school lunches / packed lunched

[Wutanga1]

Anyone have any experience or ideas for school lunches or going the packed lunch route?

My kid is on school lunches. But while for weeks at a time these are generally well-managed (we provide the school with the carb counts based on the menu / choice for each day, and tell them how to bolus for it), we are having real problems with large spikes (above 14), and low lows (below 3mmol/L), usually due to - large spikes frankly due to the large, high fat/high carb meals they serve up on an almost daily basis (very few low carb options, or to be frank options I'd class as healthy in any case), coupled with a tendency to over-correct hypos (they've recently started prompting to down a full glucojuice even when the hypo is more like 3.8-3.9, even though we have supplied them with guidelines as to how many carbs of dextrose to give at any one time depending on how deep the hypo is). So after an overcorrection there will be a climb to 10-14, this can then be followed by a large carb-heavy meal, with large bolus. So the meal causes the glucose number to keep climbing, and then the pump autocorrection + the insulin bolus causes a rapid crash - usually into a deep hypo. Needless to say, this does not happen at home, and while we don't restrict carbs, we do carb count and account for the type of food eaten and how quick the absorption is going to be.

We are now considering packed lunches for the next school year. But are struggling with creative ideas away from sandwiches, pasta salads or similar. It can get very boring very quickly, Any good ideas/resources out there?

 

[Thebearcametoo]

Egg muffins or frittatas - you can add whatever veg, cheese, meat you want to them. BBC good food has recipes if you need one.

Tabbouleh made with quinoa

Burritos - wraps are fairly high carb but you can fill with lots of protein, salad and veg.

It depends really what your kid will eat. Mine would happily have sandwiches and crisps every day with some fruit.

It might be worth getting your diabetes team’s school’s coordinator to have a chat with the school about how they’re treating hypos. Sometimes schools respond better to being told by an ‘expert’ as if parents aren’t experts.

 

[Wutanga1]

Thanks for that. Will look into it, also with the BBC recipes.

 

[Elenka_HM]

Burritos - wraps are fairly high carb but you can fill with lots of protein, salad and veg.

Also if you wanted to make this option a bit lower in carbs, you can try a lower carb wrap. I like the "carb lite" ones from Deli kitchen, I find them at Asda but I think other shops have them. They are roughly 15g of carbs per wrap and not much more expensive than the regular type, as oposed to special keto brands. Or another option is to use a mini tortilla wrap instead of the bigger size, and add some extra snacks on the side (cheese, veggies, nuts...). Of course depends on what your kid likes 🙂

 

[42istheanswer]

When my children had packed lunches, I used to do a lot of variety to start with but they ended up asking for basically the same meal each day so depends on your child how much variety they will actually want.

You already have some variety ideas with sandwiches (and you can use different fillings depending on your child's preferences - ham, egg, cheese, chicken mayo, coronation chicken (very easy to make at home, just add a little garam masala to mayo as garam masala doesn't need cooking out, and some sultanas and pieces of dried apricots), possibly nut/ peanut butter unless your school has a no nuts/ peanuts policy, sliced sausages, houmous and grated carrot, etc) and pasta salad (can add colour with different coloured cherry/ plum tomatoes - cut up if you are worried about choking as not sure how old your child is and you won't be the one supervising eating - cucumber chunks, pepper slices etc, can use cheese, ham, tuna etc).

I also did things like "nachos" with sectioned lunch boxes - tortilla chips as the carb, a little tub of tomato salsa or ketchup depending on your child's preference, a bit of guacamole if they will eat that, some vegetable sticks or pepper slices and tomatoes, some cheese chunks or ham or chicken chunks for a bit of protein. If your child like assembling their own food then you could put in a wrap plus fillings, otherwise you can add pre- made wraps to the sandwich options.

Houmous, bread sticks, carrot sticks, cucumber sticks, maybe apple slices (spritzed with diluted lemon juice to stop them browning), maybe a few cheese chunks and a small flapjack.

You can also make sandwiches more exciting by cutting them into different shapes using cookie cutters.

Mini quiches or a sausage roll or pork pie or slice of gala pie (probably best only do the latter two occasionally in case school object) with some salad/veggies