Happy New Year!

 

May this year bring good health & happiness to you and yours!

 I've only been blogging since July - so I present my

Top Ten of the 2nd Half of 2011

#1 T.G.I.F.D!  
Friday fry day! Pita Pockets stuffed with ham, cheese & apple "fries".

#2 Angry Birds Sandwich 

Pickle's loved his favourite game as a sandwich, but it was too good to eat.
Really.

#3 A-Camping We Will Go 

Campground favourites in a muffin tin meal!

#4 Hugs & Kisses

A picnic lunch packed in Easylunchboxes.

#5 Reduce, Reuse, Recycle...Refuel

Lunch meat packaging repurposed as bento boxes.

#6 I ♥ Lunch

Lunchboxes full of love. And stale pitas turned into tasty chips :)

#7 You Are My Sunshine

Sun chips, cheese & quesadilla suns, Sun-Maid raisins...

#8 Under The Sea Lunch Adventure

Blue noodles! A muffin tin meal full of fishy fun. 

#9 Sea, How Cute

Still my most time-consuming bento - and my first Bento of the Week win!

#10 Welcome Jack Frost

This merry muffin cup lunch, plus snowflake sandwiches, donut hole snowmen, and Santa strawberries.

To everyone who follows my blog, thanks for all your comments, likes, pins, and shares this past half-year! And to all my new blogger friends, thanks for all the inspiration, encouragement and fun! Have a happy, healthy New Year! ♥

Welcome Jack Frost!

This morning I looked out my window to find my neighbourhood shimmering with frost - NOW it feels like winter.  So I made a wintery lunch for Pickle:

Snowflake peanut butter sandwiches, powdered suger donut hole snowballs, and vanilla yogurt.  I don't usually have donut holes, so that was just lucky coincidence; I bought them specially to make a treat.

Bella got a muffin cup meal. I had already made it the night before, otherwise I would have made her something frost-inspired too - but I don't think she'll be disappointed with this :) 

Mini bell peppers (bells are Christmassy), a snowflake frosted oatmeal muffin (she did get some frost after all),  Christmas tree cheese quesadilla bites (on spinach tortillas), celery and grape tomato holly, and a star cheddar cheese stack. A festive bunch of her favourites!

This is why I got the donut holes. Sweet Snowmen!

I can't take credit for the idea though, I think it was in Family Fun magazine. 

Anyways, I used donut holes for mine instead of mini donuts, carrot slivers instead of candy corn, and bits of licorice instead of frosting - but same idea. I also made Santa hats with strawberries, leftover cookie frosting, and a couple of the oatmeal mini-muffins, and put them together with the snowmen to make a fun & festive snack for my two smallest sproutlets to enjoy after I dragged them around on errands this morning:

Aren't these little Santa hat strawberry topped muffin treats adorable! I saw them done with brownies by Lunchboxes with Love, but since I had muffins made I thought they'd do just as well:

 Happy Friday everyone, have a great weekend!

Oooh,  I almost forgot, the reason I decided to make the snowmen donut treats this week! For Read.Explore.Learn.! I've been reading the small sproutlets "Snowmen At Night" by Caralyn & Mark Buehner.

It's such a cute book! The illustrations are lovely, and the kids laugh at the snowman shenanigans. The last verse of the book is the greatest though:

"So if your snowman's grin is crooked,

or he's lost a little height,

you'll know he's just been doing

what snowmen do at night!"

Thank you, Snowmen At Night, for making it easier for me to smooth over the discovery of a snowman not as my children left him :)

There's also some learning fun hidden in the book, secret shapes that have been painted into each scene... like Santa's face in the snow, a T-Rex in the moon... the girls had fun searching for them, and now they race to be the first to point them out when we turn the page :)

Thank you to Pickle's 1st grade teacher Mrs. Nickerson,

he received this book as a Christmas gift from her!

Angry Birds Sandwich

Here I go, hopping on the Angry Birds lunch wagon! Not sure what took me so long, Pickle is crazy about the game :) I've never played it myself, but I'm familiar with the characters - who isn't ?

Pickle's favourite is the Red Bird, so he was a given, and I decided to make a little King Pig as well to make the lunch more filling. I'm really pleased with how it turned out! Completely edible, and no artificial colouring :) 

The Red Bird's body is a peanut butter sandwich made from wheat and white wheat bread. I used dark wheat for his tail feathers, pupils, and eyebrows, and wheat crust for his beak. His features are "glued" on with peanut butter. 

The Pig King is a peanut butter sandwich on wheat, with white wheat features. His pupils, nostrils, and crown are made from crust. I used different sized drinking straws to cut the little circles.

This sandwich was time consuming, but fun! I don't normally do this much - a quick press of my trusty Lunch Punches is more my speed for the average school day - but since there is no school today (conferences again) Pickle had lunch at home,  and it was the perfect opportunity for me to get to see him opening a special lunch.

It's very plain to see that he absolutely loved it :)

    

In fact, he loved it so much, he refused to eat it - he wants to save it! I had to make him a plain peanut butter sandwich to eat. *sigh* Lesson learned - make the lunch look good enough to eat, not too good to eat!

Looking for Angry Birds lunch ideas? Look no further!

This week's Bento of the Week theme was Angry Birds!

Sea, how cute!

This is one of my favourite bentos so far - but also one of my most time consuming - I think it must have taken me half an hour! Mostly because I didn't plan it in advance - so much time was spent staring at the food I had on hand trying to envision how to use it to create what I had in mind.  Also I did make 2 of everything, but the other Sassy bowl is pink, so I didn't take a photo :)

I knew I wanted to do a sea life theme - I'd seen the adorable wiener crabs in this tutorial from Cute Food For Kids and just HAD to try them. They were so simple too! The faces did take some time to cut out and stick on with pancake syrup and tweezers, but they weren't difficult.

I had some rice stars pre-made (when we have rice left over I use my egg molds to make up a bunch of shapes for the rest of the week) so it was a snap to add a cheese smile to make a starfish. I tried to make the cantaloupe into coral by slicing it and randomly cutting chunks from the slices with half of a flower shaped cutter, then arranging the pieces to look like a tangle of coral reef... hmm... ok. The cucumber seaweed was a last minute trial & error addition - the ones you see here are the 3rd and 4th attempts - the first 2 just didn't work out, so I ate them :) And of course, got to have goldfish crackers in a sea life bento, the girls love goldfish.

It was NOT a bento for a busy morning, but today I had time, and Birdie, Sprout and I all loved how it turned out ♥ 

I made a big mess on the counter too, lots of little scraps, but luckily they were yummy all mixed together for my lunch. Scrap salad, I have that a lot  :)




I won Bento of the Week : Smiles! Thanks to all who voted!

Oh, I almost forgot! Here are Pickle's peanut butter sandwiches!

And I'll let you in on a a bread-saving secret... the sandwich bottoms don't have to look pretty! When using cookie cutters instead of Lunch Punches, I often cut the bottom shapes from the larger scraps, and piece them together. The peanut butter holds them in place and Pickle never even looks underneath :)

A-Camping We Will Go!

Our camping weekend was so much fun, none of us wanted to come home Sunday! Next year, I think we'll go for a whole week. To bring back a little of the fun, I made a camping food theme for today's muffin tin lunches. Also, I'm not quite caught up on the laundry yet so the campfire scent from the baskets of clothing sitting near the kitchen table added to the atmosphere :)

Sadly, my cheapie camera has now joined my good camera in retirement, so today's photos were taken with my phone. I'm a bit sad because they just don't look as yummy in the pics as they do in person. My birthday is in a few weeks though... I'm hoping to be able to take better pictures then... are you reading this darling husband o'mine?

Anyways, back to the lunches! Muffin Tins for Bean Sprout & Baby Bird:

• Trail Mix & Popcorn cakes - mmm, ever have Jiffy Pop cooked over the campfire? (Birdie LOVED these)
• S'mores Goldfish - gotta have s'mores!
• Ovaltine "hot chocolate" 
• Turkey hot dogs on sticks  (Wouldn't a little tealight candle to roast them over have been cute? Too dangerous for tots though, oh well)
• Baked beans - a camping staple and one of my childhood favorites 
• Pancakes wedges with syrup dip - Sailor Boy's special "Daddy Pancakes" (secret recipe, I don't even know it). He makes big batches and we freeze some for me to thaw as needed. He made them fresh on our trip and they were all the better cooked out in the open air :)

Bella & Beanstalk got an Easy Lunchbox version. Their beans and hot dogs I sliced and put in a Thermos Funtainer - beanie wienie!

I am really impressed with this Thermos. 4 hours after I filled it the food was just the right temperature for eating. Oh, and that's a Tritan Spork by Light My Fire.

Pickle's daily peanut butter sandwich fits in with the camping theme.

He had a pancake tent with his PB evergreen trees under a night sky :)

I think today's lunch could have been healthier - it was a little lacking in fruit - but they had apples for snacks later on. And I was surprised that none of them liked their brown beans! I love baked brown beans, especially beanie wienie! Silly sproutlets, don't know what they are missing. Ah well, more for me! :)

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle... Refuel

There's no theme behind what went in today's bento lunches, they were just bits and bobs of what was in the fridge - I needed to use up the fresh foods before our family leaves for a camping trip.

Bella, Sprout & Birdie had sliced ham & mozzarella roll-ups, grapes, tomatoes & clementines on skewers, pea pod snacks I thought were cute but they didn't really care for, baby carrots, crackers (Goldfish for the little girls, Ritz for their big sister), and Bella also got cucumbers by request. Picky Pickle had a peanut butter sandwich puzzle (which he LOVED, thank you Lunch Punch!), yogurt, and an oatmeal cookie, cut into wedges to fit.

So what's with the title of this post then? ...Today's lunches were packed in lunch meat containers! ... If you've been thinking of packing bento-style lunches but hesitate to invest in containers, consider stocking up on lunch meats that come in reusable plastic containers - they work perfectly for bento lunches, and they aren't priced any higher than the lunch meats that don't come in containers. If you're going to be buying lunch meat anyways, why not reuse the packaging ? I usually buy Hillshire Farms Deli Select brand (as you can see above) and reuse the containers for Sailor Boy's lunches. Their Variety Pack, that Pickle's lunch is shown in, is about the same size as an Easy Lunchbox. The containers are actually Gladware so they're sturdy, seal well, and are microwaveable and top rack dishwasher safe - and I won't cry if they don't make it home or get destroyed somehow ;)

Well, it's s'mores and wienie roasts for my family for the next few days...

See you Monday!

I ♥ Lunch

Today's lunchboxes are full of love ♥

For the girls, Easy Lunchboxes full of heart-shaped yummies:

• Homemade pita chips (using stale pitas from last week's Fry Day lunch)
• Ham & cheese bagel sandwiches (open face for presentation, they can put the bagel tops on themselves if they wish)
• Grapes (OK not heart-shaped but they like grapes)
• Strawberries - so easy to make heart shaped with a lil' notch :)

For the boys, good old peanut butter sandwiches, with a touch of love
...whether my too-old-for-cute-lunches Beanstalk likes it or not :)

♥ I got the pita chips recipe from Eat well, Eat Cheap
I seasoned them with parmesan, sea salt & cracked black pepper.

You are my Sunshine

♪ My only sunshine ♫ You make my happy, when skies are grey... 
This morning was another grey one, so a sunshine themed lunch sounded perfect... and by lunchtime the sun was out, so the sproutlets got to enjoy their sunny lunch in the sunlight :)

Beanstalk and Bella each had the Easy Lunchbox version:

A little love note peeked through the lids to brighten their day :)

They had sunshine shaped three-cheese quesadillas on a bed of Sun Chips with cheddar suns, Clementines, Sun Maid raisins (grapes & sunshine!), honey roasted peanuts, and Teddy Grahams. 10 year old Beanstalk asked me not to make his lunches too cute, so he didn't have sunshine shapes or bears, he had more peanuts instead. Not pictured is a family favourite, sunshine juice (lemonade + orange).

Sprout & Baby Bird had a muffin tin version:

Pickle had a smiling sun peanut butter sandwich

(with his usual yogurt and apple juice)

Everybody loved their lunch. Beanstalk blushed at his note but I could tell he was pleased - he hugged me after he was finished eating! And Bella said she definitely wants me to make this for her school lunch. Hooray!

Now lunch is over and the sproutlets are outside in the back yard soaking up some summer sunshine while they still can :) I think I'll go join them ☀

Like the look of our EasyLunchboxes? Get some!

And the Mini Dippers, and the cookbook too!

Hugs & Kisses

We're leaving for the park in a few minutes, and will have lunch there. It's kind of a grey & gloomy day, looks like it might even rain, but we haven't had much of a summer this year, and if we wait for a sunny day to go to the park, it could be a while!
I've packed Easy Lunchboxes with a snacky lunch of ham & cheese, crackers, apples & baby carrots. I used little cookie cutters to cut some of the ham and the cheese into little X's & O's & heart shapes for a touch of love ♥

Pickle's daily PB sandwich also got some cookie cutter love ♥

UPDATE: The sun never did come out from behind the clouds, but it didn't rain either :) Once again I packed too much food - Bella ate all hers, but the little girls ended up sharing Sprout's lunchbox and we took Birdie's home and recycled it's ingredients into a chef salad for their Daddy's supper. I had planned to use the scraps from cutting out the ham & cheese shapes to make a quiche but the day wore me out and by supper I didn't feel like making pastry, so instead I hardboiled the eggs and threw them and the scraps in the salad too. It was a huge salad! Here's Bella & Sprout having lunch in the park: