Look, it's a Sailboat!

My lack of nautical knowledge is probably pretty obvious with these, but they were sailboat-ish enough for my Pickle :)

2 sandwiches - a circle & a square, cut in half.

Very simple to make with swizzle sticks!

If you're fluent in movie quotes, maybe you caught my Mallrats reference in the title, and if you did, chances are you're a Kevin Smith fan, and if you are, you won't want to miss out on the awesomeness of Kevin Smith Week from my friend Karen of What's in Mom's Lunch Bag!

A Lunch fit for a Queen...

 I  ♥ my little royal pains! So even though it's MY birthday and I could have slept in and let their dad pack their lunches, I got up and made them something cute. OK, OK, so I wanted to get up, I admit it, I like making their lunches :) 

Bella had a crown shaped sandwich cut out with a Lunch Punch, crown shaped cheddar, cucumber hearts, carrots, strawberry yogurt, and - you might have to look hard to see them stuck on the Easy Lunchbox lid - fruit leather hearts. I stuck them there to keep them from getting crumb-covered from the bread - hopefully they were easy to peel off at lunchtime! 

Sprout & Birdie also had sandwiches, cheese, yogurt, and fruit leather, with heart shaped eggs and fruit twists. The fruit twists were from the toddler food section, they are Gerber Graduates - I thought they were cute. I tasted them and they are good - they taste just like the fruit leather bars and the nutritional content seems the same - but you only get 1/4 of the amount for the same price as the fruit leather, so this will be the one and only time we have them!  

The girls don't like fruit chunks in their yogurt - they prefer the smooth "kids" yogurts - so I bought one six-pack of Trix yogurt, stirred the contents of one little container into two equal parts plain yogurt, then divided it between the three girls - less sugar, less money, but still smooth, yummy and a pretty pink.

Can't forget about my little Peanut Butter King! 

Today's sandwich is #25 in my 101 peanut butter sandwiches challenge! 

Nearly a quarter of the way there; only 76 more to come up with ... 

Yesterday the school age sproutlets opted for the school cafeteria hot lunch - they do breakfast for lunch on Tuesdays so they had waffles and fruit bar. There was also sausage offered but none of them care for that.  They like having the school hot lunch from time to time - but they are always ravenous when they get home those days, so I really don't get why...  and yesterday was no exception, they needed a big snack after school. I baked oatmeal muffins to go with breakfast so at least I knew they went off to school with full bellies...

Here is what the preschool girls took for lunch:

Sprout wanted to take macaroni and cheese in her Hello Kitty thermos, so the small container of carrots, mozzarella and egg is hers, Birdie got the bigger one, with 2 chicken nuggets (cooked in the toaster oven - but she'll eat them cold) plus a muffin.

Some stuff used to pack these lunches:

Lunch Punchalooza!

We got mail! New Lunch Punches! We  ♥ Lunch Punches! 

Sure, you can use cookie cutters for sandwiches, and I do, but these sandwich cutters are my first choice;  they are so much quicker and easier, and use ALL the bread right up to the crusts, so no waste, LOVE that! And they are deeper than cookie cutters, so they easily go through all the layers of the sandwich. Their design also offers a lot more versatility than other sandwich cutters; some shapes leave imprints as well as cut out a shape, while others make a shape within a shape, that you could use together or apart, for more lunchbox fun and variety. Here's our collection of them:

The puzzle piece set comes with a pattern to make a large puzzle - what a great party snack idea, and for more than just sandwiches, you could do different cheeses, brownies & blondies, or pizza! I really do love them. My Pickle has a peanut butter sandwich every day (his choice), but with our Lunch Punches, he can still have a different sandwich every day :) Check them out! www.thelunchpunch.com or on Facebook. Oh and this is not an official review, I'm just gushing of my own accord, heheh. Yeah, I'm a lunch packing nerd :P

Oh yeah, those little packets of white circles in the first pic - they are iGrips, you can attach them to a wall or inside a cupboard door, to hold the Lunch Punches for easy access and less kitchen drawer mess. You can use them to grip other things too, like papers, and oven mitts, but mine are for our Punches. I'm going to organize my kitchen clutter - one of my projects now that school's back in. Pics to come!

Anyways... enough of me blathering on about my new toys...
Here's Pickle's lunch from today. The first sandwich we made from our new sets had to be a train, Pickle loves trains. I made an extra half sandwich and used the top corner of the Punch to make 2 more box cars :

I was able to fit the train, plus a dish of yogurt, in a Snapware container that fit perfectly in his BuiltNY lunch tote. The dish is a Take'n'Toss, which fit flush with the Snapware lid, no spill over. If I wasn't out of oatmeal cookies I would have stuck one in there too, but Pickle was so pleased with his train, lining it up then eating it caboose to engine, that he didn't even miss his cookie :) 

Here's my Pickle with his little sisters, all ready for their first day of preschool today:

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I didn't start out with a theme in mind for today's lunches, was just going to do a fruit & cheese bento for the little girls and a bagel sandwich with fruit sides for the bigger kids, but as soon as I chose the cookie cutters for Pickle's peanut butter sandwich, I decided to cut their cheese into airplane shapes too.

Here's one of the bigger kid's lunches. Ham & cheese bagel sandwich, carrots, fruit leather, and grapes. Tucked under the bagel top are some cheddar clouds. Packing the bagel sandwich slightly open like that keeps it from sliding around and breaking. Plus it lets them see the cute shape when they take the lid off :)

This is how one of the little girls' bento lunches looked at first... 

... but as I took the photo,  I thought, "that's too much food for 2 and 4 year olds". 

I'm always doing that, filling the available space, but their stomachs are small, I need to choose smaller containers for them. I repacked that one bento into 2 smaller containers, dividing the food among them, except I gave Sprout some ham instead of bunny grahams, at her request. Birdie didn't want ham, so all I had to do was cut another cheddar cloud and airplane for her : 

They are back to school in 1 more day and I still don't have lunch-making down to a science! Gah! I am going to have to be more consistent with packing lunch the night before - we won't have time for trial & error on school mornings!

Play-Doh Bento

Recently I saw some cute little containers in the supermarket, meant for snacks with a dip, and nearly put one in my buggy before the cheapster in me regained control :)
"You have so many containers", I told myself, "you don't need this!" I put it back, but I didn't forget about it completely... Bella does love a little caramel dip with her apples - the container with the built-in dip well would be so handy... or would it? After all, it wouldn't stack with my other containers, so it would take up more cupboard space, and give us yet another square lid that only fit a certain container. Wouldn't it be more handy to just have a little lidded dip cup that I could put in whatever container her lunch was packed in? I have seen them at bento supply shops - but maybe I had something around the house I could use...

Yep, I did. In the same place I found some "free" shape cutters a few weeks ago...
the Play-Doh bin! This one was even empty already :

So here is an example of what can be done with what is already in the house, no need to purchase any special tools or containers to cutify your kidlet's snack. I used an ordinary sandwich box we've had for years, Play-Doh cutters, and the washed out mini Play-Doh container. I think it came from a goody bag. Since my Bella likes me to name her lunches nowadays, I'll call this one "I ♥ Nature" :

Apples, Cheddar Cheese & Caramel Dip

Butterfly Family Lunch

Today's lunch was chopped up and thrown together while I was on the phone catching up with a friend in Hawaii, so not much thought was put into it, but the sproutlets liked it. They wanted ramen noodle soup which was quick & easy, and I cut up some carrots, apples & cheese to go with it. A plate full of chopped fruit & vegetables is much more appealing when arranged artfully (Kulinary Kids wrote a great note about this yesterday on their facebook page ) so this is what I hastily did with the hand not holding the phone:

The plates went in the center of the table for them to eat family-style.

Here's Pickle's peanut butter sandwich. I told him that it's our family as butterflies, so he decided which of each of the little butterflies was who, and ate himself last :)

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.

Two Firsts

1) I decided to bake carrot muffins in the silicone mini muffin cups I've had for years. It's the first time I've used them for their actual purpose! I thought they might bake faster than regular muffins but they took the same amount of time. And oops, I forgot to spray the cups with cooking spray! Luckily the muffins popped right out nonetheless, and the cups washed up easily as well - which was a relief, as some of the reviews I've read about them have said just the opposite, and I was a bit apprehensive. I cut the muffin batter recipe in half which still made enough to fill the cups nearly to the rim - so I did, hoping they wouldn't overflow... and they didn't :) They are so little and cute!



2) My mom gave me these ice trays from IKEA. They are some kind of synthetic rubber, not silicone, and I don't think they are oven-safe, they are even labelled FOR WATER ONLY - but I think they'd be handy for lots of things other than ice :) If anyone else has these, or similar ice trays, I'd love to know if you've used them for anything other than freezing water! Anyways, Sprout likes rice, so I thought I'd see if they worked as rice molds... I only had some leftover brown rice with veggies in it, not white as I've seen used in all the real rice molds, but they came out just fine, the shaped rice popped out easily and held it's shape. So here is my first rice shape ♥

Flower Power!

We're heading out of town this afternoon, and I didn't use the peppers I had bought for fajitas (we had something else) so I needed to use them today or lose them. Luckily, Bella, Sprout and baby Bird like peppers. 

Flower Power lunch for the girls ✿

• Chicken & cheddar mini bagel sandwiches
• Bunny Grahams
• Bell pepper & cheese flowers on a bed of lettuce
• Carrots (bunnies like carrots)

Bella got her own Flower Power EasyLunchboxes bento, Sprout & Birdie shared one. They all had a good time clowning around with their lunch.

Bella discovered that if you squish a pepper slice it looks like a silly monkey :)

Pickle's peanut butter sandwich was a flower too, made with the blossom Lunch Punch from the Sandwishes set.

He said it was pretty ♥

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:

Under The Sea Lunch Adventure

♪ ♫ We got no troubles, Life is the bubbles, Under the sea ♫ ♪

It's Muffin Tin Monday! I have muffin tins this week, I bought some nice new silicone ones. Justified them to the hubby with a list of other uses for them - he really liked the idea of melting all the broken crayon bits into new shaped crayons, he can't stand all the little crayon bits we find on the floor after Baby Bird has been colouring - she likes to break them for fun :)

Today's "under the sea" themed lunch was a bit of an adventure for me, as I've never coloured pasta before so I wasn't sure how it would turn out - would the blue food colouring + the yellowish pasta = bluish or greenish noodles? Either way would work - blue would be the ocean, green would be seaweed. It came out a pretty aquamarine :) Along with the ramen noodle waves, lunch contained turkey "octodogs", canteloupe starfish, a clownfish gummy on a bed of sliced grape sea urchins, and "baby" goldfish crackers, topped with a cheddar cheese "mama" fish. My little Bird loves anything "mama & baby".

The first thing they both ate was the gummy clownfish of course, then Sprout bit the head off the octodog while Birdie dove into the waves. Beanstalk & Bella opted for a regular ramen noodle soup & crackers lunch, and Pickle had his usual - which I will make a separate post about after I get dinner started :)

 

Want fun muffin tins to make a muffin tin meal for your tot?

Berry Beary Nice Try

I had high hopes for this Berry Beary Yummy lunch. They were all going to love it, and think it was both cute and yummy and gobble it all up :) It did look good, they did think it was cute, and some of them thought some of it was yummy... but, there were still some complaints, and some leftovers. I learned a few things ... Lesson #1: I can't please everyone, and with 5 kids, the odds are higher that I won't. Lesson #2: I can cut back on the amount of food. Lesson #3: Cutting sandwiches with cookie cutters wastes a lot of bread (cheese is fine, I can put the scraps in my salad). And that's exactly why I am packing lunches now, before school starts, to work out these kinks :)

So here is what went in my berry and bear themed lunches: Cran-raspberry juice, strawberries, bear shaped peanut butter sandwiches (Beanstalk's is grilled and stamped, didn't quite work out), bear shaped cheese, teddy grahams, strawberry-vanilla yogurt, honey-roasted almonds for Beanstalk who doesn't like yogurt (bears like honey!), a sugar-free strawberry wafer cookie, and 3 gummy strawberries.
Pickle's lunch was already packed in his red bag when I took the photo; he only had teddy bear sandwiches and yogurt, but he had twice as much of each.

Oh, I did find out that with an ice pack in the Built neoprene lunch bags, the contents DO stay cold for at least 3 hours, yay!

We Are The Dinosaurs, Marching, Marching

Pickle, my 7 year old, is beyond picky. He has autism, and has a very short list of foods he will eat. He would happily eat peanut butter sandwiches every day - boring! Today I tried to make his sandwiches a little fun. I cut them into dinosaur shapes, and marched his plate to the table while singing Laurie Berkner's "We Are The Dinosaurs". I was met with a big smile and clapping from my hungry, happy Pickle :)

I think they look more like Loch Ness Monsters than dinosaurs. Maybe next time I'll serve them on a blue plate and play bagipe music ...

Butterfly Garden

As part of my healthy eating overhaul, I organized my kitchen drawers last night - and found a set of cute little tiny 1" cookie cutters! I've no idea where they came from, but they are perfect for making cute cheese cutouts, yay!

Bean Sprout and Baby Bird shared this, with scrambled eggs:

Oatmeal cookie halves make the soil, grape tomatoes, baby carrots, seedless grapes, & strawberries make the garden, and sharp cheddar butterflies (there were a couple more than shown here). So cute. They loved it!