Kitchen

Common School Baon Mistakes to Avoid

by Kevyn Gohu
August 7, 2023

We may not be culinary artists but here are some school baon mistakes we can avoid to make sure our kids feel the love in their meals.

We always want our kids to have a warm, delicious, healthy, and home-cooked meal. Unfortunately, not all the food we send out with them doesn’t “keep” well until lunchtime. And when that happens, kids sometimes lose their appetite, go hungry, and have meltdowns before the day ends. To ensure they have a full stomach until the end of the day, here are some typical school baon mistakes to avoid.

1. Serving pork

From Afritada to Grilled Pork Chop, we Filipinos love our pork. Unfortunately, cooking pork has a fine line between it being soft and buttery to being as hard as a bathroom tile. Pork tends to cook in its own heat, becoming chewy and hard after a while.

The best ways to solve this problem is to either slightly undercook the meat to make sure it stays soft or use chicken or fish instead.

2. Packing saucy foods

While most Filipino dishes are stews and soups, they also don’t keep well since many containers don’t have a rubber lining that prevents them from spilling. And if it’s vegetables we’re sending them with, the leaves tend to wilt because of the moisture. However, if the food has a lot of sauce, either put a small layer under the meat to keep it moist or make the rice soak up the sauce instead.

3. Giving them fried food

We all want to make use of that air fryer we got budol-ed into buying. But fried food has one minor caveat: it perspires! Because it perspires, the crispy batter that our kids love chewing on so much soaks up the water from the steam and becomes soggy like wet cardboard. Besides, fried food is unhealthy anyway. School lunches are the perfect opportunity to introduce them to grilled or steamed food.

4. Overcooking leafy vegetables

All of us want to make sure our kids get their daily dose of green but, some leafy vegetables like lettuce, watercress, spinach, or kangkong don’t keep well, leaving our kids a wilted mess come lunch time. For leafy vegetables, stick to basic stir-fry or blanching recipes to make sure they still look fresh. Or, use certain vegetables like bokchoy, cabbage, malunggay, and pechay (both variants — wombok or baguio) that appear more appetizing after cooking.

We can also avoid the leafy vegetables altogether and introduce other greens like sayote, upo, zucchini, and broccoli instead!

5. Giving them a bony fish

Kids only have 40 minutes to an hour to eat their lunch and we’re sure they don’t want to spend that time deboning a fish. Plus, the sauce of the fish can hide the bones! Some fish like Tilapia and Pampano (or Pompano) are easier to eat because their bones are big. But for boneless options, there’s Bangus (Milkfish) and Cream Dory. Unless kids have an eye for detail, best to stick to boneless fish options for their baon. They usually sell those in vacuum packs at the supermarket’s seafood section.

6. Constantly giving them preserved goods

Unfortunately, their favorite canned tuna, bacon, and hotdogs fall under this category. Hotdog, being as bright red as it is, stains containers — which are stressful to clean. Canned tuna, because of the salt, has a strong fishy smell. And since bacon is cured, it’s often loaded with sugar, salt, and it’s also fried. While it’s the faster alternative, it also gets our kids used to “strong” flavors, making it more difficult in the long run to get them used to “clean eating.”

Avoid these baon mistakes to make sure they come home with full tummies!

Well-prepared baon stops our children from getting hangry (hungry + angry), saving us a few obligatory trips for a PTC (parent-teacher conference) because they lashed out at a student. Also, some studies have proven that one reason kids become out-of-school youth is that they had “no baon” to bring, showing how food is a powerful motivator in encouraging our kids to learn.