Does anyone else skip lunch A LOT? Breakfast – huge advocate. Dinner – couldn’t go without. Lunch – eh. Recently I’ve started to actually put an emphasis on lunch for myself because I got super lazy and snacky, and I figured I couldn’t be the only one. And since everyone loves a food inspiration post, here are some of my top lunch ideas. I am NO food guru, blogger or even remotely knowledgable but I love cooking, and I love easy and cheap so here goes.

Tuna, Rice and Avo.

Yes, it sounds hella fitspo and boring, but honestly it’s my new holy grail of lunches. It’s made easy by buying the 2 packs of 40 second brown rice cups from the supermarket ($2), one tin of tuna (I choose chilli, and the thai red curry flavour is immense as well) for around $.90c and sometimes I add half an avo chopped up (an avo is roughly $2.50 at the moment, praise be).

It’s super quick, my stomach loves me for it, and it keeps me full for hours and less snacky.

‘Snack Plates”

Is basically what my children live off and has no rules – we start a snack plate around 10am, and it can be added to or recreated with different ingredients at any stage of the day. Some of their favourites at the moment are cucumber (the little packs of minis are Evies favourite and she will seriously eat 5 in a row), sultanas, any fresh berries, crackers, cheese slices, avocado, capsicum, nuts and lentil chips.

Dinosaur sandwiches

Adding a sandwich to this list might sound like an easy cop out, but if I don’t use our dinosaur cutter that came free with one of their lunch boxes, chances are they won’t eat it. And you know what, I’ve been loving throwing it back to my childhood and just indulging in a vegemite and cheese sandwich with a cup of tea. The kids love natural peanut butter (which are super cheap now, you have no excuse for buying Craft or any of those suger filled ones), honey, or ham and cheese. The dinosaur mould just ensures they eat it and creates a bit of fun.

Smoothies

Another banger for the kids, they will drink whatever I put in a smoothie so this is perfect for the super fussy kids, or if you’re just on the go. Our staples are generally banana, blueberries (frozen packs for $4 a kilo), peanut butter, almond milk, coconut water (packs of 4 litres for $10) and some hemp protein (because it looked cool and was only $8 at Woolworths, so it’s a good protein option for vegos). I also like to add frozen chopped spinach or kale which comes for $1 a bag from the supermarket.

This morning I had Kiwi, Pear, Apple, Banana, Blueberries and Coconut Water.

Marinara Pasta

I thought I should include this since it is the face of the blog post on social media. It’s a really quick pasta dish we recently started having every week and the kids are crazy for it! It’s just around 450g of Marinara Mix from the Deli at the supermarket (which is only about $13kg), fried up in some butter and garlic, then I add it to some cooked spaghetti with one tub of creme fraiche and mix – add a heap of chopped parsley on top, and chilli to the adults version and its a hit. HELL easy.