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! :)

Happy Star Wars Day, & May the 4th Be With You! Enjoy Your Lunch, You Will!

This past weekend Mia Bella reminded me that Monday was May the 4th. For a moment I forgot the significance, until she said "You know, May the 4th be with you?" Right! I knew that! "So will you make me a Star Wars lunch?" I said I would, & this is it, packed in her PlanetBox Rover:

I think it turned out pretty awesome! Stamping cookie cutter are the best for making a fancy looking lunch, fast. The ones I used (below) are part of a set from Williams-Sonoma that includes Darth Vader, Yoda, a Stormtrooper, & Boba Fett. They don't carry it anymore but you can still sometimes find them & similar Star Wars Press & Stamp Cookie Cutters on Amazon, or eBay.

Bella's Darth Vader & Stormtrooper sandwiches are turkey & cheddar on whole wheat & white. She has two of each, on a bed of lettuce & flanked by sweet mini peppers. The trio of Yodas are slices of honeydew melon. Dueling lightsaber cupcake picks pierce one of a bunch of grape tomatoes.   

I also packed some green grapes, & carved Star Wars into the wax shell of a Babybel cheese, using a v-shaped cutter shown in the tool set below. Carving those words took me longer than it took to make the whole rest of the lunch! And for a treat, I added some "Galaxy Mix" Jelly Belly beans. Our packet had Darth Vader on it, & the beans themselves were iridescent!

I had already closed her PlanetBox & packed it in her Rover carry bag,  & was busy making the younger sproutlets' lunches, when I remembered that I had forgotten to include a Lunchbox Love note!  Caught it in time though,  & opened up her lunch to add the note. So now you get to see what her lunch looks like after the lid's been closed & it's been turned sideways :) See... nothing squashed or out of place, only the jelly beans have moved a little ;)

I also added a Star Wars print cloth napkin made by one of the biggest Star Wars nerds in the bento world as I know it, Kristie of Beneficial Bento. You can get custom cloth napkins & more in her Beneficial Bento etsy shop.

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!

A Hobbit Day Riddle Lunch

Today is Hobbit Day, and this week is Tolkien Week! Why? Because September 22nd is both Bilbo & Frodo Baggins' birthday, and Tolkien week, celebrating authors J. R. R. Tolkien & his son Christopher, is always the calendar week in which it falls :) And wow, The Hobbit was first published September 21st 1937... 77 years ago yesterday!

In observance of all this, I've packed a Hobbit Riddle bento lunch for Bella. In Chapter 5 of the Hobbit,  Riddles in the Dark,  the hobbit Bilbo Baggins & the creature Gollum trade riddles; 3 of them are represented within:

1. Alive without breath, As cold as death; Never thirsty, ever drinking, All in mail never clinking.

2 .Thirty white horses on a red hill, First they champ, Then they stamp, Then they stand still.

3. A box without hinges, key, or lid, Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

I also added a Lunchbox Love note Riddle:

By perfect chance, that was the first card I took out of the box - I love that the answer is the same as the answer to one of the riddles in the lunch, which I also wrote on the note's blank flip side!

Bella's Riddle lunch is packed in a Frutti Blue Yumbox Panino. Obviously, her turkey & cheddar tortilla sandwich is a hobbit hole door (with pepperoni doorknob), as is her Babybel cheese, no riddle there!  In the center section she has pepperoni chunks with a ring pick. In the top right section, she has an egg in the shape of a fish... the answer to riddles 1 & 3 in one! In the bottom right section, she has cucumber chunks & sunburst tomatoes, on teeth picks... the answer to riddle number 2 ;)

Bella, her brother, & her friend who we were giving a ride to school all got a peek at her lunch while I took the photo, but I didn't tell them what riddles were represented, so we had a fun conversation on the drive to school while they tried to remember all the riddles in chapter 5 & figure out which ones went with the lunch - and they did!

It's been a couple of years since I made a Hobbit themed lunch! Last time was the day An Unexpected Journey came out in theatres!
The Hobbit Bento : An Unexpected Lunch

Doctor Who Starry Night PlanetBoxes

One of my favourite episodes of Doctor Who is Series 5's Vincent and the Doctor, in which the Eleventh Doctor & Amy spend time with Vincent Van Gogh. I'll not give any spoilers about the episode in case you haven't seen it yet, I'll just tell you that every time I watch it I get a serious case of the feels. Bella loves it too, so she loved this Van Gogh-inspired PlanetBox:

Bella's PlanetBox Rover contains:

• Cucumber & cantaloupe stars
• Chocolate sprinkle-topped oatmeal muffin sunflower 
• Green grapes on the vine
• Cheddar tortilla swirls on swirly picks
• Babybel cheese carved with a really lame DW logo ;)
• Spiced sunflower seeds
• Starry Night cloth napkin from Beneficial-Bento
• Happy little fork - for the stars
• & a Lunchbox Love note

Before closing the lid, I folded the Van Gogh print napkin under the Little Dipper, turned the Babybel over, placed the Lunchbox Love note over the sunflower muffin, & challenged Bella to guess the theme of her lunch. 

Not only did she guess correctly, she also recognized my terrible logo carving :) Pickle, on the other hand, did not get his. I didn't really expect him to - he doesn't truly watch the show, he just watches it here & there when someone else is, because it's on. He did ask me for a Doctor Who lunch not long ago though so I didn't want to make Bella one and leave him out - and once I explained it to him he got it, and seemed to like it :

Pickle's PlanetBox Shuttle contains:

• Mozzarella cheese stick bites with a bow tie pick
• Yogurt with star sprinkles & blue sugar swirls
• Peanut butter sandwich sunflowers with chocolate sprinkles
• A Van Gogh's  Starry Night cloth napkin from Beneficial-Bento
• A happy little spoon for the yogurt
• & a Lunchbox Love note ♥

The sproutlets & I all loved the Eleventh Doctor, but that doesn't mean we aren't looking forward to getting to know the Twelfth! And we don't have to wait much longer, Series 8 begins tomorrow :)  A new season of Doctor Who is an excellent reason for the bento bloggers of Edible Geekery to do a blog hop, so we are! Click the TARDIS button to be taken to Loving Lunches!

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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: