We were running late on Tuesday, so I had to throw Wyatt’s lunch together in a hurry. He got a half banana, a dinner roll, a hot dog cut into strips and some catsup to dip it in. All he ate from this lunch was the bun.
Wednesday I sent peaches with sprinkles, turkey pepperoni, and a bun decorated with food markers. He ate every lovin’ bite of this bad boy. Yay me!
Thursday’s luncheon consisted of a few grapes, a slice of deli turkey cut into strip and rolled up, a challah bun and a whole lotta berries.
Lunch on Friday was turkey pepperoni folded over and skewered on little picks, a couple of Hello Panda candies (in the pink box), Cheerios and a whole heck of a lot of berries.
June 18, 2009: The big rose bush in our back yard is in full bloom. This photo only shows a tiny smidge of the plant. It’s gorgeous and it makes me regret not taking better care of it.
June 19, 2009: We got a preview of what Augie will look like 40 years from now while goofing around with the fake mustache. Handsome!
June 20, 2009: We got TP’ed! Zach and I were watching Nurse Jackie when he noticed something white waving in front of the living room window. We went out to investigate and the front of our house had been decorated with toilet paper. We don’t have any trees at our house, so they put it on the bush, around the porch pillars and even around the stepping stones in the flower bed.
We couldn’t figure out why in the heck of the world we’d been targeted — after all, we are no longer 15. At first we thought it might have been kids targeting people at random, but a quick look up and down the block showed not a shred of toilet paper anywhere else. Then we racked our brains trying to think of any incidents where we’d angered some teenagers, but we came up blank. As we cleaned up the paper, we critiqued the work of the decorators — they got high points for wrapping the rocks with toilet paper, but over all we decided they’d done kind of a half-assed job.
After we’d collected it all, Zach went down the driveway to recycle the toilet paper and he stumbled upon three people dressed all in black with their backs pressed up against the side of the house. His first thought was that he was going to have to fight intruders to defend his family. Naturally that got his blood pumping, but it turned out that we’d caught the TP’ers in the act and they’d run down our driveway to hide when we came out. I heard hysterical giggles so I went back out to see what was going on and I discovered Zach talking to three very drunk women in their 30’s. It turns out that they worked with our next door neighbor and they’d meant to get his house instead of ours.
So that mystery was solved, but now we must ask why three 30 year old women are running around TP’ing their co-workers’ houses. Hmmmmmm….
June 21, 2009: Father’s day! We went over to the city to see the Samurai exhibit at the Asian Art museum. Zach and I agreed that it was OK, but we were a little disappointed in it. Wyatt was bored stiff. Afterwards, we went to T-Rex for dinner and one of the appetizers we had was — I kid you not — chicken fried bacon. As soon as the meal ended we reaffirmed our commitment to Weight Watchers.
June 22, 2009: Wyatt has been having fun with this big piece of cardboard all week. First he used it as a barrier to hide behind and he jumped out to scare us about a million times per day. Then he made it into a tunnel — first for his cars to go through, then he tried to lure Augie to crawl through. Augie was having none of it though. Next, he carefully drew a shower head on it, asked Zach to cut it out and then attached it to the top and pretended to take showers (you can see the cut-out there at the bottom). Finally, today, he asked me to cut armholes in it so he could make an Optimus Prime costume. After I cut the holes he decorated it with markers. There’s a reason the cardboard box is in the toy hall of fame.
June 23, 2009: It was in the 80’s, so I brewed a batch of sun tea on the front walk. Yes, our front walk is carpeted. Wanna make something of it? Huh? Huh?
June 24, 2009: As I write this, Zach is busting his boo-tay to get a new release of Laconica out the door. He spent most of the day pounding away and even ate his dinner at he desk. Good luck, my dear!
P.S. I installed a new comment widget on the blog yesterday. Please let me know if you have any trouble commenting as I’m not sure I have it working quite right yet. You can send me an email at daisy at wendolonia dot com. Thanks
For all you bento lovers out there, I just saw this article on the Ichiban Kan blog saying that they are shutting down their online presence. I am in no way affiliated with Ichiban Kan, but I’m saddened to hear that this will be happening as they are the only online source of bento boxes and supplies I’ve found who offer their products at consistently reasonable prices. If you have been waiting to place an order with them, this may be your last chance for a while. From their blog:
While we do hope to re-establish our online presence in the future when a better financial situation arises, we will be indefinitely closed.
As soon as items are sold out, our online store will be closed.
One of the things I like best about living in the area I do are all of the fruit trees. In just our immediate vicinity, our neighbors’ yards have pear, plum, apple, apricot, and lemon trees and our next door neighbors’ kiwi vine grows over the fence into our driveway. Occasionally, we are the lucky beneficiaries of big, fresh, delicious bags of fruit and I’m thrilled every single time one comes our way. Last week we took home a bag of Meyer lemons that one of the parents at Wyatt’s preschool brought in to share.
I used a half cup of the juice to make Bakerella’s awesome, fantastic lemon bars, but that barely made a dent in our bounty, so Wyatt decided we should make some home made lemonade. Good idea, Buddy! Further discussion determined that the lemonade should be pink. It got me wondering what exactly pink lemonade is. A quick Google search told me that pink lemonade is pink from dye being added. There are lots of stories about the origins of pink lemonade, but this one says that the first batch was made using water a circus horse rider had been using to wash her red tights with. Um….disgusting.
We were fresh out of water infused with horse sweat and toxic 19th century dye, so I decided to use some strawberries from the freezer instead. Another Google search led me to a gazillion recipes for fresh lemonade, all with slightly different ratios of lemon juice, sugar and water, but in the end I settled on this one as a starting point: 3 parts lemon juice, 2 parts sugar and 4 parts water. I still needed to get the strawberries in there and I also found the lemonade was pretty sweet from the addition of the strawberries so ended up adding more water and ended up with this recipe:
Strawberry Lemonade
2 1/2 cups lemon juice
1 big hand full of strawberries, fresh or frozen (this results in about a 1/2 cup of puree)
2 cups sugar
5 cups water
Juice the lemons, straining out the seeds and pulp.
Thaw the strawberries, if using frozen. Puree with a hand blender (or regular blender or food processor). Push the puree through a fine mesh strainer to get get out as much of the solids as you can. Some seeds will come through and that’s OK.
Mix together the lemon juice, strawberry juice, sugar and water. Stir until sugar is desolved.
Try not to guzzle it all immediately!
Next time I get a bag of lemons, I’m going to try making this with mangos or raspberries. Wouldn’t that be good?
Hi guys! I’ve got extra bentos for you this week because Wyatt and I went to the zoo with some friends on Saturday and we took our lunches along with us.
Here’s the lunch I packed for Wyatt. Look familiar? I am so bored of blueberries, salami and buns, but he loves them so there’s no good reason not to send them. I also packed a couple of Hello Panda candies and a grape gummi candy.
This is my lunch: fruit salad, salami, aged gouda cheese, bun and three McVitie’s chocolate digestive biscuits. I found the biscuits at the Berkeley Bowl. The have an English food section in the ethnic food aisle! My grandma grew up in England and has gone back every year since she moved here at 17 and she often brought these back for us from her trips. I absolutely adore them, but they’re so hard to find in the States. I took three in my lunch, but the kids looked at me with big wide eyes when I got them out, so I gave two to them and only got one for myself.
Tuesday’s preschool lunch had watermelon chunks, baked tofu and oyster crackers. The oyster crackers are Wyatt’s new favorite.
Wednesday saw more oyster crackers, blueberries and some baked tofu. Wyatt refused to eat the baked tofu — probably because it was a different brand than I normally buy. Frustrating.
Thursday’s lunch had more blueberries, turkey meatballs on skewers, and some garlic toast that I cut up into heart and star shapes. I also put in a little container of catsup after I took this photo.
Friday’s lunch was a bonanza of elephant shapes cut with a cookie cutter! I cut them out of the tofu and we’re trying cheese in Wyatt’s lunch again (he refused to eat it for awhile), so I cut it into shapes to make it more appealing too. I also sent some bing cherries and oyster crackers. I tried using the bing cherry juice to make a purple frame around the elephants on the tofu, but it didn’t turn out so great. Itjust looked kind of messy. Oh well!
Also, I took a picture of the baked tofu when I was at the store the other day so folks who are looking for it would know what the packaging looks like. This is the Soy Deli brand, but it all looks pretty similar.
June 11, 2009: I went shopping at the new Berkeley Bowl. Berkeley Bowl is an institution in our area — well-known for their incredible, huge selection of produce and horrible parking. The new Bowl seems to have retained the good (check out the root vegetable section here!) and solved the parking problem with a larger lot and a two story garage.
June 12, 2009: This is Wyatt working at the desk we set up in his office (which is actually a little table in the shared family office). He very carefully chose what he wanted on his desk and decided that a poster of the man-eating lions of Tsavo was the proper decoration. Later he added a snapshot of Augie and one of Zach and our friend Evan together. He’s been working at his desk several times per day since we set this up. One night I asked him if he wanted to come out to help me make dinner in the kitchen and he told me, “Sorry Mama — I just have too much work to do. I have to get some stuff done before I can play.”
June 13, 2009: The boys and I went to the Oakland Zoo with our neighbors. Wyatt and his buddy spent a good 20 minutes on top of the rabbit burrow slide talking trash. When you’re in the 4-5 year old age range, talking trash involves saying the word “poop” a lot apparently. When I figured out what they were doing, I quickly put an end to it but by then they’d managed to tick off much of the preschool population of the East Bay, so we moved on to the tigers.
June 14, 2009: Augie is cruising all over the place now, so the baby gates are in heavy rotation.
June 15, 2009: Our tomato plants are starting to flower! We planted seven tomato plants this year, so we should be full up on tomatoes in a few months. I can’t wait!
June 16, 2009: Hanging out at the table after dinner.
June 17, 2009: He pretty much lives in the Batman costume when he’s not at school. Check out those dirty toes. That, my friends, says “summer” to me. Now if only the weather would catch up….
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bentos · food · photo · preschool
