Sandwiches for school
I live in Australia and so school holidays are over and the shops are full of back to school stuff - including a huge range of lunch boxes. And the foodie magazines are full of stuff to put in them - not to mention the supermarket shelves of course. So I thought I would do a post on sandwiches - but you could write a whole book (and people have) about sandwiches - so I am going to stick to the subject of lunch boxes with the emphasis on the sandwiches that go into them.
My starting point was the current Coles Magazine (apparently no longer available on the iPad - another post coming up there) - which has an item on making and freezing sandwiches so that you don't have to do it every day. And looking back on my mummy days I do see that this would have been a good thing to do. In fact I was an appalling provider of lunch. I told myself that it was because my children wouldn't eat the various healthy options that were available. But I should not have caved in to them. And I do remember from my teaching days that the children were very bad about eating what was in their lunch boxes. I remember one mother in particular used to make the most delicious looking rolls and sandwiches and they never got eaten. We would find mouldering bits of sandwiches in the cloakroom. Which just goes to show that I was an appalling teacher too - I should have made them eat what was in their boxes. We just did not police it. And I did see a reference to the fact that children with healthy lunch boxes get bullied about it and made fun of. Do you think they still do?
Anyway to return to the Coles article. It was a simple article with just a few tips about making frozen sandwiches and how to prevent them going soggy, plus a few ideas of what to put in the sandwiches.
I do know that my own granddaughters have fairly sophisticated tastes and would probably eat avocado and hummus and other such things, but I do wonder about most children. But we should definitely try to train them to like good food. As Jamie Oliver says: "You might think there's nothing remotely exciting about sandwiches, but the fact is that you can made them in seconds, they're really portable and there's no excuse for them not to be damned tasty." He has a whole chapter on the subject in his Jamie's Dinners book - well this was the book that was built around his campaign for better school lunches. I have to say some of the sandwiches - or sarnies as he calls them (they call them butties up north) - were pretty tempting and not all of them were super healthy - but that's Ok every now and then. He has a model lunch box to show
which is pretty healthy, but it's alright to include the odd treat as well - as long as the bulk of the meal is good, healthy food.
And there are so many things that you can use these days - so many pre-made sauces and relishes and things. Cheese comes already sliced as does the ham and other cold meats, and even though home-made is obviously best there's no need really. And then there's all the healthy drinks and dips and bars of this and that.
There wasn't nearly as much choice in my childhood. I still remember the tomato sandwiches my mother made, which had their own peculiar taste due to them making the bread a bit soggy and to their taste having changed over the course of a morning in the lunchbox. We didn't even have gladwrap then so the sandwiches would have been in brown paper bags I think - or perhaps just lying around in the plain plastic box we had as a lunchbox.
School lunch boxes are an industry though. Not just the boxes themselves and the paraphernalia of drink bottles, and mini containers for this and that to slot into the lunchbox, but sandwiches - yes you can now buy actual sandwiches in Woolworths,
along with the bars and other snack foods. Tiny tins (or plastic containers) of fruit, dips, yoghurts and other dairy snacks, cereal bars, biscuits, cookies - on and on it goes. You can see why it would be easy for a busy mum to succumb to all of this stuff.
And I will come back to the general topic of sandwiches some other time.
