School Lunch Day 90: Hot Oatmeal and Muffins

It's Day 90 of school for us. Do the math. That means we are half way through the school year! Half way to 180 days! Schools do all kinds of stuff around the 100th day now (which was not at all a thing when I was in school), but personally I think the 90th day should be celebrated. We made it half way! One more half to go! It's like the big hump day. It's all down hill from here. But for some reason my kids didn't seem to understand why this got me so excited. Oh well, maybe it's just me. And I know that most of you are probably much further along anyway, we started late. 

school lunch from

Anyway, we are celebrating today with a hot breakfast for lunch. They all have apple cinnamon oatmeal in their thermos containers. Basically, I just make a big pot of oatmeal, grate an apple into it, add a teaspoon or so of cinnamon, and some brown sugar. 

To keep warm lunches warm until lunch time: fill the thermos with boiling water. Then heat your food to much hotter than you would normally serve it to small children. Dump out the water and fill thermos with hot food. I also heated some half & half and poured a little of that in the top of each one. 

In the other container they all have strawberries and cheddar cheese. Three have mini pancake muffins. One has cinnamon bread with butter, because she has apparently now decided that she only eats muffins if they have chocolate in them. 

Pancake muffins you ask? Easiest thing ever. Make extra pancake batter (I make it from scratch, it's easy), pour into greased mini muffin tins, and plop a couple blueberries or a raspberry, or whatever else you like, into each one. I also made some without fruit and I sprinkled a little cinnamon sugar on top. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. 

These are the thermos containers.
These are the small snack containers.
My pancake batter recipe is here.
If you don't want to make oatmeal ahead of time, this is my homemade instant oatmeal recipe.