Book-ish Bento Lunch for Roald Dahl Day

Yesterday would have been beloved author Roald Dahl's 99th birthday! We love his stories so much.  In observance of Roald Dahl Day, I made my 7th grader a Dahl-icious bookish bento lunch, featuring a Giraffe & Pelly & Me "bookwich", strawberries with a giraffe fork, checkered cucumber slices, carrot sticks, & a cocktail tomato with a "Read" pick.

The bookwich is a turkey & white cheddar tortilla sandwich. I stacked deli meat & cheese slices on the right half of a tortilla, folded the left half over the stack, & trimmed it to a book shape. I used food colouring pens to illustrate the cover in the style of one of our books. That's meant to be the giraffe & the pelican... *sigh* ... I decided I'd better not even attempt to add Billy or the monkey...  I'm no Quentin Blake!

Splendiferous, but small. I folded the scraps, along with another couple of slices of cheese & turkey, into a little bundle & secured it with a long food pick, then packed it in the bento box where it would be covered by the bookwich. More filling for my middle-schooler, & no waste. Whiz-bang!

The bundle also raises the bookwich to the top of the bento box. Filling as much of a bento box's space as possible keeps a scrumdiddlyumptious lunch from becoming a muckledy mess on the way to school!

I packed her lunch in my new nested snack pots / bento boxes! I ♥ them.

They're really, really new - they only just arrived the day before Dahl Day,

all the way from The Roald Dahl Museum & Story Centre in the UK! The lids feature Quentin Blake's iconic illustrations & quotes from Matilda, The Enormous Crocodile, & George's Marvelous Medicine.

I've had a lot of fun over the years making Dahl Day lunches for my sproutlets.  In fact, it was while making one that I was first inspired to make a bookwich,  a type of sandwich with layers of cheese(s) & sometimes deli meat folded between bread or tortilla to resemble a little book. It's become a favourite with my sproutlets, that to their delight was even featured in the September issue of Family Fun magazine! They're so proud of their lickswishy lunches & of their phizzwizard mum for making them :)

Click to see all my Roald Dahl Day lunch posts!

Have a whoppsy-whiffling Roald Dahl Day!

Wait, there's more!

Some of the Bento Bloggers & Friends have a blog hop of bento tributes to Roald Dahl to share with you! Click the big button below to hop to Yummy Bites By Amy, then keep hopping until you're back here, & you'll know you've seen them all. And when you're done with the hop, why not have some food fighting fun with Mr. & Mrs Twit in their new app, Twit or Miss!

PS - Today is my birthday! 

You didn't know though, so I'm not expecting a present... but how about sharing our blog hop via your favourite social network? It's free! :)

Harry Potter School Lunch & Birthday

I had fun making this Harry Potter themed lunch! The sorting hat is grape fruit leather, folded & pinched into shape. I also used a bit of the fruit leather to bind the pepperoni stick & string cheese broom. That's the rest of the stick of string cheese in the cup with a Harry Potter pick. In the triangle cup I stacked 2 Deathly Hallows turkey & cheddar sandwiches. The grapes with the tree picks are meant to be baby Mandrakes :) Mini pumpkin muffins frosted with a Golden Snitch & a lightning bolt complete the theme.

The frosted muffins were a special request from 8th birthday girl Sydney Bean Sprout (below) to bring to school to share with her classmates.

Truthfully, she requested cupcakes - but if you frost a muffin it counts as a cupcake, in my opinion :) I also topped the cream cheese frosting with the little Snitches & lightning bolts that I made by drizzling melted baking melts on parchment paper, so they're plenty sweet!

They turned out so cute! I had enough left over to put one of each of the "cupcakes" in her big sister Bella's EasyLunchboxes bento:

The pepperoni broom was my variation of the popular pretzel & cheese broomsticks Hallowe'en snack. I used a Slim Jim, which is quite a bit wider than a pretzel, so to avoid splitting the string cheese cheese, I used a drinking straw to hollow out a "pilot hole" of sorts in it first.

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Now, click the button to see what awesomeness awaits
 at Chaos & Confections!

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It's Throwback Thursday! So here are a couple of pics of Bella & Pickle from Hallowe'ens gone by. Bella dressed up as Hermione Granger in 2013:

Pickle was Harry Potter in 2012:

We all love Harry Potter!

Every Lunchtime - A Shel Silverstein Day Lunch!

It's Shel Silverstein Day! My bento friends & I are paying a birthday tribute to the late great author, with a blog hop!  And there's a link-up at the bottom of the post for anyone who wants to join our Shelebration :)

My lunch was inspired by Every Lunchtime from Falling Up:

A snake in the lunchbox! It had to be done :)

My snake is made of cheddar cheese, with a ham tongue & beady sugar eyes glued on with honey. He's coiled atop a ham & cheese sandwich to match (& use the scraps). On the side a carrot snake slithers among green grapes & hisses (with alphabet bento picks), while more eyes peek out from the strawberries. And as usual, I found the perfect Lunchbox Love note:

And here's a look back at one of Pickle's PB sandwiches, an edible homage to The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. It was inspired by my friend Keitha's Storybook Lunches she makes her son, based on the books they read together. And I just happen to be linking to her in our blog hop :)

Click the sign below to hop over to Keitha's Chaos & see what my clever friend has made:

And here's one more look at my lunchbox snake - it cracks me up!

How will you Shelebrate?

"How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give 'em."

~ Shel Silverstein

A Bookish Bento for Roald Dahl Day

It's Roald Dahl Day tomorrow! In honour of the beloved author's birthday, some blogger friends & I are making Dahl-icious lunches & doing a blog hop! I made my Bella a bookish bento, with turkey & Asiago cheese tortilla books! I made Fantastic Mr. Fox, Esio Trot, Matilda, & The BFG:

The book sandwiches were super easy to make. I cut tortillas in rectangles & used food markers & stamps to make the covers. I cut cheese & turkey in smaller rectangles & stacked them for the pages, then folded the tortilla book covers around them. These were a big improvement on the ones I made for 2012's Dahl Day lunch.  I had come up with the whoppsy-whiffling idea for them just that morning, & only had cheddar & white bread. I've long been meaning to remake them with white cheese & brown bread, but Bella prefers sandwiches made with tortillas over bread - which worked out even better since tortillas are much easier to stamp & draw on!

I love how my new & improved edible books turned out! Here they are in my 6th grader Bella's EasyLunchbox. She also had some broccoli & grape tomatoes with a "Read" pick, & grapes with a chocolate bar pick - it's the 50th anniversary of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!

And look, I had the perfect Lunchbox Love for Kids joke note to go with it :) Oh, I also tucked in a tiny pack of Wonka Gobstoppers ;) Hallowe'en candy!

Even the flip side of the Lunchbox Love note was just right :) I had a great foxy cloth napkin from Beneficial Bento too:

This book bento was such a fun lunchy use for my Stupendous Stampers :)

And in case you missed them, here are some of my sproutlets' splendiferous lunches from Dahl Days gone by :

 

2012's bento had elements from James & the Giant Peach, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, & Matilda. One of 2013's (above) was all James & the Giant Peach, & the other (below) was mostly the BFG, with a smidge of Danny the Champion of the World. 

Now, it's time to get jumpelling over to Robot Squirrel and the Monkeys to see what luctuous lunches Eileen has made:

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Some stuff used to make this bookish bento:

Halfway to Homecoming Military Kid Lunch

We've just passed the halfway point of Sailor Boy's deployment, yay! We read one of our favourite deployment comfort books which inspired me to make Bella a "Daddy loves you" lunch with a cucumber deployment chain:

A deployment chain is a paper chain that some military families make when their loved one deploys, to count down the days left until homecoming. ♥ 

When Dad's at Sea, by Mindy Pelton tells the story of a Navy family about to be separated by deployment, and the ways they cope.

One of the fun things they do is make a paper chain with a link for each day the Dad will be away, and hang it on the wall so the little girl can take off a link each night and see she's one day closer to her family being together again! The story's filled with great ideas for staying close during separation :)

Bella's EasyLunchbox is packed with a cucumber chain representing the deployment chain in the book,  cheese-filled tortilla secured with a long heart cocktail pick, tomato with anchor pick, cantaloupe balls with hugs & kisses, & a Lunchbox Love note, all to remind her that her Daddy loves her. 

Now that we are looking forward to Sailor Boy's homecoming, we've started shopping for welcome home gifts for him.  I got us a pair of mugs from Say Please, the folks who make our Lunchbox Love notes - aren't they sweet?

The sproutlets are full of ideas for presents for Daddy - my favourite so far is signing him up to play hockey with his favourite NHL team,  the Detroit Red Wings, haha! They're sure he would be great - they're so proud of him :)  

Here are Beanstalk & Bella a few years ago, ready for their school's Dress As Your Hero Day. They dressed as their Dad ♥

I'm so proud of them, and their Dad!

By coincidence, today happens to be Military Spouse Appreciation Day! 
I've been getting lots of thanks for all I do for my Sailor, and I'd like to say the same to all my fellow spouses, to my parents, and to our extended families and community too, who hold us all up! I couldn't do it alone. Thank you to everyone who supports our military & their families ♥

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Some stuff featured in this post: