Welcome to Week 4 at Lunch Matters.

News
Recipes
Links
Weekly shopping list
Got a favorite photo or recipe to share? Email it to us at lunchmatters@lunchmatters.com.au and we'll publish it here!

NEWS

Many thanks to all of you that completed the online survey – it has provided me with invaluable feedback! Overwhelmingly people are happy to receive the newsletter weekly and the length doesn’t seem to be a problem – the scroll bar is a wonderful thing! So the format will remain the same.

This week I thought I’d take the news story about ‘healthy’ muesli bars as a focus point for the newsletter.

Many of you would have seen the news this week about Choice Magazine's review of so called healthy muesli bars. It comes as no surprise to me and I am sure to many of you, that products that are marketed as ‘healthy’ are often not what they report to be. In a world where McDonald’s is trying to promote the nutritional value of their food, where Nutella and Coco Pops are recommended as ways to enhance your child’s performance at school and prepackaged fruit juice is marketed as a way of boosting your vitamin intake, we cannot walk away from the fact that at the end of the day what comes off the tree or out of the ground directly to us is always better than anything that comes out of a factory.

Presentation:

What we have to accept is that marketing of these foods is fantastic – the producers are very good at making these foods attractive and will often try to put a healthy spin on the product. The Laptop Lunchboxes and the other products available at Lunch Matters aim to redress the imbalance, to highlight the presentation of natural foods in an effort to make them as appealing as their nutritionally inferior counterparts. In a recent trip to the park we had a little circle of children standing around our lunchboxes peering in to look at all the goodies inside – it works, good presentation of natural foods looks amazing!

Products that enhance the appeal of fruit and veggies are a great addition to your suite of lunch packing accessories. We recently purchased a device that cores and slices apple like a ‘slinky’ – our apple consumption has gone through the roof! Some schools have bought these for their tuckshops/canteens and they too are finding that apple sales are up from 1 a week to 50 a day! I spent ten minutes cutting out carrot into alphabet letters with cutters with my 5 year old today – he ate two carrots in the process! Kid’s love a good novelty and where we can it’s an idea to think about this too.

Planning:

The main perceived advantage of prepackaged foods over the homebaked/natural alternatives is time. We have little of it and sometimes packing a lunch filled with prepackaged foods seems like the only option if we are to make it out the door.

To overcome this – it is worth putting a little time into planning for the week ahead. If there’s a window on the weekend where some homemade muesli bars (page 74 of the Laptop Lunch User's Guide) can be baked or some muffins baked and frozen then there are goodies to grab and pack in your lunchbox even on the busiest mornings.

Always think about lunches when you’re preparing dinners. This week you’ll see that mini meatballs make an appearance in the lunchbox. To suggest making them just for lunches would be mad, but to prepare meatballs for dinner in a tomato based sauce and then to include some that were intentionally left out of the sauce as a lunch meal the next day makes life easier.

If you have a dish with rice for dinner – use the leftovers to make the rice quiches also featured in this week’s box and recipe section. It’s just a matter of planning out the week, and in my experience thinking about the week ahead can really take the pain out of thinking about every day’s options.

Think seriously about the freezer too – some things really freeze well and will thaw by lunchtime when taken out of the fridge first thing in the morning or late the night before.

The last tip is to think about natural easy to pack items – I love cherry tomatoes, blueberries, strawberries, nuts and dried fruit (if appropriate – finding dried fruit free of sulfur is hard but less so now than before) as they are so good to have on hand when you just need things to grab and go.

RECIPES

I have two great recipes to include this week.

The first is again from the fantastic publication recently published by a Melbourne mum, Hélène Canavan called Lunchbox. It is pictured in Monday’s photo. This is a great way to use up the left over rice.

Quiche with Rice Base

Rice shell

8 tbsp cooked white rice

2 tbsp grated parmesan

lightly greased muffin tins

Mushroom filling

1/2 onion grated

4 mushrooms sliced and quickly browned with onion in pan

2 beaten eggs

2 tbsp yoghurt

Preheat oven to 200C

Use fingers to mix cheese and rice. Place 3 tbsp of rice mixture in each muffin tin and press down gently. Pour over beaten eggs and yoghurt mix then place the sauteed mushrooms and onion on top.

Bake 20-25 minutes

Allow to cool

These really take about 5 minutes to make and they are really yummy cold or warmed up for lunch the next day.

Bean Dish

The second recipe is for the bean dish which is a great stand by to have when the cupboard is looking a little bare- this is a family favourite of ours and is again a great dish to have for dinner the night before and then cold for lunch the next day.

1 onion

1 red pepper

4 ripe tomatoes (or a tin of tomatoes if that's what's in the cupoboard)

1 tin of 4 bean mix

Fresh bread

Cheddar cheese

Parsley

Yoghurt

Cut onion and pepper, saute in a little olive oil.

Add beans and tomatoes and season to taste

Place bean mix in an oven proof dish

Leave some out for the lunchbox the next day

Process the bread, cheese and parsley together

Then spread the crumb mixture over the top of the bean mix and place in the oven at 200C for 15-20 minutes or until the top is a little browned.

Serve with a generous dolop of yoghurt.

If you are reheating the lunch the next day (and remember to remove the lids before you microwave) there is no reason not to just pack it as you had it for dinner - I find though that it works better cold without the topping.

LINKS TO OTHER SITES OF INTEREST:

It really is worth visiting the Laptop Lunchbox flickr group regularly - you'll see our photos there but also lots of new ideas daily.

The other site of interest this week is the site where the Laptop Lunchboxes are now being sold in the UK http://www.laptoplunches.co.uk/

You’ll find a wealth of information there on both the gourmet and environmental possibilities of the Laptop Lunchbox systems.

WEEKLY SHOPPING LIST:

Fruit:	Vegetables:
Apples Strawberries Oranges Kiwis Bananas Lemons	Tomatoes (cherry are the best, but this week I just chopped up big tomatoes) Avocados Onion Fennel Mushrooms Parsley Celery Red pepper
Meat:	From the freezer: (it is handy to have a couple of items in the freezer for various uses)
Organic beef mince
In the pantry:	Dairy:
Olive oil Soy sauce Baguette Organic museli - for trail mix Brown sugar Mirin or sake Eggs (quail and chicken) Wholemeal flour Organic dry biscuits OrganicChickpeas Green Olives with pimento Four bean mix organic tinned Beans Organic dried cranberries and& nbsp; blueberries Caster sugar Bread (Kamut bread is delicious)	Cheese Cream cheese Organic plain yoghurt Light mayonnaise Milk