The Well Engineered Lunch

Lunch is one of my hardest meals of the day.  It's easy to deal with food allergies eating in, but lunch requires planning since it is the one meal of the day that almost always has to be eaten out of the house.  I'm also now starting to try to plan for integrating Makallia into our home, and planning for her needs.  We don't really want to do a cafeteria meal plan.  We eat all organic at home, and it just seems counterproductive to go from all organic at home to mass produced, chemically grown, genetically modified foods loaded with things we don't allow in our home---like artificial food colors, refined sugar, and high fructose corn syrup.

I'm not living in a fantasy though.  I know Makallia is going to have a tough adjustment going from eating how she does now to how we do, and she is not always going to like it---I've gone through sugar withdrawal when we stopped eating sugar, and it wasn't fun.  Sugar is truly addictive.

I turned to the blogs that I follow for some suggestions.  Now, with the bloggers I follow their kids have pretty much eaten gluten and dairy free from birth so they have a much different palate than Makallia will, and probably even more so than we will.  However, I was able to get a really good idea.  One suggested that if kids build their own lunch box they will be much more apt to be happy with their meal choices and eat what is provided to them.  They even provided a sample lunch box planner.  I used their lunch box planner as an inspiration (which included things like Quinoa, Nori Rolls, and other things that I know won't fly in our household), and came up with my own.   The idea of the lunch box builder is that you choose one item from each column, and that is your lunch.  The columns are Fruit, Vegetable, Protein, Treat, and Drink.    Though the treat column has things on it like snack bars, cookies, pudding, etc...those would all be homemade items that are much healthier---I have so many recipes now that are sugar free for desserts.  They don't use synthetic alternatives, either.  They are generally sweetened with dates or honey, and taste delicious.

I am going to start using this now with Joel and myself so we can tweak it as we go along, and be totally ready for when we need to add in lunch box #3.  I gave it to Joel for him to review, and he already chose for his Monday lunch raspberries, green salad, ham, kefir and water.  I chose strawberries, baby carrots, hummus, dark chocolate and grape juice.

Allergens

In October I started allergy testing---it's a long process, but by Mid-January I had it figured out---it also helped me learn why I was gaining weight when I should have been losing weight (oh well....the White Chocolate Bread Pudding at Larriviere's may have had more than a little to do with that...).  

My allergen issues are dairy and gluten.  I have voluntarily also eliminated refined sugar and soy simply because they are SO bad for you.

The greatest thing in this process is I learned I was far from alone in my allergen issues.  I live by blog for my recipes, and was able to make awesome Thanksgiving and Christmas meals all allergen free.  I have a two week rotating meal plan, and almost all of the recipes come from blogs.

My go to sources are:

The Spunky Coconut

The Whole Life Nutrition Kitchen

and

Real Sustenance

These are in no particular order, but all three are great---they also all have links to other blogs, and the wonderful recipe makers and experimenters that put these together have saved me so much time and frustration, and have been a life-saver in keeping Joel happy with our meal transition.