Public Servant Lifestyle

Get those packed lunches ‘boxed off’ with a new paperback from Jennifer Joyce.

Jennifer Joyce gives you a fantastically easy guide to creating brilliant packed lunches your children will love, you will have time to prepare and that, most importantly are healthy too.

Packed with 100 brilliant ideas for healthy lunches from the startlingly simple to the more adventurous Lunch Boxes is full of tips and tricks to take the headache out of the most frazzled of parents.

These 'tricks and tips' include:

Supper ideas that produce leftovers for lunch boxes the next day

Salads that make enough for three days

Homemade, healthier and cheaper versions of shop-brought products

Weekly plans, shopping lists and everyday solutions to time management

Clever ways of sneaking healthy food into your children’s diet

Nutritional advice and lots of alternatives for fussy eaters

Whether you’re an old hand or a complete novice at the school lunch box racket this handy quick guide will prove enlightening – or act as a useful refresher – to the much put upon food home preparer, however many small mouths you’re trying to feed (and just as importantly, keep interested!)

The book starts with a useful guide to the properties of various fruit and vegetables – a far from comprehensive, but nevertheless well-informed and well presented collection of food facts. As to the recipes themselves there’s a tremendous amount of variety on display: cheese and ham ‘butties’ are traded for something a little more exotic – fresh humus or guacamole served with raw carrot crudités or a chicken stay baguette. In the same way the likes of toasted sunflower seeds replace crisps and home-made brownies with white chocolate chunks stand in for all those shop-bought sweets and cakes.

Lavishly illustrated with fun, child-friendly vegetable and fruit characters throughout, the book is designed to appeal to a browsing child as much as to the adult reader.

Here’s what some of the reviews have had to say about Lunch Boxes:

“100 brilliant ideas for nutritious and delicious packed lunches” - Best magazine.

“Full of helpful ideas and even includes a weekly meal planner” - Independent on Sunday.

“Great...a compendium of fresh ideas for lunch-on-the-go” – The Daily Record

“A colourful selection of ideas for packed lunches.” – (London listings magazine) Time Out.

The book’s author, Jennifer Joyce is a cookery teacher, food writer and cook but above all, she is a busy mother of two small boys. She makes lunch boxes every day of the school year and therefore knows exactly what children will and won’t eat, the perils of peer pressure and the stress of trying to prepare food at seven o’clock in the morning!

For more information on planning healthy lunches in advance for school aged youngsters, you could do a lot worse than follow this link for a handy meal planner from The Food Standards Agency.

Lunch Boxes is in the shops now, priced £7.99 (paperback) and is published by Penguin Books. A more durable hardbacked edition is also in the shops, priced £10.00.

More information available in Books, Dining Out, Main Courses, In Your Kitchen