This Is the Most Popular School Lunch Recipe on Pinterest
Brown-bag lunches have come a long way since I was a kid. My school lunches were always plain sandwiches, served in order: turkey, tuna, ham, peanut butter and jelly, then back to turkey and the rotation started over again. Now kids’ lunches are way fancier — carrots are julienned, sandwiches come in adorable cartoon shapes, there are probably grapes in the chicken salad. Kids’ school lunches are getting seriously gourmet, and Pinterest probably has something to do with it.
Some Pinterest lunch box ideas can be a little over-the-top. (I’m not building a carousel out of lunch meat; it’s Wednesday afternoon, not the finale of the Great British Bake Off.) But there are a lot of good, sensible ideas too. And of the myriad lunch box ideas on Pinterest, the most popular school lunch idea is this granola crunch apple peanut butter sandwich wrap from the blogger behind Two Healthy Kitchens. It’s basically a fancy, healthier take on a classic PB&J, and it doesn’t take much more time to make.
See it on Pinterest: Crunchy Granola Apple Peanut Butter Wrap from Two Healthy Kitchens
This wrap has been saved more than 13,000 times on Pinterest, and it’s pretty simple. You simply start by spreading peanut butter on a whole-wheat flatbread, then top it with matchstick-cut apples, golden raisins, dried cranberries, and a bit of granola for crunch. Then just roll it up and hand it to your kid or pack it in their lunch box.
It’s a great starting point for a kid’s lunch, because you could swap around pretty much any one of the ingredients and still have something tasty. You could use bananas, berries, or really any fruit in place of the apples. (If you used grapes, this would truly be a deconstructed PB&J.) If there are allergies or your school is a nut-free zone, this works just as well with sunflower seed butter, chickpea butter, or any of the various nut-free butters out there.
This might be the most popular school lunch on Pinterest, but according to the comments, a lot of grown-ups are making it for themselves for breakfast, office lunches, or just snacks. It seems like the sort of thing that’d be great after the gym, and it’s a cool way to upgrade a lunch box without spending a lot of time. And, most importantly, the kids will actually eat it, so it’s no wonder people seem to like it so much.
