School dinners and post school snacks - and a recipe for dried fruit roll

A went off to school a few years back now and I thought this would solve all our food troubles. He would eat a healthy, nutritious, filling lunch at school (well why not - all his friends are eating theirs, the menu looks good and they get dessert daily!) and dinner could just be eggs on toast or cereal. Haha how wrong could I be... all that happened was he ate the bits he liked (a few peas and maybe a slice of bread) and I fetched a starving, moody child. After school snacks became the new headache in my life. Ah how I missed those heady days of nursery when the children got fed every hour and a half, and the nursery staff gave him food they knew he would eat. So now every day I would get to the school gate and get greeted by "give me a snack!" I needed some A approved snacks (and saying we will be home in 5 minutes and dinner is all ready to eat did NOT work!) Suddenly I was up and down the snack aisles in every supermarket I went into trying to find something tasty and healthy (well healthy-ish at least ;-) ). Money was spent on dried fruit in all shapes and sizes -long rolls, paws, animal faces etc etc, cereal bars, rice cakes... and those days when the cupboard was almost bare a bag of wotsits or pombears (other crisps are available) or a packet of biscuits. We'd got ourselves into a negative cycle as we fought over what and how much was eaten after school and how much was eaten at dinner.

I'm happy to buy variations of dried fruit from supermarkets, but aside from the fact that they're expensive I do also like giving the children homemade snacks on occasions!

Here's my recipe for dried fruit roll/fruit leather/homemade winders. Very straightforward, just time consuming.

Fruit roll

1 punnet of strawberries (about 400-500g)

2 ripe bananas

Hull, clean and chop the strawberries.

Cut bananas into pieces

Place both in a blender and mix until it forms a liquid with no lumps

Strain the mixture using a sieve to remove seeds (optional)

Heat the mixture on the stove, stirring constantly until it thickens (run a spoon down the middle and the gap should stay for a second or 2)

Pour this onto greaseproof paper; spread it out so that it's all the same thickness

Bake at 80C for about 3 hours until it's dry

Tear into pieces and store in an airtight container

We initially removed the seeds but now leave them in and taste just as good! Also, the first time we made this we added in a spoonful of honey when mixing in the blender but no longer feel that's necessary - it all depends on how sweet you like it!