Nine days into the beginning of the new school year, for Ottawa School Board students, Candace Derickx posted an entry into the blogosphere asking for suggestions for boxed lunches.

Candace is the co-owner of Best Tools for Schools, an ingenious business idea that effectively takes the frustration out of back to school shopping. Tools for Schools partners with local and not-so-local schools and takes orders for kits that contain all the necessary materials a student will need for a school year. By taking the shopping out of the equation, there are no more badly photocopied lists to pickup. There is no more visiting the local Walmart where the back to school aisle looks like a category five hurricane has come and gone. There are no puppy-dog eyes or pouty faces asking for the latest Hanna Montana binder.

Today, a little under a week later, I checked back and only found 3 commented suggestions.

Well Candace, I'm no longer school aged, but here is a lunch idea. It was my favourite lunch when I was old enough to use a microwave. It is my favourite lunch now:

Hong Kong-Style Joong with Chinese greens and pork
It contains 3 components: an unwrapped Chinese tamale, called joong in Cantonese (jongzi in Mandarin); stir fried Chinese greens; and roast pork with crackling.

Actually, when my school lunches had joong, they rarely came with roast pork. The box pictured was actually prepared by my better half's mom. It was my dinner during an evening French class at Algonquin College.

For more information on joong/jongzi, foodiePrints has an entry dedicated to the dish.

More practical ideas follow:

• tomato-based vegetable soup with pasta in a thermos
• pan-fried pork and napa-cabbage dumplings with stir fried vegetables
• pan fried potato pierogies with carrot coleslaw
• a portion of vegetable fried rice or rice pilaf
• chicken or vegetable tortilla wraps with a corn and tomato salad
• toasted pita bread with hummus and carrot sticks

The chef and cooks at Credible Edibles (78 Hinton Avenue North) also have great ideas and a pretty cool boxed lunch service if you live in their delivery zone.

This just in: Dug up a picture of a boxed lunch my better half made me.

Butter sauteed fresh shiitake on rice with garlic stir fried zucchini and sliced sausage

Particulars:
Credible Edibles
78 Hinton Avenue North
(613)558-7569



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