If I have leftovers from the week I try to send leftovers for lunch on Friday. It helps me get the fridge cleaned out for the weekend, and makes for very easy lunch packing.  Last night I made a big pot of macaroni and cheese for the kids for dinner. They usually devour it, but we had been at a holiday party earlier and I think they all had too many snacks. So there was tons of mac & cheese leftover. Perfect for lunch! 

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I've done a lot of quesadillas lately, because they are quick and easy, so today I thought I would try to mix it up just a little. Tortilla pinwheels are super easy to make and you can put basically anything in them.  You just put a thin layer of your fillings on a flour tortilla, roll it up as tight as you can, and slice.  I like to put a little skewer through them to keep them from falling apart when my kids toss their lunches around. 

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It's "breakfast for lunch" Wednesday!  But it's been so dark and rainy in Seattle this week, that I felt like a nice hot lunch was needed.  So lunch was a nice hot bowl of oatmeal, with a few extra little snacky things on the side. 

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This is just simple snack box of little nibbles - like a homemade lunchable. But I realized that I hadn't been using any of my cutters in a long time, so I thought I'd break out a couple and just cut the cheese into some pretty flowers.  It doesn't take more than an extra minute or two, but it makes the lunch look just a little more fun.

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Listen, I'm no sanctimommy. I'm not even going to pretend that we eat like this 365 days a year. I'm working hard to do the best I can, as much as I can.  But even I sometimes need to take a break. 

We're living in the real world over here.  I try to feed my kids the healthiest food I can get them to eat most of the time.  But when we are on vacation, we eat like we're on vacation. I mean hey, it's my vacation too, I'm not interested in being the food police. I want to enjoy myself, and I want them to have fun too. They get burgers and fries and milkshakes. We order off the kids menu and they get to choose. They've had goldfish crackers, and those little snack size bags of cheez-its, and chocolate covered packaged granola bars, and those sandwich crackers that may or may not have real cheese in them. There were even a couple bowls of Fruit Loops from the hotel breakfast buffet (which I'm happy to say they didn't actually much of). There's a lot of stuff that I won't buy at home, but when we are on vacation I think relaxing the rules is just fine - it's two weeks out of the entire year and I don't think it's going to kill them. 

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Did I mention that we just got back from vacation? There wasn't a whole lot of fresh food in the house, so I had to dig around a little.  Fortunately I did have a few things in the fridge that have a long shelf life, so I was able to pull together what I think ended up looking like a pretty good lunch!  

Cheese always saves the day for me, and I had some uncooked chapati from Costco that were still sealed in the package, so they were great.  If you haven't bought those, you totally should.  They are in the fresh food section - near the cheese.  Uncooked Roti-Chapati - they are whole wheat flatbreads that you cook on a hot pan.  Much like tortillas, but a little thicker, and they are great for quesadillas. I also made a few quick cheese crisps. I found a few apples in the fridge. Cabbage and celery were the only veggies in my fridge that were still good. My kids actually like eating raw purple cabbage - I told them once that it was the magic kind, and they associate cabbage with "cabbage patch" - so they call purple cabbage "magic patch". Whatever, as long as they eat it. We haven't had a whole lot of veggies the last few weeks, so I need to ease them back into it.