Happy New Year! Hoping you had a lovely holiday period with your family.
We had a “stay-cation” here in Melbourne – visiting local playgrounds and touristy spots while being able to return to the comfort of home at the end of each day… Bliss!
While we did enjoy the occasional meal out and about, I prepared a great deal of packed lunches and snack boxes to keep us nourished through our adventures.
A favourite of ours was a “make your own trail mix” box, where I laid out a selection of nourishing snack foods and we each filled a box of our favourites.
Here’s a list of ideas so you can make your own trail mix, depending on your tastes and dietary requirements:
- Nuts – cashews, walnuts, almonds (of all shapes and sizes), pistachios, hazelnuts, brazil nuts, macadamia
- Seeds – sunflower, pumpkin, chia, sesame, flax
- Dried Fruit – sultanas, cranberries, apricots, apple, banana, date, fig, berries
- Coconut – dried, shredded, flakes
- Cereal – we visit the health food store and pick one organic (gluten free) cereal at a time and include a dozen or so pieces in our trail mix.
- Granola – a sprinkling of homemade or store bought granola
- Sweet treat – on cooler days we include a couple of dark chocolate chips, on days they are likely to melt from the heat we don’t.
- Popcorn – we love homemade popcorn and include some if we have a recently made batch.
- Pretzels – a savoury treat my kids love!
I don’t lay out EVERY single of the above ingredients, I pick and choose a combination depending on what we have to hand and what our diet has looked like the past couple of days.
For the purposes of this blog post I laid out a selection of ingredients in little boxes to photograph. My 4 year old was intrigued and couldn’t resist sampling from the appealing display.
My boys helped me pour all of the ingredients into a large box and mix them together well so that we now have our very own trail mix ready for when we need snacks on the go.
Do you make your own trail mixes? What’s your favourite combination?
Want more? Check out 40 Healthy Kids Snack Ideas!
