8 Days Until Halloween - Breakfast For Lunch

Kids with allergies/food intolerance issues have to miss out on buying school lunch... sometimes that's good, because the school in question doesn't provide good lunches, but in our case, the school provides a lot of variety and options and it would be nice if she could buy on some days.  One of the times she feels left out are when they have breakfast for lunch.  So, when I can, I send her that.  Obviously, some foods simply don't work out due to her own preferences for temperature.  Eggs, for instance... she likes them HOT, not just warm, so I don't send them.  Now with only milk being an issue I know someone would think, well, why can't she have lunch at school then?  Well, because of all the milk you wouldn't even think of looking for.  Sure, she can have stuff made with milk and be fine, but not when it's in large amounts and certainly not when it's in almost every part of the meal.

Here is an example of a typical breakfast for lunch at our elementary schools - pancakes, egg OR pork sausage patty, and then whatever fruit/veggie sides they pick.  They then have the choice of white, chocolate, or strawberry milk.  They can have water (which means the water fountain.. yeah, it sucks and isn't sufficient for her) instead of the milk, but between the tempting milk flavors and how the water is available, it just doesn't work.  the pancakes have milk, the egg patties have milk.  I'm not saying the school doesn't provide safe options, I'm saying that most times, the option to have her have a milk-free lunch at school just isn't practical.  As she gets older and can remember what all of their foods have milk in them and which ones don't, it may be possible for her to get lunch at school sometimes, but it's just easier to pack it and send it.

So, since my best friend picked up a pack of 4 jumbo muffins on sale and brought them over to share, I decided to save half of one for Ruthie's lunch.  (The other half was devoured by her brother for after-school snack).

Yes, the muffin has some milk in it, most likely (when I make muffins I use a recipe that doesn't call for milk or I use soymilk or other "milk" instead), and so does the nutella on it, but again, because it is an intolerance and not an allergy, I can monitor and adjust her diet accordingly.  I can't do that when I have to trust her to tell me absolutely everything she puts in her body at school and when the milk is in such high quantities there. Since the nutella is samples, I'm using it, but in future, we're going to buy a different brand of chocolate spread that is milk-free.  Jif has to-go packs of a chocolate peanut butter spread, for instance, that are milk free.  However, that's more waste than I want when I'd be using it at home, so I'm still finding what to buy next... reading labels is so crucial.

For her breakfast for lunch today, she has a banana, cut in half, and decorated with food-safe marker to look like ghosts... between her ghosts is her treat... a snack sized bag of skittles that her brother brought home yesterday and traded in for the reward of nutella spread on his snack... she has a spider on it for fun... then she has the half muffin cut into 4 pieces with some nutella on it and a ghost coming up to go BOO!... in the small container she has two pieces of turkey bacon.  She decided to have lemonade to drink... weird child... she didn't bat an eye after having OJ with her chocolate yesterday... so I believe her that she'll drink it.

It is all packed in our kotobuki panda and one glad 4-oz round container... or, as Ruthie called it... her kung fu-panda box and a little bowl of bacon.