Bento Archives - Page 3 of 3

Lunch for Kids- Scarecrow’s Harvest Lunch

November 19, 2012 By Deirdre

Many of us will be eating a special meal on Thursday filled with harvest foods. Why shouldn’t a scarecrow or a special four year old get to have a scarecrow’s harvest lunch too? This scarecrow’s harvest lunch is filled with wonderful foods JDaniel really enjoys. Well, most of the foods in this lunch are foods he really enjoys.His head features a flour tortilla with an orange pepper smile, a cranberry nose, raisin eyes, pineapple hair, a pear hat, and a homemade granola hat band. Yes, I am still trying to get him to like peppers.The top left section holds a butterscotch and chocolate haystack cookie. My sister in law will be bringing peanut butter hay stack cookies when she comes into town on Wednesday for Thanksgiving, but JDaniel avoids peanuts and peanut butter like the plague. We made a batch of cookies that he can eat them instead. (See the recipe below.)

Top right section contains a chicken salad. There are apple pumpkins, a scattering of cranberries, and chucks of baked chicken covered in Vidalia onion salad dressing and bread crumbs. A crow on a toothpick was placed in the salad with hopes he will use it as a pick.My scarecrow looks very serious about his job. I wonder if he know that the crow is going to help his chicken salad to disappear. I am crossing my fingers that the whole meal will disappear. JDaniel is going to take this Bento to school for lunch. I won’t know until he gets home what parts of the meal he has eaten.

Here are some more fun Bento lunches for kids:

Apple Chicken Salad Bento Lunch

Lunch Ideas with LEGO

Minion Lunch with Blueberry Overalls

You will find more bento lunch ideas on my Food Creations board on Pinterest.

Bento Lunch for Kids- All Star Lunch

November 5, 2012 By Deirdre

When I was planning this week’s lunch, I was thinking about Election Day and how it is wonderful time for Americans to get out and give their opinions on who they want for president. I decided having an all star themed lunch would be perfect. The bento lunch would literally be an all star lunch.That was before Sandy arrived and made it difficult for people to get out and vote. Some are displaced. Some don’t have polling places available. Some have more important issues on their mind like finding food, keeping warm, and trying to rebuild.

With that in mind this post is not going to be about getting out to vote. It is going to be about how proud I am of the people that I have heard about reaching out to others. People that were first responders. People who called friends up and invited them to stay with them. People like a blogger who lives not far from me who is gathering supplies to be taken to New Jersey. People that are trying to teach their children how to make it through each day without knowing what tomorrow will bring.

All those people are all stars! They are in my thoughts and prayers!

Oh! I am hosting a special Surviving Sandy event this week. Every comment on any post left this week will be translated into a 50 cent donation to Samaritan’s Purses’ relief effort for Sandy’s victims. You can read more about this event in a post that went up on Sunday called Doing Something About Sandy!- Helping Others.

If you like this all star lunch Bento lunch , here are some more bento lunch ideas:

Apple Chicken Salad Bento Lunch

Lunch Ideas with LEGO

Minion Lunch with Blueberry Overalls

Bento Lunch with Cracker Sandwiches

Summer Sunshine Bento Lunch

14 Halloween Meals for Kids

October 28, 2012 By Deirdre

We have been having lunch creations at our house for three years. I though I would share with you some of the Halloween themed lunches and snacks that JDaniel has enjoyed. I have called this post Halloween meals for kids.

Halloween Meals for Kids

If you see one that you like, please click on its link below and you will be taken to the meals’ original post.

We have just started having bento meals this fall. JDaniel takes them to school once a week when he has late stay.

The first bento lunch in the collage is one he took to school just a few weeks ago it appeared in a post called Pumpkins Galore. Ham and cheese pumpkins were served without bread and pumpkin cream cheese rolls were served in a tortilla.

The second lunch in the top row is one that never had its own post. JDaniel took it to school two weeks ago. It was filled with a batwich, apple bats, and chow mein noodles (JDaniel loves to snack on them.) with cranberries.

The bento in the bottom row has various symbols of Halloween. There are cheese and cracker spiders, neon green pickle cats and spooky sections of a Full Moon Brownie from Clif Kids. It was created for a Clif Kids Giveaway I hosted.

We had the best time making the food creation in the upped left hand corner of the Halloween Food Creation Meal collage. JDaniel and I visited the salad bar at Whole foods and he picked out of the food elements he used for crafting a pumpkin salad.

I just made this owl sandwich for JDaniel to have when he came home from preschool for lunch. It is a simple cheese sandwich, but I think it ended up looking pretty cute.

The lunch in the bottom row is supposed to be a scarecrow’s harvest lunch. The scarecrow came out pretty scary looking. I guess that it he would really scarecrows. JDaniel love the french fry corn stalk bundle in this lunch.

We started out our creative lunch journey by having muffin tin lunches. We linked them up to the Muffin Mom. As you can see a simple light blue muffin tin appeared in several Halloween meals.

The first lunch in the upper left hand corner is from a post called Muffin Tin Monday- Halloween. It was filled with wonderful fall foods. There was pumpkin chili served in a cornbread muffin, apple shaped pumpkins, pumpkin dip, carrots, cheese shaped pumpkins and sweet potato tater tots.

Two Spiders Have Lunch was one of my first muffin tin meal attempts. There was a web of sour cream nachos, spider biscuits, an aging apple slice pumpkin and some carrots. The web was so hard for me to create. The noodles seemed to have a mind of their own. This was one of those Halloween meals for kids that I thought would be easier to make that it turned out to b.

The meal on the middle row was featured in the Pumpkins Galore post. JDaniel had it for breakfast one morning a few weeks ago. He loves tortillas and cheese for breakfast so, I made him a pumpkin tortilla with cheese. He also had sweet potato french fries, pumpkin marshmallows, grapes, Raisin Bran, and a frozen yogurt pumpkin in this meal.

I saw the pumpkin face craved in a orange online and decided to fill it with fruit in this lunch from a post called A Great Pumpkin? Beyond the fruit salad pumpkin this lunch was filled with foods JDaniel loved as a two year old.

The last muffin tin is from a lunch called Boo! for Lunch. The title didn’t come from the ghost shaped bagel. It came from the fact that the tuna and cucumbers were booed by JDaniel. He loved the mac and cheese, marshmallows and bagel though.

I hope you have enjoyed visiting our Halloween meals for kids from long ago and just a few days ago. I had a great time seeing what JDaniel has been served in the past.

Lunch Idea- Apples for Lunch

October 1, 2012 By Deirdre

Last Wednesday was Johnny Appleseed’s birthday and I made JDaniel an apples lunch. It was filled with all kinds of foods made of apples or made to look like apples.He had a ham and Colby Jack cheese sandwich on the inside of the bread. The outside of the bread had a thin layer of apple butter and I stenciled an apple on the apple butter using cinnamon. JDaniel put the bottom piece of the bread on top and moved the ham and cheese in between them after I took this picture. He said it made more sense. He was right. I just wanted the apple stencil on the outside for the picture. I made one of myself and really enjoyed the sweet ham and apple butter with the cheese.

Apples for Lunch Bento

The top left section of his Bento box contains grape tomatoes. I am not sure that there are apple tomatoes so I went with a tomato that would fit in the box and was red. I thought they would look pretty in the box. I took an apple shaped piece of apple and placed it in with the tomatoes to make that section officially contain an apple product. When you are creating a themed lunch for a four year old, they like it to be offical.

The top right section of the his apples for lunch Bento box contains apple shaped fruits of all kinds. There are apple shaped apples, apple shaped pears, and apple shaped cantaloupe. I decided the meal needed different fruit flavors. JDaniel has been asking for cantaloupe a lot lately. It worked well wit the tartness of the apples.We got an apple shaped drink container when we visited Sky Top Orchards a few weeks ago. Then the container was filled with apple juice. This time the container was filled with apple cider. JDaniel announced that apple cider tastes much better than apple juice.
What do you think? Apple juice or apple cider.

Dream Big- Read.Explore.Learn

August 3, 2012 By Deirdre

Links below are affiliate link.

This week I am going to share a wonderful children’s book called Dream Big: Michael Jordan and the Pursuit of Excellence by Deloris Jordan. This lovely picture book by Michael Jordan’s mom is about how her son dreamed of going to the Olympic to play basketball from an early age.

He loved basketball, but basketball coaches didn’t always pick him for their team. Michael was cut from his high school basketball tryouts. He never gave up on his dream and I think we all know what happened to his dream to play basketball. His mom says, ” I guess you aren’t a dreamer, but a doer.” Michael was so blessed to live out his dream.

JDaniel announced a few weeks ago that he could do almost every big boy thing he could think of except tie his shoes and read. I guess you could call them his big boy dreams.

Learning to Tie Shoes

When I mentioned to a friend that JDaniel wanted to learn to tie shoes, she said she learned to tie them by practicing on her dad’s shoes. We took out my husband’s shoes and we have been parallel practicing. One of us has it mastered and the other still needs a lot of practicing.

Learning to Tie Dad's Shoes

I hope he learns in the next few months. I just ordered his school sneakers for the fall with laces on them.

Working on Sight Words

I created little basketballs that contain the first 36 Dolch Preprimer words to help JDaniel work on his dream of reading. We have been working on four words at a time.

Every time he reads me on the words he can move an orange pom-pom to the basketball hoop on paper.

I don’t want to overdo the word practice. He gets to work on each word only a few times at each sitting.

Here are some wonderful book Read.Explore.Learn post that were linked up last week:

Crafty Moms Share linked up a great dress the mole activity to go with the book Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed.

Keitha’s Chaos linked up an amazing bento lunch to that explored the book Hour of the Olympics.

Please share your book extension and exploration post below.

Puffin Muffin Recipe Served in a Bento

June 18, 2012 By Deirdre

I came across a wonderful recipe for The Magic Puffin muffins. They sounded like the perfect thing to serve my husband for breakfast on Father’s Day. Last Tuesday JDaniel saw the movie Happy Feet 2 and it had a puffin in it. Along with the puffin muffin I created a tortilla puffin, I wanted to share with you and the meal I wanted to make. Recently I served both them to JDaniel in a Bento container.

What is in the tin?

The box contains two puffins. I made one puffin out of a dyed tortilla cut out with a pattern of puffin that I made out of clip art picture from the internet. He was given a carrot eye with a raisin added, carrot feet, and part of his beak is made of carrot pieces. The rest of his beak is made of yellow pepper.

The second puffin is the pancake muffin I will tell you more about later.

The sun shining over the puffins is filled with delicious strawberries and blueberries. We have gotten the best tasting fruit this summer.

Making Puffins

JDaniel and I had the best time making these wonderful puffins. He loves to help in the kitchen and jumps at the opportunity to help all the time.

His first job was to place the liners in the pan. He has become an expert at pulling the liners off the stack and placing them into the pan.

JDaniel’s favorite job is mixing the ingredients. He loves to sneak his fingers into the mixing bowl. I try to keep them out of the mixing bowl, but he is very sneaky.

The final step after placing the mix in the liners was to sprinkle on crushed bacon. JDaniel loves bacon. He wanted some of the bacon to not make it on the puffins. Some of it conveniently stayed in the bag for him.