Bento boxes – Or how I gave a boiled egg its first black and blue eye
Somewhat last minute, we decided to start sending the kids’ lunches again and cutting out some possible trigger foods. Dairy and sugar are being mostly tossed out the window for a little while and while I don’t use much processed food anyway, it’s completely gone, too.
So when I realized first off that sandwiches weren’t going to cut it, bento boxes were my go-to plan. They’re extremely versatile, can be made as healthy as you want, and hopefully the occasional cuteness will keep the kids interested.
I don’t have actual bento boxes, but standard plastic bowls with lids worked just fine. They’re a bit on the large side but I think that can be adjusted as I get more used to how much food is enough vs. too much.
Because of the time pressure, the only “cuteness” in these boxes are the simple drawn on faces and the hamburger lookalikes. I’ve got Anna to thank for that one again. Mine are made with barbecue meatballs sliced in half and put back together with a slice of carrot and lettuce leaf to make them look like mini burgers. For some reason, I didn’t take a picture of one individually so you can see what it actually looks like, but they were a big hit.
What’s in the box?
- Boiled egg (edible markers were used and it was actually black the night before but melted into a blue by morning…..I squished each one slightly so two are round balls and the other is a triangle)
- Grapes (cutting them in half and mixing them up only took a couple extra minutes and was also a huge hit, so well worth it)
- Ants on a log
- Leftover rice from the night before (a light Spanish rice of sorts)
- Edamame on toothpicks (not a big hit….needed a bit more salt….probably won’t use again once the bag is gone)
- Hamburger lookalike meatballs
- Homemade fruit rollups (no sugar is needed….just toss some apples into the mix and it’s sweet enough…..not shown in the picture above, but can be seen in the bottom of this one)
So uh, the guy above had a little accident. I had partially prepared them the night before and stacked them in the fridge without lids. One bowl shifted so that it ended up resting in this guy’s face overnight. Oops!
I ran into a few other issues but nothing too major. I forgot the girls switched to the lunch bags from Subway last year instead of the old bags I remembered from before. The bowls I chose didn’t quite fit easily, so we had to do some squishing. B pointed this out almost immediately in her least offensive tone….”Are you really going to send those to school with us?” I was afraid she was talking about the food, but it was really just the logistics of getting them in the bags that worried her.
Their excitement was less than peak before they left for school which really threw me off because they’ve been begging to take their lunches again for a while. They weren’t really sure what to think of the sheer lack of sandwiches, I don’t think, but when they got home from school, it was a whole ‘nother story. “I’m so happy we get to take something other than sandwiches,” L told me first thing and N couldn’t stop talking about what the other kids wanted from her box, but she couldn’t/wouldn’t share. Definitely a success and now they’re full of a huge stream of ideas of things they’d love to take. :D
Groundhog’s Day meatloaves – Happy Rodent Day!
I think my meatball groundhogs are more like meatloaf gophers, but same idea, right? B thought they were more like squirrels even, oops! And another looks more like a rat. Hmm. A rodent is a rodent?
I wasn’t sure what to make the cartoon faces out of, so tried a few different things. This one has radish and and cut chocolate baking chips as eyes, cranberry nose, monterey jack teeth, and baking chip ears. I gave each rodent a lobotomy, it seems, to wedge their new found body parts into.
I tried oyster crackers for ears on this one and cut the cranberry in half so it’d be flatter on this one. Not that you can tell in the picture, but he’s a little less Rudolph-ish.
Gopher caught in the headlights! Er, I mean, ground hog. I switched to dark colored cranberries cut in half for the eyes and walnuts for ears. This one is a little more squirrel-like.
Anyway, more rodents!
I tried going for a more realistic “groundhog walking around on the ground” viewpoint, but uh, yeah, it looks like a rat, hehe. The only thing that’s missing is a licorice tail.
When I started running out of time, I solicited some help. :D This little guy is my sister’s groundhog. Oh, and that’s brown mustard on the eyes to help stick some of the parts together. My little rodent family:
Happy Groundhog’s Day, guys!
I could never survive on a cooking show
A couple months ago, my sister was watching me take pictures of food. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but I’d actually bought a set of cheap plastic dishes for the sheer sake of picture some food on the colors.
Foodies present on white. Food bloggers present on white. Chefs present on white. Food looks great on a white background and cameras can capture their colors best with the white. That’s just the way it is.
All the more reason she giggled at me when I gave her the option of blue or pink (okay, it was magenta, but I didn’t know if she knew what color that even was, hehe).
She watches Chopped on a regular basis and told me how she thinks of me sometimes when she sees the dishes.
“Except yours would never be picked because you’d do it with smiley faces or something. They’d think it was really cute, but you’d never win.”
Lol! It’s true! The conversation went on and we joked about me serving meatloaf rats or arranging the foods into funky shapes. She said sometimes I make them look like the chefs do and talked about how sometimes the chefs end up making a dish look really gross.
All the while, I was arranging bowls of shrimp alfredo into a pyramid.
Sure, the color is off, but the more important thing is the milk on the table you can see on the left hand side. I can get by with this because I’m not a food photographer. Or a chef. Or a photo editor.
I’m Quirky Jessi and kids like building things, even if it’s just a tower of funky colored bowls. :P
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