How to Make Your Child’s Lunch Fun Even If You Have Zero Artistic Ability
Parents these days seem to be treating lunch packaging as a competitive sport, creating truly creative midday dinners for their youth . Not all parents are gifted with ham origami techniques, but that doesn’t mean their kids have to suffer from lackluster performance. Follow these tips and you will have a truly impressive meal.
Just put faces on things
Anthropomorphization is just fun. I put some eye stickers on my stapler and since then my home office has become a very joyful place. To bring the same joy to your beloved child’s lunch box, take a marker and draw a face on a thick-skinned fruit such as an orange or banana. If you want your child to be the beauty of the ball, borrow from the world of delicious tiki drinks and make gorgeous banana dolphins .
To make these yellow marine mammals, do the following:
- Take a banana and give it a mouth by making an inch long cut in the stem to give your little guy a mouth.
- As for the eyes, you can draw them with a marker or insert whole carnations into the fetus, but then your child will smell like a carnation, which does not seem to be the right child.
- Put something in Flipper’s mouth. Lucky Peach uses grapes , but tiki bar master Paul McGee uses whole nutmeg. I feel like grapes are the best option here, unless you bring a tiny microplan with you so your child can decorate their Easy Mac with useful things.
- You’re mostly done here, but you can go even further by inserting some trimmed pineapple leaves as fins.
You can also put faces on hard-boiled eggs like Daddy does with a stormtrooper egg lunchbox , but I was a kid who brought a hard-boiled egg to school and I can’t say it helped me increase my popularity. (I tried to fight stigma by smashing them on my forehead, but then I was just a weirdo who hit myself in the head with sulfur bombs.)
Hug the cookie cutter
Do you know what I’m not good at? Form making. It’s really hard for me to cut a piece of paper into a circle. Do you know what is good at making forms? Cookie cutters. We live in the golden age of cookies, my friends, and you’d be a damn fool if you didn’t use their power.
Living in such a wonderful time means you can find a cookie cutter that will suit not only every holiday and season, but any obsession with your child. Star Wars , mermaids , dinosaurs , carpentry or – for hipsters – stone jar cookie cutters can all be used to make sandwiches (or cookies, I think) fun, not boring shapes.
If you’re worried about wasting sandwich pieces, consider buying knives specifically made for sandwiches , like this dinosaur I have (pictured above).
Aside from sandwiches, you can use small cookie cutters to cut sturdy fruits like melon into all sorts of things, but if you’re a kid like me (narcissistic) I recommend getting an alphabet cutter set and making young Carrie’s decent fruit kebab. Bradshaw.
You can also make lunch more “interactive” for Younger by packing some of these Vegetable Toys and making them build their own goddamn carrot bear. I actually have a bear and a rabbit and have only ever made cheese animals, but you get the idea.
Just make sure you have hard cheese slices.
Put things on sticks
Fruits, meat, sandwiches, vegetables: it’s all the more fun to eat on a stick. A few kebab ideas for you:
- Fruit kebabs in fun shapes or your child’s name. Or forget about shapes and just alternate beautiful pineapple slices with strawberries and grapes. If for some reason you need to take your child with you, alternate strawberries with pieces of cake.
- Make sandwich turntables using tortillas or a sandwich flatbread. Roll up and stretch over a skewer.
- Toast broccoli and potatoes and stir in. Bring a good tahini dipping sauce with you to get some extra credit.
- Ditch bread altogether and use cold meats and cheese sticks. I don’t know if the kids love gourmet meats and cheeses, but I think the cool ones do. Maybe try the prosciutto wrapped around the melon if you’re ambitious about a baby’s palate.
The possibilities are endless with this format, so go crazy.
Rely on cute containers and packaging
I once had a small plastic container in the shape of a cow’s head and always ate whatever was in that container. In fact, packaging doesn’t even have to be that cute. Simply dividing food into neat little pieces works wonders for presentation. Bento boxes (similar to the ones we wrote about earlier ) are a great reusable option, but you can always share some Tupperware crockery or another reusable container with adorable cupcake liners.
Also, don’t be afraid to dissemble. Believe it or not, the butterfly bags one person at Tinder told me about is very simple and very cute. There are two ways to make them: with clothespins or with a pipe cleaner. The clothespin method takes a little more work because it requires the eyes to be glued to the pin, so I recommend the pipe cleaning route. To make your cute little insect a friend, simply fill a resealable plastic bag with snacks, leaving some wiggle room. Take the pipe cleaner and rotate it centered to form the body and tendrils. Look how cute:
If you have the skills of an artist, don’t underestimate drawing a little cartoon directly on Ziploc, as David Larrerier does for his kids . If you’re not creative, you’ll love even the emoji and the simple hopeful note. After all, it’s the thought that matters. In fact, food really matters, everything else is just a drag and drop.