Goodbye Summer, Hello School Lunches!

We still have a few more days of summer freedom, but let's be honest with ourselves: school is starting again soon. For those of us who are heading back to the books, now is a great time to be thinking about how to feed ourselves well through the busy months. If you're not going to class yourself but you pack a lunch for a kid who is, it's even more important to know how to keep the lunch box healthy.

School lunches are also big garbage producers -- according to the U.S. Energy Information Association, school-age children generate 67 pounds of garbage per child each school year, and that's just at lunch time. Yikes! Instead of paper bags and disposable cutlery, cut back waste where you can; pack lunches in reusable containers that often come with the added bonus of being insulated and bring along reusable cutlery from home. Add some cloth napkins and you are good to go!

An easy way to make sure your packed lunch stays balanced is to plan your meal around a vegetable rather than a grain or protein, include a fruit for dessert, and make sure you're putting in some good protein and fats for your brain to keep buzzing through the afternoon.

If food can be heated up at lunchtime, then your job just got a hundred times easier. Dinner leftovers? That's lunch. It's a whole lot easier to throw on a little extra supper when you're cooking than to make a separate dinner and lunch in one night, so plan to have some leftovers. Just make sure to label them as "lunch food" in the fridge so they don't turn into someone else's midnight snack. If you don't have access to a microwave or stove at lunchtime, consider investing in a good thermos that can keep soup, stews, and other re-energizing dishes hot until noon.

The most important thing about packed lunches is that they need to be portable. Perhaps this is why the sandwich still reigns supreme in the packed lunch realm, but the real trick is simply making it a one-dish meal. Meal salads are great for the early fall, when it still feels like summer outside -- take tuna salad out from between the bread and dress it up with scallions, dill, celery, and mustard, or pop it between some crisp lettuce leaves instead. Make the kale salad everyone's nuts about. You know the one (hint: any kale salad at all). Load it up with toasted almonds and you'll feel like you just ate a steak for lunch, but better. Food blog 101 Cookbooks even has a salad recipe called An Ideal Lunch Salad. Make it. Pack it. Lunch is served.

If you want to go beyond salads, why not try stuffing some veggies full of delicious things like rice, beans, cheese and spices and call it a lunch? Peppers and mushrooms are especially famous for their stuffed goodness, but stuffed zucchini (otherwise known as zucchini boats) is equally amazing, as are onions, if you're up for a bit of a longer cook time. Or what about these rice-stuffed tomatoes? Perfect as summer produce is still booming around us, but we're hitting the books once more.

And sandwiches certainly aren't the enemy when it comes to school lunches, it's just that we can get a little bored of them. And for folks who are gluten-free, it can be pretty frustrating when your only lunch options are packed full of gluten. If you need a change from bread, try bringing quesadillas or other dreamy tortilla concoctions, or wrap up your sandwich innards in crisp lettuce or rice paper wraps. Whatever you pack, make it something you actually want to eat, not something you think you should eat.