After School Snacks

~C~ 

Hey y'all! Hope you're having a great week! I know that a lot kids around the country are getting ready to start school back soon or have already started back. I thought it might be fun to share some fun after school snack ideas.

The first on is a banana tree. Now, I don't like banana's but I do/help with  VBS snacks at our church and one of the things that we did this year for the little kids was a banana tree. Peel the banana, cut up and apple for the leaves or branches and then sprinkle raisins on top. You could attach the apples to the banana with peanut butter but we didn't because so many kids have peanut allergies.

Another fun one is 2 slices of apple and mini marshmallows. Make sure the apple is red, spread peanut butter on one side of both apple slices and place mini marshmallows in between the apples. It makes them look like teeth!

Another one is trail mix, go to the grocery store one day a week and buy your favorite things to put in trail mix. For me, that would be pretzels, M&M's, craisins, peanuts, toasted chex cereal with seasoned salt (toasting bagel chips with this is yummy too) , and cashews. Mix up in a big bowl and put a serving in 5 little snack sized bags and they're already made up for the whole school week. (Monday-Friday) This is a sack that you might make on Saturday or Sunday.

Another make ahead snack is granola. At my house we don't really have a recipe for it. We use oats, chocolate chips, craisins,  flax seed (not much), slivered almonds and honey. Put in the oven at about 300 or 350 let it roast for a couple of minutes and then get it out stir it around and then put it back in for another couple minutes. Let it cool and place in snack sized zip lock bags for the week.

Laughing cow cheese... where do I start? This stuff is so good!! I love to put it in tomato soup, on my quesadillas, on grilled cheese, I have quite a long list that I could go on about. But for a snack... putting laughing cow cheese on fresh vegetables is so good! I use the creamy swiss garlic and herb. (It's in the purple package)  

Just plain fresh fruit is also a very good snack!!

Ham and cheese roll ups (again laughing cow cheese is perfect for this!)

Fruit smoothies are really good too! When we make them in our house we use Greek yogurt, frozen berries, frozen cherries, frozen peaches, cranberry juice and Juice Plus vanilla compete powder. We don't really have measurements we just do it until it looks right. It so good and refreshing! Of course you could always add frozen bananas to it or what ever kind of fruit you want but that's just what we usually put in ours. We usually have them for breakfast but they would can also make a good snack or you could use it as a substitute for a milkshake too.

I hope you enjoyed these ideas for after school snacks (or snacks for anytime really)! See ya next time! ~C~