes the 4 food groups, I’m happy with it even if it looks strange!
Luckily we homeschool and I don’t have to deal with packing these odd lunches to send to school!
School lunches will definitely be my challenge with her. Left to herself, she’d likely ignore any lunch meat. I’ve been trying to experiment this summer to see what I can make since she enters kindergarten in the fall. Her school runs it until 1 pm, so lunch has to be packed.
I joke that the dislike for peanut butter is genetic. I don’t like it either, nor does my paternal grandmother. We’re thinking about trying her on cashew butter, because one of the very few nuts she likes are cashews.
I don’t like peanut butter either. So I make jelly and fluff sandwiches.
Have you tried cream cheese and jelly sandwiches??
Ooooh, no! I wonder if she would like cream cheese.
Trick is, I don’t, not even in cheesecake. So it’s not something I would have thought of on my own.
My toddler is going through a picky stage. He obsesses over foods for a week or two at a time. His current obsession is bran cereal, raisins and rice cereal, the kind you give 6 month olds when they first start to eat!
The problem is, he needs a very high fiber diet because he had intestinal surgery. So I try to get lots of fruit and veggies into him. The best way to do this is to serve him only slices of tomato (which he loves, but won´t eat if he has another option) at first and eat some myself. Also, if I´m eating something, he ALWAYS wants to try it, so sometimes, I´ll just put extra veggies on my plate and let him take them. He thinks he´s being the sneaky one!