Packing a school lunch, Trabocchi style

Do they get a dessert for lun ch?

Lots of fruit. To me, fruit and dessert are equivalent. I grew up always getting a piece of fruit after my meal, every single time. Fruit has sugar, so it satisfies the craving a little bit.

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25 recipes under 500 calories: These healthful recipes by Nourish columnist Stephanie Witt Sedgwick are low in calories as well as fat and sodium, based on recommended intake as part of a 2,000 calorie diet.

About tweeting your lunchbox. Do you have a lot of followers?

Not really. I find it funny, in a way, my lunchbox. . . . Moms follow me, I think, and they find it interesting. Maybe they get ideas, maybe not, maybe they think I’m sort of snobby. I don’t know.

Is there a cafeteria at your children’s school?

There is a cafeteria. They had the option to do the school lunch, or you can bring your own. A key ingredient to make a good, successful lunch is to have the right items to pack it in. There are so many rules in schools now: It’s like an airplane. You can’t bring knives to cut, so everything has to be already cut. You have to find a really nice thermal kind of box to be able to keep the food hot. I mean, everybody loves a sandwich, but I think there’s more than sandwiches in life. So I try to give them as much fish as I can, as much vegetables, and they need to be warm. You can eat it cold, but in the winter you don’t want to eat a cold fish; you want to eat it hot. So I make it in the morning, and it’s very simple. It’s not fancy at all. I’m not a chef. I’m just a mom who is concerned about their health and their habits. And I’m also concerned about my time. So I think it’s important that whatever I make, it can be done in 15 minutes or less. So while I’m having my coffee, I’m putting things here and there. It’s time management, really.

Have they ever come home and said, the other kids have different lunches? Why can’t we have lunches like theirs?

Yes, all the time. There was a time last year when I gave them octopus for lunch. That didn’t go very well. All the other kids went, “Eeew.” And my son is like, “All the other kids have sandwiches; why can’t I have a sandwich?” He was so annoyed, because then apparently the teacher asked them to spell “octopus,” and nobody got it right. He was 7 years old, and at that age, all the kids kind of follow the same pattern, so when you’re not doing the same thing. . . . But my son, especially, enjoys food so much that now I think some of the other kids, their moms, are starting to ask me, “What is your son having for lunch, because now my son is asking me, ‘Why can’t I have what he’s having?’ ” So I think it’s a good influence for the other kids. And even the teacher asked me once, “Hey, do you ever have an extra lunchbox? Just send it over my way.” So I think people want to do what I do; I think they’re afraid of it.

Do you try to tell them about nutrition and vitamins and protein or do you figure that they’ll just get it by osmosis?

I don’t think they get anything like that by osmosis. When I pick them up from school, they always want a snack, because all the other kids have snacks. If we go to a store or stop anywhere, it’s “Mom, can I have this? Can I have some chips?” They always want something. That’s a very common thing in this day. So I say, “No, that’s too fattening.” Or they’ll ask me directly: “Mom, is this too fattening?” So they know already what my answer’s going to be. So I say, “Find something healthy.”