Lunch Guest: Loving Lunches!

G'Day, I'm Jackie from Loving Lunches (yes, I'm Australian). I'm loving the opportunity to guest post for Cristi while she gets some well deserved family time! To be honest I'm quite nervous, Cristi is one of my Bento idols and I still get a little giddy when I see her name pop up on my screen. I had intended to do a Monkeys in Suits lunch for you today, with lots of geeky references, but I'm afraid I'm only on geek level 1 and failed you there. I did however make sure I included some peanut butter for Pickle. Anyway, here's lunch!

Today's muffin tin was made for my Miss M, now 3 1/2 and contains

• banana/peanut butter/nutella smoothie (in a Take & Toss cup)
• bow-tie pasta (because bow-ties are cool... hey hey, I got one in there!) with tomato dipping sauce (using these silicon food cups)
• half a banana (I do keep wanting to sing *bzthhhhpppfft, half a banana*) with some almonds & yoghurt covered sultanas
• mashed banana/peanut butter monkey sandwiches with Nutella and peanut butter detail
• yoghurt and almonds (in a cute little banana silicon cup)
• monkey egg

When thinking on ingredients I knew I wanted to include peanut butter, and my inspiration for this lunch came from my new Animal Palz monkey, so banana was a must. Why not combine the two? I remember having banana sandwiches as a kid and earlier this year I rediscovered the joys of banana smoothies. So half a mashed banana and peanut butter it was.

I then added some Nutella and had a mummy sample with the bread offcuts.

The leftovers were wizzed with some milk and voila - smoothie. The other half of the banana ended up in the lunch so there was no waste there either.

Thank you for letting me share some Loving Lunches love with you today. I do believe you will be returning to your regular program by this time next week :-)