Bent On Better Lunches' Top 14 of 2014

Wow, another year is behind us, already! It feels like 2014 went by very fast. I sure didn't get very far down my To-Do List, in life or on the blog! Ah well, there's always next year... or rather, this year :) And while I didn't make as many creative lunches this past year as I have in previous years, I did make enough fun ones for a Top 14 of 2014 post. So, according to blog statistics, these were the year's favourites. Is your favourite among them? 

14・ Pirate Treasure Map

This Talk Like A Pirate Day bento was one of my own favourites,  so I'm glad to see it made the Top 14 :)  I did another version of it for a friend's daughter, by request, see it here: Special Delivery Lunches.

13・It's Shark Week!

I had a feeling Shark Week would make the cut ;)

12・Bookish Bento for Dahl Day

These sweet little "bookwiches" went into Bella's Roald Dahl Day bento. Her literary lunch even caught her principal's eye in the lunchroom. If these were real books, they'd have been bestsellers! 

11・Blooming Bento

This Back-To-School post couldn't help but make the hit parade; it was part of the Bento Bloggers & Friends Bento Basics Blog Hop, & it's full of tips for building your bento toolbox from what's already in your kitchen :)

10・Message in a Bento

11 Lunch Note Ideas shares fun ways to leave a message in their lunchbox, including right in the lunch! One of the bentos in this post was featured in the November Laptop Lunches Newsletter :)

9・Poolside Lunch

This summertime post still makes me smile :) Love that pool monster! 

8・Halfway to Homecoming Military Kid Lunch

A "Daddy loves you" themed bento in celebration of passing the deployment halfway mark, featuring a cucumber chain inspired by homecoming countdown chains & the book When Dad's At Sea.

7・DIY Pizzable Lunch

A homemade pizzable lunch is way better than a pizza lunchable!

6・Pinkalicious Story Book Lunch

My girls and I had a pinkerrific good time making their Pinkalicious Story Book Lunches for National Book Month. We even made pinktastic cupcakes decorated like the ones in the book :)

5・Baby, It's Cold Outside

This winter post featuring a CuteZcute kitty cat sandwich for Birdie & Lunch Punch dog for Pickle also has cold weather tips for pets.

4・Autism Puzzle Lunches

This Autism Awareness Month post contains awesome puzzle piece themed lunches & a tip for packing easy to open Go-Gurt tubes. 

3・Heart-y Happy Lunches

These lunches were made cuter by colouring hearts and smiley faces on the pistachio nut shells and cheese wrapper with food-safe markers :)

2・Simple Seuss Sandwich

I was surprised to find Pickle's super simple Cat in the Hat peanut butter sandwich bento in the number 2 spot! It is pretty cute... It just goes to show, it doesn't have to take a lot of work or time to make lunch fun :)

And finally,  the top post of 2014 is...

1・Frozen lunch! Do you want to eat a snowman?

Who else is not at all surprised? :) Anything Frozen for the win!

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Thank you for following Bent On Better Lunches! I've loved reading your comments & answering your questions. Here's to more fun lunches in 2015!

Happy New Year!

Talk Like A Pirate Day Treasure Lunch!

Yo-ho-ho! Today be International Talk Like A Pirate Day!  'Tis one o' me favourite days t' fix fancy grub fer me little sprogs, an I've amassed a fair bit o' pirate bento booty t' make it fun & easy :)

Avast! Wha' do ye reckon o' this, me hearties? Won't me smallest scallywag be sure t' love diggin' in t' this treasure lunch?!

Birdie's midday meal be packed in our new Frutti Blue Yumbox Panino. Arr! She's gone off veggies so I doubled th' fruit, t' keep th' scurvy at bay! Mixed berries 'n green grapes - plus one wee carrot stuck through a pirate cupcake ring - just in case th' wee wench might eat it, aye!

Me girly''s sandwich pirate isle be made of cheddar cheese & peanut butter, cut with a special promotional Lunch Punch Landwich cutter. 'Tis embellished with a tropical tree & a pirate flag pick, an X drawn with food marker, an' surrounded by sugar shark-infested water :) The shark cupcake sprinkles are affixed with dabs o' PB.

'Tis a special day so she gets to splurge with a special treasure treat of a few jelly belly jewels an' a chocolate doubloonie ;) Arr!

Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day, mateys!

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:

Message in a Bento: 11 Lunch Note Ideas

When I pack my kidlets a bento I'm sending them to school with more than a nutritious & waste-free lunch... packing their favourite foods with fun touches also sends the message that I love them & want them to enjoy their meal! And it doesn't need to be fancy to be fun; simply adding an amusing or encouraging note is enough to brighten their lunch & their day :)

I love including a Lunchbox Love note ♥ Each colourful card has a positive message on one side, a joke or fun fact on the other. My sproutlets tell me the whole lunch table enjoys them - hooray for sharing the Love!

 In this lunch:  Watermelon & cantaloupe, cereal & pretzel snack mix, cheddar tortilla spirals, a heart-shaped hard-cooked egg, & symphony tomatoes, packed in Laptop Lunches.

A bananagram is an a-peel-ing way to slip in a note :) Did you know you can write on a banana's peel with something pointed, like a toothpick, & your message will turn brown by lunchtime? I'm sure I got a bunch of smiles with this silly pun message for my sproutlet who was getting over a cold.

 In this lunch:  Babybel cheese with smiley face cut-out, banana, crackers, mini turkey pepperoni, golden & orange carrots, grapes, & pistachios, packed in Laptop Lunches.

No artistic ability was needed to make this confidence booster!  I used Wilton alphabet cutters to add some encouragement to my nervous about starting middle school 6th grader's sandwich :)

In this lunch:  Peanut butter sandwich, cantaloupe,  apple wedges & caramel dip, & Babybel cheese with star cut-out,  packed in Laptop Lunches.

Make an impression with a stamped sandwich! Cookie stamps can also be used on bread! I have a cookie message set for embossing words & phrases, even more fun ... fondant stamps would work just as well :)

In this lunch:  Embossed peanut butter sandwich, apple wedges, strawberry hearts, & yogurt with rainbow marshmallow bits, packed in Laptop Lunches.

7 more ways to leave a message in their lunchbox:

• Food markers. Write a note on their sandwich, cookie, or cheese!
• Alphabet crackers or cookies. Glue them to a granola bar or across a sandwich with honey :)
• Alphabet bento picks. Stick them in almost anything to spell out a message. I use mine a lot! There is 1 of each letter per package so I got 3 sets to have enough letters.
• Include a little chalkboard, like these Lunch Box Scribbles.
• Dry erase marker. Make a test mark on your lunchbox first, in a spot that won't be seen, just in case. 
• Write on erasable stickers made for labeling food!
• You can always write a message or draw a picture on a piece of note paper, or if you use them, paper napkin (like this dad!), plastic baggie (like this dad!), or paper lunch bag (like this dad!). 

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☺ This post contains affiliate links to the tools used to create these lunches.

It's Shark Week!

Discovery Channel's Shark Week is one of our favourite summer traditions! So I was setting this stuff out tonight to make my 13 year old a shark-themed bento tomorrow, when I remembered he has oral surgery in the morning! He'll be wanting soft foods only for a few days, and probably only ice cream tomorrow, so my lunch plan would have to change. That's okay - like Fin in Sharknado 2, I'm just making this up as I go along ;)

Shark Lunch Alert!  With a bit of thought, I made use of Beanstalk's Laptop Lunches & the shark accessories for Pickle! He really liked the fun shark fact on the Lunchbox Love note, and the flip side too, which said "Don't be afraid to ask questions. That's how we learn." That boy loves asking questions, lots of questions :)  Shark fact card from Lunchbox Love for Kids Volume 9

I made a couple of peanut butter sandwiches with a shark cookie cutter. They were kind of small so I added a sandwich ocean floor beneath them - the perfect place to stick the bento pick letters. My picky boy never eats crackers so I only included 2 goldfish - in case he felt like trying something new (he didn't). A drop of food colouring made blue yogurt to stick the shark fin cupcake pick into, & I chopped a string cheese into triangle shark teeth. Sharks do have several rows of teeth, you know :)

Maybe Beanstalk'll heal fast & be back in biting form soon... as Marian Call sings in The Shark Week Song, "It be Shark Week all week through!"

And here are a couple of my favourite previously devoured shark bentos:

 

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Click the pic for the original post 

I've got a couple more fun Shark Week ideas I'm going to try to get to, though even if I do, I may not get a chance to blog them - so you should follow me on Instagram - I'll at least post a pic if I do!

Update: I did get around to making one of my sharkish food ideas - Sharknado cinnamon rolls! And also a shark lunch for Birdie, with a Sharknado pizza roll :) Click the pic to see all my shark week posts:

Happy Shark Week!

Some stuff I used to make these lunches: