Lunch Box Essentials: Best Snacks for Kids at Aldi

Since I just got back from grocery shopping at Aldi, I have snacks for kids and lunch box essentials on the brain. As we round the bases to the end of the year, lunchbox duties, at least in our house, start to get a bit routine. Always looking to jazz up the lunch box and snacks, I thought I’d round up some of our favorite snacks from our favorite grocery store.

BestSnacksforKidsfromAldi

If you’re not familiar with Aldi, they’re a thriving grocer that’s has been a long standing favorite in Europe. We love Aldi for their small footprint—typically 5 aisles—making grocery shopping a quick in-and-out errand. They’ve committed to refreshing their overall look and selection:

which includes an expanded selection of fresh and organic produce, rolling out Healthier Checklanes that offer smarter options at checkout, and continuing to grow its product lines to offer better-for-you options for families to enjoy, including more gluten-free options and a range of products free of additives, antibiotics and added hormones. 

Here are just a few of the many snacks from Aldi that are currently on our lunch box and after school snack rotation:

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White Cheddar Puffs

Aldi’s White Cheddar Puffs are a great cheesy snack that isn’t too filling. The fun flavor of the Simply Nature White Cheddar Puffs won the Product of the Year Awards, solidifying them as a favorite pick for lunch boxes. If you’re familiar with that ubiquitous “pirate snack,” then you’re familiar with this style of puff. No dyes or other artificial ingredients, you seriously can’t go wrong with Simply Nature’s White Cheddar Puffs.

 

Fresh Fruit

I love the inexpensive fresh fruit options at Aldi. From the $2 bananas to the $2 blueberries to the $3 organic apples, there’s always a colorful selection of fresh fruit that are perfect for snacks. Fresh fruit are the original snacks on the go, so you can’t go wrong when grabbing a bag of ripe tangerines!

ALDI Organic Produce

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Mini Bear Grahams

Some of our absolute favorite items from Aldi are the great selection of pre-packaged snacks for lunch boxes. The Mini Bear Graham Snack Packs in honey are a great size for 2 kids’ lunch boxes for the week, with a few to spare for me to pop in my bag for when we’re on the go. The flavor is sweet, but not too sugary sweet. These mini crackers are perfectly sized for littles and bigs’ lunch boxes! 

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Happy Farms Cheese Snacks

We’re huge cheese eaters in our house, so I love knowing that our cheese from Aldi is free of unnecessary additives and hormones. The prepackaged cheese snacks are super easy to pop into lunch boxes for a quick bite. I love that there are several flavors beyond the usual mozzarella string cheese. 

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Vegetable Chips

Vegetable Chips is another staple in my weekly grocery trip. This blend of chips includes sweet potato, taro, batata and parsnips. A healthier alternative to regular potato chips, vegetable chips satisfy the crunchy salty cravings. As part of the Simply Nature brand, the vegetable chips are free from artificial ingredients and preservatives.

There are so many other awesome snacks and treats that are suitable for kids, so these are just a few from our favorites list. If you shop at Aldi, what are your favorites? 


Full disclosure: This is not a sponsored post. We love sharing the things we love. Thanks for supporting NKT!

St. Patrick’s Day Treats from Family Fun Magazine

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  Not sure if any of you caught any leprechauns, but we sure didn’t.  We did, however, enjoy creating some fun food goodies.  St. Patrick’s Day and food go hand in hand in our house.  

I got a kick out of Family Fun’s Leprechaun-inspired treats.  How cute are these tiny hats and donuts?!  We’ll be doing some fun after school creations after school today!  

 Leprechaun Hats

Hats

 

Ingredients

English cucumber
Sliced cheese
Hummus

 Directions

Celebrate Saint Pat’s with a crunchy cucumber treat. Cut 1-inch sections of an English cucumber. Halve them lengthwise and lay the pieces flat on a plate, as shown. Trim a cucumber brim for each hat and set it in place. Finish with a sliced cheese band and buckle, attached with dots of hummus or dip.

 

 

Leprechaun Doughnuts

 

Donuts

 

Ingredients

Chocolate sprinkle:

O-shaped cereal
Dark or white chocolate
Colored sprinkles

 Cinnamon sugar:
O-shaped cereal
Sugar
Cinnamon sugar

 Directions

Lure wee visitors this Saint Patrick’s Day with O-shaped cereal disguised as tiny doughnuts. Prepare each variety following the steps at right and let dry on waxed paper. Add to the fun by placing them in a miniature box (get our template at familyfunmag.com/printables).

Chocolate sprinkle:

Dip the tops of O-shaped cereal into melted dark or white chocolate (the tines of a fork work well for this) and cover with sprinkles.

Cinnamon sugar:

Over medium-high heat, dissolve ½ cup sugar in ½ cup water. Let it cool. Dip the O’s, a few at a time, in the syrup, then toss them in a small bowl of cinnamon sugar.

Most Memorable S’mores Face

As I announced earlier this summer, we were asked to participate in a fun Say S’mores campaign. For this campaign, I was given the task for capturing the most memorable S’mores Face. With an “independent” 3-year old. making a memorable S’mores face wasn’t hard at all.

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Now that we have a yard, making S’mores together is a family favorite; we have 3 or 4 boxes of graham crackers and Hershey Bars and other supplies onhand at any given time. My husband made our firepit out of scrap bricks, so, making S’mores after dinner is our go-to summertime dessert. After a day of fun in the sun, there’s truly nothing like hanging out in your backyard with your family, listening to the crickets and other creatures, while eating S’mores together under the glow of a crackling bonfire.

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And believe me, after spending all of last summer homeless and displaced, we truly appreciate family rituals like making S’mores in our homemade firepit…and the messier, the better!

Here are a few photos from our most memorable S’mores faces from the other week!

Say S'mores

IMG_0285Say Smores

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And be sure to check out a quick video where I try to get my normally-loquacious son to share a cheesy grin. Apparently, S’mores is serious business for him!

And if you’d like to check out the Say S’mores photo contest and enter your own memorable photos, be sure to head over to Hershey’s Say S’mores Facebook page!

Giveaway

Interested in winning a S’mores kit?  Just send me an email to jen (at) nextkidthing dot com and tell me what your family’s favorite summertime activity is.  Please make sure the subject is Say S’mores!

Full disclosure: This post is part of my participation in the Hershey’s “Say S’mores” Promotion. As always, all opinions expressed are mine.

Freezer Fruit Pops Make for Healthy Summertime Snacks


Summertime snacks for our family are often synonymous with fresh, ripe fruit and chilled frozen yogurt or ice cream.  Actually, with all this heat we’ve been enduring this summer, anything cold sounds good right about now!

This post and activity was inspired, in part, by Healthy Child Healthy World’s weekly twitter party, and by a recipe I stumbled accross on one of my favorite kiddie cuisine sites, Weelicious.

Since we’ve been staying with family for the past few weeks, with three kids in the house and a Costco down the street, we’ve been stocking up on all the delicious fresh fruit.  And fruit from Costco…you know what that means.  We had a ton of it!

 

We had a surplus of strawberries and mangos; meaning, we had more ripened fruit than we knew what to do with!  Cue in Weelicious’ yummy recipes!

With all the extra fruit that was on the cusp of getting too ripe, I enlisted the two bigger kids to help me make some fun homemade popsicles!

I used:

1 set of Tovolo Groovy Pop molds, which yield 6 bigger fruit pops
2 ripe mangos, sliced into thirds and then cubed and pureed
1 cup of ripe strawberries, pureed
1/2 cup of blueberries, pureed
1/2 cup of Mott’s Medley’s juice

I mixed and pureed fruit for each pop, personalizing each flavor for each kid.  Since these fruits had so much of their own fruit juice, I only had to add a few splashes of the juice to help solidify the mixture once frozen.


It was fun to get creative with the kids and let them mix, then help pour each pop.  The making of the pops was a fun outdoor activity, and I’m sure it’d make a great (albeit messy) indoor or rainy day activity too.

 

The beauty of the Tovolo freezer pop molds is that each container is a good size and actually stays put.  I’ve used other molds in the past that used questionable plastic and the sticks never stayed in place.  Plus, Tovolo has a bunch of great shapes to choose from.

Looking for more healthy summer snacks?  Check out Healthy Child Healthy World’s Twitter Party (tonight at 9-10) and their site for more great ideas!