Design Your Lunch!

Whether it’s a weekday or weekend, have the kids help you make lunch. Okay — what’s fun about that? Well, try it this way!

I have such fond memories of my mother making us Happy Tuna Meals. It was really a trick to motivate us to eat healthier. She’d make a bowl of tuna fish and have all the garnishes handy for us to make designs on the tuna. Try this. After whipping up a bowl of tuna fish  (or egg salad or chicken salad), flip it over onto a pretty serving plate. You might want to have lettuce on the bottom. Then prepare the vegetables — you can grate carrots and make those curly swirls of carrots, cut celery, slice black olives and green olives,  cut strips of red, green, yellow peppers, slice cucumbers and have, maybe, some pimento or jarred red peppers available. You get the idea, right?

Take all this healthy garnish and design the dish. We used to take slices of pitted black olives and make them eyes, pieces of green peppers for eyebrows, maybe red peppers or pimento for the mouth … and those cool curly pieces of carrots for hair! But, anything is possible …. just making a colorful abstract design on salad can be fun  AND they’ll keep productively busy and enjoy eating healthy!

Help create more interesting meals … tell us about them! We’d love to share that with our readers.