How to make my tuna and cream cheese sandwich

Thanks for joining me again for another healthy lunchbox. My name is Abbey and I'm a university qualified nutritionist at The Lunchbox Nutritionist. Today I'm going to take you through how I pack my daughter's lunchbox...

There are five different food groups (fruit, vegetables, grains, protein, dairy) and every lunchbox I always include something from each of these groups.

I've had quite a few comments lately about my tuna and cream cheese sandwich. So I thought I'd take you through how I actually make it.

Now my daughter is not a massive fan of tuna on its own, but I find if I mix it with cream cheese, she loves it! There are actually quite a few things I mix with cream cheese to get her to eat!

So first off, into a small container I put some cream cheese, I like Philadelphia cream cheese, but whatever your favorite cream cheese is, it will work well. Then I just add some tuna to the cream cheese, I just use plain tuna in springwater. Now if your child is only new to eating tuna don't go overboard and load it up with too much tuna, but just adding a small amount for them to get used to the taste, works best. Definitely make sure there is more cream cheese than there is tuna. Then mix them both together and spread some into a sandwich. I just use wholemeal bread and spread it with the tuna and cream cheese mix. Now again, don't load up the sandwich with too much tuna and cream cheese mix (I often get told off by Miss 5 for putting too much in!!).

I then just cut the sandwich up and add it to the lunchbox. So that's a 'protein' serve from the tuna and a 'grains' serve from the bread and a bit of 'dairy' from the cream cheese. So next i'm going to add the 'fruit' serve, and my fruit for this lunchbox is Kiwi Fruit. My kids are loving the Zespri Gold Kiwi fruit at the moment, so creamy, delicious and it's a favourite of both the kids so I often add it into the lunchbox. I'm often forgetting to pack a spoon though, so I do need to remember that for this one!

The good old favourite yoghurt is next for the 'dairy' food group. I love the Tamar Valley brand - no added sugar.

Next is 'veggies', as always, I include carrot, it's my daughters favourite and one that I know she will actually eat. I pop a fair few slices of carrot in for the veggies. Next is cucumber, she's only recently started to like cucumber, I started off with only one little round of the mini cucumbers and gradually increased quantity overtime. Now I can add in a few and she quite likes it. Sometimes they come home uneaten and that's okay, they are a familiar food for her now and she does eat them. The other food that I am trying to include in the lunchbox is cherry tomatoes. She doesn't particularly like the seeds so I used to scoop them out for her but now I'm starting to introduce them, just in very small amounts.

Okay. So we've got our protein, grains, dairy, fruit and vegetables. Now all that's left is the small little circle to fill in the middle of the lunchbox. Because I've already included something from each of the 5 food groups, I just top it up with whatever I have that fits! I have been using these little Pumpkin Seed Munch Snacks lately. They are 85% pumpkin seeds, it does have some rice malt syrup, sesame seeds and salt as well. I'm just going to pop a few little bite sized pieces in there.

So there you go. A super quick lunch box, including something from each of the five food groups. I hope you've enjoyed this one and if you know of anyone who might be in need of some lunchbox inspiration, tag them below and I'll see you next time! :)

Abbey xo