Bento Class: DIY Pizzables!

This month & next I'm teaching an after-school enrichment class at my sproutlets' elementary school, introducing kids to the principles of bento & helping them learn to pack their own creative nutritious school lunches! My class is called Bento Lunch Fun - & I think it's living up to the name :)  I know these two have been having fun:

This week's theme was Kid's Choice, & they all wanted to make something with pizza. Like pizza lunchables, they said. That gave me the perfect opportunity to talk about making a lunch that's not just fun, but also nutritionally balanced.  I asked them what they like about pizza lunchables. They were unanimous - "You get to make your own little pizza!" Of course, I agreed, that is fun! Then I asked them what's missing from lunchables. Aha! They quickly realized, & agreed - fruits & vegetables! Right! Okay, so the tomato sauce is technically in the veggie food group, but you don't get much of it in a store-bought pizza lunch. When you pack your own version of a lunchable (that my sproutlets call momables - the class liked that) you can include however much you want of whatever fresh fruits & veggies you like!

Here's my version of a DIY pizza lunchable, with fruit & vegetables, a Clifford the Big Red Dog cupcake ring, a pizza cupcake pick, & alphabet picks:

The kids chose pepperoni & mozzarella cheese for the mini pizzas. For fruit & veg I brought strawberries to show them how to notch the tops to make a heart, apples to show them how to checker the peel (though I didn't use any in my example), mini peppers they could chop for toppings or eat whole, & baby carrots they could decorate with cupcake rings. I brought a tackle box filled with an assortment of my own accessories for them to use - but didn't think to take a photo until after class, so the cupcake rings were already gone :) All the accessories I brought came from BentoUSA.

The students were very proud of their creations :) The little girl on the bottom left pointed out that we could make our pizzables even healthier if we used whole wheat - an excellent point to make,  & another great thing about packing your own bento - you can choose healthier ingredients than what might come in a pre-packaged lunch. These kids did great!

 

 

I had actually planned to get whole wheat sandwich thins for our pizzables, but couldn't find any (I should have shopped earlier!) so ended up making do with plain mini bagels sliced & flattened with a cutting board. 

We could fit 3 flattened mini bagel halves in each EasyLunchbox, but some decided 2 would be plenty for their lunch - which made another good point - when you pack your own lunch, you can customize the portions to your appetite, so you're neither left hungry nor with wasted food left over :) 

EasyLunchboxes generously provided my class with reusable divided lunch boxes & Mini Dippers that they got to take home, so they could take their bentos to school for the next day's lunch if they wished! These are the boxes I use most often for my own family - they're so versatile! I also gave each child a spoon that fit in the EasyLunchbox, for spreading the sauce on their bagel, & voila - everyone had their own unique healthier-than-a-store-bought-lunchable pizza lunch! I saw a couple of my students in the lunch room the next day, enjoying theirs :) Our DIY Pizzables were a hit!

Yumbox DIY Pizzable!

Apparently enough time has gone by since our Momables Lunchbox Wars pizza lunch makeover for Birdie to forget that she doesn't like Lunchables, since she asked for one as we passed them in the grocery the other day. Even though we taste-tested several for the Lunchbox Wars series I did for Momables, they are still inexplicably drawn to those little boxed lunches - go figure.  I reminded her that she doesn't like them and that I can make a better one. So we added the necessary ingredients to our list, and today, I did!

Birdie's fun DIY pizza lunch, or "pizzable",  is packed in a Yumbox, which keeps all the ingredients, wet & dry, perfectly separate:

Her Yumbox pizza bento contains:

• bagel thins, cut in quarters
• shredded cheese
• marinara sauce
• mini turkey pepperonis
• & honeydew melon balls with alphabet picks

I also included a little spoon for spreading the sauce, & a Lunchbox Love note ♥ The other side of the note has a fun fact about belly button lint, which Birdie was talking about yesterday, so she'll like that :)

Click to see another version of our pizzables & a DIY pizza muffin tin meal!

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Stuff used to make this lunch:

Mustache Bento for Movember!

I mustache you not to laugh at my lunch...   Today's the first of November, the month that's come to be known as Movember <--- click if you don't know what I'm talking about :) So I packed my Sailor Boy a mustachioed lunch:

He's got cajun-spiced chicken tender mustaches on a bed of cheesy rice with broccoli & cauliflower, decorated with a whole bunch of tiny cheddar cheese mustaches. On the side, a heart-shaped egg embellished with a mustache pick I made myself *. And a handful of pistachios topped with a little mustache-shaped tin of mints he can keep at work. Mustachioed pistachios, heheh :)

  * To make a mustache pick, trim a few bits off a bat pick & voilà!

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UPDATE: Sailor Boy loved his lunch & sent me a pic if it on his desk :

He knows I'm rarely satisfied with pics taken at night in our poorly lit kitchen, so he sent me a daylight one.  Hmm, looking at both of them,  the one I took is not that bad! You can see the little cheddar mustaches better in his though :)

ReUsable DIY Cupcake Toppers!

Beanstalk came up with the design for his birthday cake all by himself. He wanted a small cake with an Avengers "A",  surrounded by cupcakes, one for each Avenger. Cake decorating is not my forté, but I did my best, and came up with a new way to make DIY cupcake toppers in the process!

As I've said, I'm not much of an artist, and especially not with frosting, so I wanted to do cupcake toppers. I've made them before, for Pickle's Dr. Seuss Birthday, but they were paper, so not washable and reusable. If I made Avengers ones, I wanted to be able to use them again in his bentos - so I came up with the idea to make them somewhat like plastic plant labels, using the laminator we bought for Pickle's PECS! 

This photo was taken after the cupcake toppers had been washed and dried. They really are washable and reusable, yay!

How I made my laminated cupcake toppers:

I snagged the Avengers promo poster images from Google (probably breaking some copyright law but since I'm not selling or profiting from them I hope whatever authorities enforce that sort of thing will let it slide). I printed 2 of each image on card stock, cut them up and glued them together back to back, and arranged them between the sheets of laminating plastic.

(I put a sheet of tissue paper down on the table to keep any crumbs or dust from getting on anything - that's what the crumpled red background is.) Sorry, no pic of the laminating process, I needed both hands to keep the small sproutlets from messing with the hot laminator.  Here is the laminated sheet.

Next I cut them out in little stake shapes. 

Easy-peasy! If you have a laminator :)

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Here are my Avengers cupcakes and toppers, ready to assemble!

And, Avengers cupcakes, assembled! Heheh

I had more cupcakes than Avengers and couldn't find pics I liked of all of them solo, but I had everyone represented, even the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. So we had Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Nick Fury, Captain America, Hulk & Hawkeye, and 2 of the group. We had Avengers plates, cups, and cupcakes - now all we needed was the cake for the center!

I baked the cake in a loaf pan so I could cut it in half and stack it to make a cube. Here is my somewhat messy but recognizable enough Avengers "A" symbol - I was pretty pleased with how it came out!

Probably not exactly as he imagined, but pretty cool nonetheless.

Beanstalk was pleased :)

This is the only photo I got of him with his cake that didn't have other people's children in it. It's right before he blew out the candle, and that's the only time I took pictures. I always forget to take pictures during parties! Too busy participating... Oh well, I suppose I'd rather he have memories of me actually being part of things than have photos of the party without me in them :)

Happy 11th Birthday Beanstalk!

A Bunch of Lunches : Bunnies, Hearts, Stars, A Car, & DIY Drinkable Yogurt

For my Bella, a bunny lunch in a Goodbyn Original. Celery sticks with peanut butter dip, ham, cheddar bunnies and mozzarella bites, iced tea, a chocolate sandwich cookie, carrot chips, a little bunny peanut butter sandwich, and carrot sticks with leaf pick stems.

There isn't space for a full-size ice pack in the Goodbyn, and it's too big to fit in any of our insulated lunch totes, so I used reusable ice cubes to surround the celery, ham, and cheese with cold. I also added ice cubes to her drink.

To keep the little cheese bunnies and ham rolls in their place when the lunch is turned sideways to be carried by the handle, I tucked a couple of sheets of lettuce on top of them before fitting the lid on.

The carrot chips are from the bulk bin at our Marketplace, and are not the same as the ones in the Sunshine Chips mix from NatureBox, I have yet to find any as tasty as those.

Bella's bunny sandwich has little pink sugar candy eye. We have a whole bunch of candy eyes now, in many colours, and an abundance of sugar sprinkles and sparkles, thanks to the generosity of Ludicrous Mama of Biting the Hand That Feeds You, who is eliminating artificially dyed foods from her little one's diet, and has noticed quite an improvement in her behaviour as a result. Visit her blog for posts about dye-free lunches & treats.

Sprout also has a bunny lunch, in her Goodbyn Bynto.  Grapes, a bunny sandwich, strawberries with a pink bunny peeking out of one, and mozzarella string cheese beneath carrot sticks with leaf pick stems.

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Birdie's lunch is packed in one of our new Laptop Lunches bento boxes! I received one from Laptop Lunches to review (in an upcoming post) and one from another generous bento blogger friend, Karen of What's in John's Lunch Bag and What's in Mom's Lunch Bag. We love them so far!

Birdie didn't want a bunny sandwich, she asked for a heart, which I added a pink pick to, just because her sister's lunch has a pink pick and they do sometimes compare :) I just happened to have a heart shaped hard-cooked egg in the fridge too! And with a little notch cut in the tops of her strawberries they became  hearts as well. I also tucked a string cheese in the utensil slot of the Laptop Lunch box.

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Beanstalk has Clif Z bar squares, cheese crackers, an apple sliced horizontally with the core cut out with a star cutter - I get the most out of those mini apples that way - and grapes on star picks.  He also has a homemade yogurt drink (in a recycled milk bottle). The sproutlets love Danimals drinkable yogurts but I don't love the price or the sugar content so I mix my own:

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Pickle has a car sandwich made with a Lunch Punch from the Vrrrrmm! set:

The Mighty Thor Bento Lunch & Birthday Party + Bonus Paper Bag Popcorn Recipe!

Here's another Marvel character lunch for Beanstalk! He's had Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man & the Amazing Spider-Man themed bentos... today his PlanetBox lunch is a tribute to the Mighty Thor !

I went with colours from the movie poster - red, silver, black and a little blue. The blue corn chips look kind of blackish to me! The salsa is red, as are the Gala apple wedges, and the ham is skewered on a blue star pick. Surrounded by garlic pepper popcorn - made in the microwave with plain kernels, olive oil, garlic salt, & pepper in a brown paper bag - is The Hammer of Thor.

The Hammer of Thor is two granola squares wrapped in aluminum foil on a popsicle stick! Beanstalk took a peek before he left for school, and his smile made getting up at 6 am to think up how to make a hammer from my picky kid's limited food choices well worth the effort   ♥ 

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Mighty Thor Movie Party!

Last year for Beanstalk's birthday we reserved the balcony of the base theater and took him,  Pickle, and 10 of his friends to see Thor ! Sounds expensive, but it was so not! About $6 a kid which included their admission, popcorn, a drink & a candy selection. We had the balcony to ourselves to watch the movie, and the upstairs lobby for the cake and presents. Awesome!

I made "movie ticket" invitations with Beanstalk's picture on them and hand delivered them to the invitees in striped popcorn bags as envelopes: 

They were so cute - the bar code even said RSVP and our phone # ! They were really easy to make - I found the free template here - all I had to do was drag and drop his photo, add my text, print on card stock and cut out :)

I used more popcorn bags (a pack of 12 for $1 at Dollar Tree) for loot bags. 

And since my baking is hit or miss and my cake frosting skills non-existent, I bought a grocery store bakery cake and added a Thor action figure and his accessories as cake toppers. Beanstalk loved it.

His 10th birthday Thor movie party was a hit! 

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By request, here is how I make
Easy Peasy Paper Bag Microwave Popcorn!

 

1/4 cup good quality popcorn

2 teaspoons olive oil

1/4 teaspoon salt, the finer the better

Seasonings to taste - I like garlic salt, cayenne & cracked black pepper

Brown paper lunch bag

1. In a small dish, toss the popcorn with the oil, salt and seasonings.
2. Dump it all in the paper bag.
3. Fold the bag over several times. Secure w/ tape if it won't stay folded.
4. Microwave on high 2 or 3 minutes - until there are several second pauses between pops.
5. Empty into a bowl and enjoy!

*If not eating right away, line bowl with tea towel or paper towel to absorb oil and cool before transferring to storage container.