Lunch for the Man, and me too!

In my one year blogiversary post, I asked you to leave comments telling me what you liked about my blog, and what you'd like to see more of, and a few readers mentioned my Lunch for the Man posts. I do make Sailor Boy a lunch most days, I just don't always photograph and blog them. One of the reasons is a lot of the time they aren't very interesting - not to me anyways :) Yesterday's was kind of cute though, I think:

Romaine salad with golden Sunburst tomatoes and checkered cucumber, and raspberry vinaigrette dressing. Masa chips from the June NatureBox (thank you Ludicrous Mama!) Raspberries and mozzarella chunks skewered on heart & leaf picks. And a cheeky little monkey pick, for fun :)

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Another reason I don't always post Sailor Boy's lunches is that I make his lunch at night and leave it in the fridge for him (since he almost always leaves for work before I get up), so I don't often get an opportunity to photograph his lunch in natural light, and our indoor lighting is not the best for photos.   

For example, this photo was taken in the morning, with natural daylight:

This photo was taken the night before, with our poor indoor lighting:

Doesn't the top photograph look better?

Lunch was leftover pork tenderloin, an egg, NatureBox Lemon Pucker pistachios, oranges & pluots, with some white cheddar hearts scattered over the meat. Protein-heavy, but that's what he asked for.

And this one, from a couple of weeks ago, looks awful to me, so I never posted it. I think the yellow cast makes the turkey breast look very unappetizing :( 

So there you go, that's why I haven't made very many Lunch for the Man posts. That and when he goes on trips I don't get to make him a lunch :(

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I hate to end the post with such an unappealing image, so here's one of my lunches from this past week. They're usually just scraps so I don't bother with pics but I took this one because it might be my first EasyLunchbox!

It's made with the scraps and extras from one of Sailor Boy's lunches. If you follow my blog via my Facebook Page you may have seen that lunch, but I'm not blogging it yet, it's for my upcoming PlanetBox review :) I often make my own lunch from the scraps of the hubby's and/or the sproutlets' lunches, but I think this is the first time I packed them in a EasyLunchboxes container! It's definitely the first time I used that cute little apple head sauce bottle (filled with soy) since I just got it from Ludicrous Mama of Biting The Hand That Feeds You, when she came for a visit last week! (See her post about that here.)

Candy Girl & Ludicrous Mama + Baby E
Shopping for all things Hello Kitty :)

Don't miss the brilliant Sproutlets Bento she made to represent my family!

Stegosuraus Sandwiches

Stegosaurus sandwiches for all! (Except Beanstalk who wasn't home).  
I made each one unique by using different things for the spikes on the dinosaurs' backs :)

Sprout's Stegosaurus is made of peanut butter, with raisin spikes. Beneath her dino sandwich she has baby carrots, and above it, a cheddar cheese sun & stars. On the side she has dried strawberries, and red plum wedges.

Birdie's dinosaur has goldfish grahams for spikes. Love the smiles :) The rest of her lunch is much the same as Sprout's, but she has fewer dried strawberries, and a Fig Newton. 

Bella's sandwich is honey ham & white cheddar cheese on wheat, and her Stegosaurus's spikes are made from the Garden Tomato Crunchies almonds from our July NatureBox. I didn't give her any dried strawberries because she still doesn't like strawberries, but guess what? She tasted one of Sprout's, and she loved it! Hooray for trying something new!

None of the girls questioned why there were stars in the sky at the same time as the sun either, haha. I had wondered if they would :)

I actually made Pickle's Stegosaurus peanut butter sandwich before I made the girls', and without thinking, cut it from the centre of the bread, making a lot of waste. So I pieced the sandwich scraps together into a rocky landscape for his Stegoasurus to climb :)

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I made the dinosaurs with a cookie cutter from my Wilton 101 Cookie Cutters set. When I made the sandwiches for the girls, I didn't want to waste any like I nearly did with Pickle's, so I cut the bread out first so I could try and fit 2 dinosaurs per slice, and was able to just do it, with the bottom slice having a bit of crust that wouldn't show.

Then I spread the peanut butter on the bottom slice, added the "spikes", spread a little more PB along the underside of the top piece where it would overlap the spikes, and put the Stegosaurus together in the EasyLunchboxes. For Bella's, since there was no peanut butter to adhere the spikes, I made a little slit in the bottom slice, a sort of pocket, and slipped the almond into it.

Stuff used for these lunches:

 

Sharing the Health with NatureBox

As a NatureBox Snack Ambassador, once every few months I get an opportunity to Share the Health with a bonus NatureBox to share any way I like. This past month I received my first bonus box!

Sailor Boy's squadron recently returned from a trip, so I decided to split this box up into individual snacks for sharing with his fellow sailors, as a yummy and healthy welcome home treat. I embellished each bag with a raffia bow, my NatureBox card, & the squadron emblem. Don't they look festive?



If you'd like to receive a box of delicious & nutritious snacks like this delivered to your door every month, or give the gift of healthy snacks to someone else (minus the ribbon & tag of course), you can sign up at www.NatureBox.com Use the code CRISTI to get 25% off your first month!

You can feel good about giving or getting NatureBox for more reasons than you might think; for every box NatureBox sends out, they donate a meal to help feed one of the many hungry children in America.

And in case you need ideas for what to do with all those empty boxes when the snacks are gone, here's one of the ways I'm repurposing mine:

I'd like to thank my silent partner of sorts, 
Ludicrous Mama of Biting the Hand that Feeds You.

She's not an official Snack Ambassador but she might as well be! She tags NatureBox snacks in all her "beautiful lunches" that contain them, as well as shares my discount code and even hands out my NatureBox card at every opportunity. Thanks Mama! Check out all the lunches made with NatureBox at Biting the Hand That Feeds You.

You can find more healthy snack ideas on the NatureBox blog, Chew on This! and by following NatureBox on Pinterest. Happy (healthy) snacking!

Making Healthy Snacks with Birdie

Birdie & I made spider snacks from our LANA Fruit & Vegetable Snack Recipes cookbook  :)

The recipe calls for dried apricots, pretzel sticks, & raisins. We modified our spiders a little, since we used the dried white peaches that came in our June NatureBox instead of apricots, and they were quite a bit bigger.

Birdie had fun with the cookbook. It's spiral bound, with thick laminated pages, so I let her play with it. She matched up all her pretzel sticks and raisins to the ones on the recipe page :)

 

At first, Birdie wasn't really interested in following the recipe to make a spider, she just wanted to snack & play. Here she is being silly with the one I made:

When she was ready to make her own, I got her started by poking some holes in the peach with a toothpick - then she filled them with the pretzel sticks. This was a good fine motor and hand-eye coordination activity.

 

She was very careful not to break the pretzels, and so pleased with her (almost) finished creation! Here are our dried peach & pretzels spiders after we added the raisin eyes:

Birdie wasn't done yet though. She picked up another peach and pretzel stick and started doing her own thing. What do you think she was making?

 

She made mushrooms! A plate of peach & pretzel mushrooms :) I love that she used her imagination to create a fun snack of her own! ♥  

We had a good time & made healthy snacks! I definitely recommend LANA's Fruit & Vegetable Snack Recipes cookbook if you're looking for fun & simple healthy snack ideas to make for or with your child. Like this Berry Cute Mice Snack we made a few months ago:

LANA (Learning About Nutrition through Activities) makes nutrition learning fun & easy! The LANA Preschool Program website is a wonderful resource for ways to help kids learn about making healthy eating choices through play. They even share FREE downloadable activities & recipes every month! 

You can Follow LANA on Facebook too :)  

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored review. I was not asked to write this post nor compensated in any way. I added the above comments because I believe in the LANA program and wanted to share about it! 

First Day of Summer Blog Hop!

Yesterday was the first official day of Summer Vacation for my school age sproutlets! Special summery lunches were in order. Especially since my bento blogger friends & I planned a blog hop for today - the First Day of Summer :)

There's always a lot of chatter when planning a blog hop, and with this hop's theme being Summer, the topic of summer movies came up - so you may see one or two summer movie references among today's lunches. Well, two for sure! One from me, and another from Karen of What's In Mom's Lunch Bag (the next stop on the hop) ... you'll see!

Can you guess what summer blockbuster inspired Bella's lunch?  

I thought it might be a little subtle, so I added some quotes from the movie:

My Mia Bella, age 9, has never seen the summer 1987 hit Dirty Dancing - 

to her, this is just a yummy watermelon-y bento :)  She doesn't know that "Hey Baby" is the title of the song Baby learns to dance with Johnny to*, or that there is any significance to her baby in a blanket (wienie swaddled in a biscuit) being in the corner* of her EasyLunchbox ;)

In the other corner she has celery sticks & cherries, and in the main compartment, watermelon & blueberry kebabs, topped with a slice of watermelon. The watermelon was seedless so I added some NatureBox dried currant "seeds" for fun :) In the little cup she has a SunButter ball (recipe below) and in the pink cup, watermelon salt water taffy. Yum!

 This lunch did not need any more cheese so I did not put any more in it!

That's it for movie references for me. I entertained the idea of doing a Ponyo lunch for Birdie & Sprout, but I didn't have any ham - and you can't do a Ponyo lunch without ham! They did get summery bentos though...

I used some of the dough from the SunButter balls and a little cookie cutter to make beaches with sandcastles! They also got some blueberries, cantaloupe starfish and watermelon. Here's Birdie's -  don't you want to eat that sand!?

Those pebbles are actually candy coated chocolates! Don't they look real? They taste like M&M's. The little girls also got a piece of watermelon taffy each, I just didn't put it in their Easylunchboxes.  I learned from last week's Old MacDonald muffin tin meals that they will still eat the candy first (unlike big sister Bella who saves hers for last) so I gave it to them after lunch.

Sand you CAN eat!

Our loaf of bread was on the small side, too small for any of our sandwich cutters, so Pickle got a peanut butter sandwich shell, embellished with a sandcastle, and a starfish mama & babies. The smaller shapes are one layer of bread stuck on with more peanut butter. And blue yogurt.

Beanstalk didn't want a proper lunch. He slept late and had a big breakfast.

Don't forget about the Summer Blog Hop! You don't want to miss What's In Mom's Lunch Bag and all the others! Click the pic to hop along now if you don't want the recipe for the SunButter balls, or read on if you do :)

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SunButter Balls

 

1/2 cup SunButter (or nut butter of choice)
1/4 cup honey
1/8 cup flax
3/4 cup graham crumbs 

Pour honey or syrup in bowl. Add SunButter and 1/2 cup of graham crumbs,  quickly mixing into dough. Knead dough with hands to combine ingredients well. Shape into balls of desired size. Roll in remaining graham crumbs. Chill in freezer for 10 minutes, then store in refrigerator until ready to serve.  You could add raisins, coconut, chocolate chips, oatmeal... all sorts of things to these.  My picky sproutlets prefer things plain though :)

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Now hop on over and see What's In Mom's Lunch Bag! It's so much fun you'll be whistling... !

* Watch Johnny teach Baby to dance to "Hey Baby" on Hulu
* Watch "Nobody puts Baby in a corner" on YouTube

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 Amazing Spider-Man PlanetBox

With Beanstalk's upcoming Avengers themed birthday party on my mind, I'm on a bit of a Marvel streak with his lunches - he's had Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, & Iron Man bentos, & today,  the Amazing Spider-Man :

This PlanetBox lunch contains NatureBox Zingy Currants (Beanstalk calls them mini-raisins), blueberry-pomegranate fruit leather squares, Granny smith apple wedges, a peanut almond granola bar, and in the PlanetBox Big Dipper, a web of ramen noodles (with a Spidey cupcake topper). He has the hot broth for the ramen noodles in a Thermos (not pictured). I pack them separately so the noodles don't turn into a soggy pasta brick in the Thermos (that's happened before); he can mix them when he's ready to eat.

If my arm wasn't in a sling I'd have attempted carving a web into an apple peel or fruit leather or something - I may have to do a sequel lunch at a later date :)

Lunch for the Man & a Gumball Sandwich ;)

I wrote a little note on the lid of Sailor Boy's EasyLunchbox, with Dry Erase marker: "Have a great day! Love from your favourite chick!", and inside there is a little yellow chick pick in his strawberries - heh heh :)

He got pizza dippers - a leftover slice of Papa Murphy's cheese pizza cut in bite sized pieces, with some marinara sauce to dip them in - a couple of peppers, and a pepperoni butterfly. On the side he has fresh strawberry slices (with a chick pick) and some NatureBox Cranberry Jubilee snack mix.

Gumballs for lunch for Pickle! Ha ha, not really - he has a peanut butter sandwich made with a gumball machine shaped Lunch Punch, embellished with bread crust gumballs (stuck on with peanut butter).

Bella had ham & cheddar on wheat sandwich thins, mozzarella bites on heart picks, celery & peppers, Kashi Fire Roasted Veggie crackers, and a couple of whole wheat Fig Newtons.

Beanstalk's PlanetBox contained some honey ham, red grapes, a Clif Z Bar, raisins, and pomegranate & blueberry fruit leather.

Beanstalk also got a yogurt drink, not shown. His Nalgene cup has gone missing so I let him pick out some convenience drinks to take until we get a new one, and he chose yogurt shakes. 

Anyone with older kids have a favourite reusable drink container? Recommendation comments welcome!

Stuff used for these lunches: