Beastie Boys! They're just like us! Check out brown-bag strategies of director Tamra Davis and husband Mike D (of the Beastie Boys) in this piece for the Huffington Post.

If your kid tires of the typical PB&J between two slices of toast, switch it up with a roll-up. Dr. Connie Guttersen, registered dietitian, mother, and author of The Sonoma Diet, suggests stuffing wraps (she likes La Tortilla Factory's) with the below ingredients to create a surprising lunch.


Combo 1:
1 banana, sliced
2 tablespoons chocolate Nutella or nut butter (such as peanut butter or almond butter)
1 teaspoon honey

Combo 2:
1 baked apple, sliced 
2 tablespoons of yogurt
A handful of nuts, chopped
A sprinkle of cinnamon

Combo 3:
1 scrambled egg
2 tablespoons bean puree
2 tablespoons salsa

Combo 4:
2 tablespoons cream cheese
3 slices deli sliced smoked turkey breast
1 slice Jack cheese
A handful of fresh spinach
1/4 cup roasted red peppers
 

Chefs share their brown-bag ideas, tricks, and struggles in this NY Mag Grub Street roundup. You're not the only one with a kid that loves goat cheese one day and hates it the next.

Today's New York Times brings us admirable lunch packer Sheri Chen: She sculpts cute creatures from rice and makes flowers out of veggies to get her picky 2-year-old daughter, Lucy, to eat her lunch. "I have to make her food look like something she recognizes," said Mrs. Chen. "If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she'll eat it."

Go buffet-style. Lori Slater, a mother of four and the founder of eco-apparel company In2green, puts an array of lunch fixings out on the counter and lets her kids pick and pack.

Kelsey Banfield, blogger of the popular Naptime Chef, shares her favorite tricks of the brown-bagging trade:
 

To keep things interesting, I’ve started changing up the shape of my daughter's sandwiches and fruits by cutting them with my favorite new kitchen tool, the Lunch Punch. These awesome sandwich cutters come in cool shapes, like puzzle pieces and various animals. They also can be used for shaping grilled cheeses, cookies, Jello, and practically anything else you can imagine. No matter the variety of sandwich I make (her current favorite is ham and cheese), my daughter loves assembling the puzzle I pack for her. Then she eats the pieces one by one. She also enjoys playing with the animal shapes and giving them names.

If you can’t find the Lunch Punch nearby, you can easily use a regular sturdy cookie cutter instead. Once I even used her Lunch Punch to “shape” a pile of sticky rice. She loved it and ate every last grain. While I’m not one to sneak food into her diet, I don’t mind making her meals more fun. I’ll even admit that I enjoy it, too.

The Naptime Chef’s Favorite Sandwich Combinations (always served on whole-wheat bread):

Peanut butter with apricot jelly
Grape jelly with cream cheese
Sliced ham with swiss and honey mustard
Sliced avocado with swiss
Peanut butter with nutella (for a treat!)

Annabel Karmel shares a recipe from her classic book, Lunchboxes (Ebury Press).


Shrimp and Avocado Wrap

Serves 1

Half small avocado, peeled and chopped
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 medium tomato, deseeded and diced
1 scallion, sliced
1/2 cup small peeled, cooked shrimp
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
1/2 teaspoon tomato ketchup
A little salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 small flour tortilla

Put the avocado and the lemon juice in a small bowl. Toss to coat, then add the remaining ingredients and stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper. Spoon the mixture onto one half of the tortilla, and roll it up. Cut it in half and wrap it in foil. Unwrap the foil slowly as you eat, to keep the filling contained.