Bring Your Kid’s School Lunch Alive with Creative Lunch Recipe Ideas

By Sherrie Le Masurier

The key to a creative lunch recipe is to think outside the ‘lunch’ box. Your kids are only young once and if you’re a working parent who routinely brown bags it yourself, you know all too well how lunches can easily become boring.

When it comes to a creative lunch recipe we also need to think like our children and come up with age appropriate food ideas that are fun and easy to assemble.

Although I don’t encourage my kids to ‘play’ with their food at the dinner table, I do make an exception for school lunches. 

Here are some creative lunch recipe ideas to get you started. Ask your children to put their thinking caps on and come up with some more fun ideas of their own. 

Crazy Eights

For this creative lunch recipe idea all you need to do is supply eight of everything. Then pack a lunch note in your child’s lunch bag promising a game of Crazy Eights before bed.

Here are some menu ideas to get you started. Be inventive by coming up with your own based on your child’s favorite foods:

8 individual pieces of cheese
8 pieces of pepperoni or sausage
8 crackers
8 celery sticks
8 carrots sticks
8 pickles
8 orange or apple slices

Tic Tac Toe Snacks

Another creative lunch recipe and snack idea is to pack your child a small piece of paper with tic tac toe grid on it and a snack bag of raisins and sandwich sized bag of Cheerios or round shaped cereal. Encourage your child to keep the game supplies in her knapsack for playing and eating whenever she has the opportunity at lunch or during an indoor recess.

Mystery Lunch

For a young child who loves a good mystery, consider wrapping up her lunch items in foil and making her guess what each individual package holds.

Add to the fun of this creative lunch recipe by attaching a note or riddle to each mystery package e.g. for broccoli you might want to write, “I am a green vegetable that grows in bunches above ground. I am a good source of iron and fiber.” Make sure any hints are age appropriate. 

Hidden Shapes

Sometimes how something looks offers greater appeal than ordinary menu servings. When thinking of  a creative lunch recipe for young children consider some shape variations e.g. melon balls instead of melon slices, slicing grapes in half, cutting cucumbers into squares and offering up carrot circles instead of ordinary carrot sticks. 

Then take this creative lunch recipe idea one step further and include a note that asks your child to count up the number of different shapes that were hidden in her lunch.

A creative lunch recipe is simply any recipe that’s fun. Use your imagination and come up with different combinations of food and unique ways to present it.