Edible Geekery : Embrace Your Geekness Day

Today is, according to my geekiest girlfriends, Embrace Your Geekness Day. Okay :) Since I'm the biggest geek in our family, I made myself a bento lunch. I thought of doing a Doctor Who theme lunch and packing it in my new TARDIS lunch box - but we have a DW/TW blog hop coming up (spoilers!)
so I went with Red Dwarf instead:

I packed my LunchBots Trio with Lister in mind, so of course I have his favourite, vindaloo - though mine's seitan pretending to be chicken. It's not pretending to be spicy though! I also have a salad with Red Dwarf cut from sharp cheddar cheese, grapes, and in the small LunchBots cup, chile-spiced almonds. Lister only has two working taste buds - one for vindaloo and one for lager - but since it's only noon here and I'm surrounded by my sproutlets, I skipped the lager and poured myself some limeade instead. It's green, so I'll pretend it's mimosian telekinetic wine, and decide it tastes like lager :)

A couple of my geeky girlfriends have also made special lunches today! Not giving you any hints though, go see for yourself :)

• Bento for Kidlet
• What's In Mom's Lunch Bag?

Did you embrace your geekness today?


♫ ♪ Red Dwarf End Theme 

"It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere
I'm all alone, more or less
Let me fly far away from here
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun

I want to lie, shipwrecked and comatose
Drinking fresh mango juice
Goldfish shoals nibbling at my toes
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun"  ♪♫

● ● ● ● ●

And because I love Doctor Who, I must include this excellent Red Dwarf & Doctor Who Mash-Up!

Laptop Lunchbox Love

Birdie wanted a sandwich made with the "kissy lips" cookie cutter, so I cut her string cheese and stacked it in X's and sliced her apples horizontally to make O's. I made her baby carrot into a heart and used heart picks to skewer her tomatoes. Lots of love in her Laptop Lunches bento box!

I had a garden in mind for this lunch. We had some leftover egg noodles so I made a little nest for some tomato eggs. I used my Lunch Punch to cut a butterfly ham & cheese sandwich and sliced a baby carrot in half for antennae. Apple wedges & baby carrots made 2 more butterflies (stacked) and some tomatoes and string cheese in a flower baking cup made blossoms. 

For this next garden lunch I used several accessories from Bento USA by All Things For Sale - bumblebee  picks in the broccoli, a tiny cutter and a flower stem pick to make a carrot tulip, and more flower stem picks for cheese tulips. I used a blossom cookie cutter for the stacked sandwiches.

The girls love the Laptop Lunches bento boxes, they love the brightly coloured cases and little boxes inside. I like that I can mix & match the inner containers. They're versatile & fun!

Stuff used to make these lunches:

   

Making Healthy Snacks with Birdie

Birdie & I made spider snacks from our LANA Fruit & Vegetable Snack Recipes cookbook  :)

The recipe calls for dried apricots, pretzel sticks, & raisins. We modified our spiders a little, since we used the dried white peaches that came in our June NatureBox instead of apricots, and they were quite a bit bigger.

Birdie had fun with the cookbook. It's spiral bound, with thick laminated pages, so I let her play with it. She matched up all her pretzel sticks and raisins to the ones on the recipe page :)

 

At first, Birdie wasn't really interested in following the recipe to make a spider, she just wanted to snack & play. Here she is being silly with the one I made:

When she was ready to make her own, I got her started by poking some holes in the peach with a toothpick - then she filled them with the pretzel sticks. This was a good fine motor and hand-eye coordination activity.

 

She was very careful not to break the pretzels, and so pleased with her (almost) finished creation! Here are our dried peach & pretzels spiders after we added the raisin eyes:

Birdie wasn't done yet though. She picked up another peach and pretzel stick and started doing her own thing. What do you think she was making?

 

She made mushrooms! A plate of peach & pretzel mushrooms :) I love that she used her imagination to create a fun snack of her own! ♥  

We had a good time & made healthy snacks! I definitely recommend LANA's Fruit & Vegetable Snack Recipes cookbook if you're looking for fun & simple healthy snack ideas to make for or with your child. Like this Berry Cute Mice Snack we made a few months ago:

LANA (Learning About Nutrition through Activities) makes nutrition learning fun & easy! The LANA Preschool Program website is a wonderful resource for ways to help kids learn about making healthy eating choices through play. They even share FREE downloadable activities & recipes every month! 

You can Follow LANA on Facebook too :)  

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored review. I was not asked to write this post nor compensated in any way. I added the above comments because I believe in the LANA program and wanted to share about it! 

A Rainbow Bynto Bento

My 5 year old Sprout has beach day camp today!  I packed a rainbow lunch in her favorite lunchbox, her pink Goodbyn Bynto:

Sprout's rainbow is made of halved strawberries, carrot fingers, half a banana, some broccoli florets (aka baby trees), and blueberries. She'll be so pleased to earn every colour on her Today I Ate A Rainbow chart in one meal :)

In the smallest section she has a mozzarella string cheese cut in thirds, and a little rainbow container of peanut butter & pretzel sticks to dip in it. Her matching water bottle is filled with ice water. I also packed a pink fork in the berries section.

Birdie wanted a Bynto lunch as well but we only have the one (Bella's is the larger Goodbyn Original). I guess I need to get her one of her own - can't have my Baby Bird feeling like the odd one out!  :)

Stuff used in this lunch:

Look! Lunch :)