Customer Reviews

Lunch Boxes and Snacks: Over 120 healthy recipes from delicious sandwiches and salads to hot soups and sweet treats

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Lunch Boxes and Snacks: Over 120 healthy recipes from delicious sandwhiches and salads to hot soups and sweet treats is a great guide for the end of boredom at school and at work. Everything here is packable, nutritious and wonderfully good-tasting.

The book includes information on how to keep food safe after it leaves your refrigerator and how to involve kids in the selection and process.

But, be advised that it is great for adults also. We get bored with everyday same-old same-old, too!

I purchased this book on a whim while food-shopping at a mega-market. I flipped through it over coffee and went right back to the aisles for some immediate meal transformations.

I don't regret purchasing it!

I am not the most creative person when it comes to packed lunches, but this book makes it easy! Many ingredients are easily found, and likely to be in your fridge or pantry already. Many you can make with leftover foods such as cooked chicken, or the 2 tablespoons of corn left over from dinner. Most are items my daughter will readily eat without complaint. For health reasons, we decided to stop eating cafeteria food and started packing our own. I ran out of ideas rather quickly and knew we had to break away from PB&J, so I ordered this book. What's great it that it's "adult friendly" too. No smiley face sandwiches or mac and cheese here...just healthy food made easy. Our kiddo is now the envy of the lunch room!

I bought this book based on some reviews that I have read. I found it to be okay. It gave me a few new ideas for lunches. A lot of the recipes call for mayo, ketchup or chicken. Overall, I think the recipes are fairly simple and kid friendly.

I was really excited to get this book based on the reviews I read about it. I like the size of the book and the fact that it is hardbound. There are pictures for some of the recipes, but not all. I would like to see more pictures for every recipe. The intro to the book is really good because it talks about what kinds of foods should be in a lunch and how to pack the lunch to maintain food safety etc. There is a lot of useful information there. Plus, there are little tips throughout the book. The reason why I gave it 3 stars is because it does have a lot of recipes with chicken, mayo and tortillas. It would have been nice to see more variety. Like the title of the book, not all of these recipes are for a lunch box. In addition to chicken there is a lot of tuna. Once I swap out the tuna for chicken, this will be a chicken cookbook. This book is not what I thought it would be, but maybe once I start making some of the recipes I will like it better? I will most likely keep the book.

As with any cook book there are hits and there are total misses but this book presents a wide variety of new ideas and twists on old ones to keep your lunch interesting for weeks. It has good eye appeal, though there aren't pictures of every dish presented. Another plus for this title is the great variety of items to chose from; there are the requisite sandwiches but also wraps, salads, hot items, and sweets. Some recipes aren't conducive to packed lunches (open faced sandwiches)but even those can be adapted. I see this as a great book for SAHM's and daycares to stir things up at lunchtime. Many of these dishes are simple enough that children can help make them. Well worth the small investment.

This little book has lots of very pretty pictures, but there isn't much substance here. Fairly basic sandwiches, pasta salads, variations on green salads, a few soups, and some desserts. You could easily find similar recipes in any decent basic cookbook. There is certainly nothing here that makes these recipes more lunchbox-friendly than any other sandwiches, entrees and sides. Also, you should be aware that of the 128 pages, about half are full-page photographs, so there aren't as many recipes as you might think. (I didn't realize that the author is a celebrity in the U.K.: this book does seem like it was published as an easy-sell for a popular television personality.) I did get a few ideas from the book, but I was hoping for something beyond the basics.

There are quite a few nice recipes here. But some duds, too. The energy bars contain corn syrup. (Ellie Krieger has a much better recipe for energy bars in "The Food You Crave.") The biggest miss is in the area of planning and packing. It would be great to have more ideas about how to manage a week of lunch preparation in minimum time, maybe by combining recipes or mixing healthful store-bought snacks with homemade ones. A few weeks of complete sample boxes would be great. Worst part of the book are the fancy pictures that give you no ideas about how to pack all of these wraps, salads and soups. There are a lot of great reusable containers now--stainless steel, air-tight glass with locks, etc.--but the pictures in this book show fancy photos with carrots wrapped in straw and soup being served in china bowls.

I figured if I got one more thing to pack in my picky 7 year old's lunch box, this would be worth it. We achieved that goal and he is interested in trying a few other things. Good pictures. Worth it.

I love all of Annabel Karmel's books, but this is one of my favorites. I am terrible at ideas beyond "mac and cheese" and "peanut butter and jelly" for my kids. She's actually opened up the creativity in me, so that I can start to make up my own foods as well as following her recipes! Yesterday my daughter had a sunflower seed butter, apple, and cucumber sandwich, fruit and cucumber salad, and pretzels with cream cheese for lunch - all things I never would have considered before this book! Not only are the recipes fantastic, but they make me think of new, innovative ways to get my kids to eat healthy. Highly recommend this book!

Does a cold omelet that has been sitting around sound like something your child would eagerly scarf down at lunch time? If so - this may be the book for you. Other suggestions for cold lunches include half a dozen pizzas, cold muffins with creamy scrambled eggs, cold sticky drumsticks (w/ foil around the bottoms, so your kid won't get sticky fingers when throwing away a nasty cold sticky drumstick their parent packed for them), cold quesadillas, and tons of ideas for letting eggs and mayonnaise sit in a slightly cooled container until noon.

The other half of the book has some good suggestions - some pasta salads, wraps, and decent muffin and cookie suggestions.

I just don't see how anyone would have approved a title with the word "Lunch Boxes" in it, when that is the term associated with school packed lunches. If adults can heat food at work - these may work, but for the most part this book is not useful to parents trying to pack healthy delicious food for their kid's lunches.