The Week in Bentos: June 10-14, 2013

This marked the first week of our new summer schedule. Yay summer! But that means that there are going to be a few changes around here. Augie is on a new preschool schedule for the summer — he attends every day now — and Wyatt is out of school and will not be attending camp. So the Week in Bentos will now have a lot of preschool lunches and hardly any big kid lunches.

Another fun thing this week is that I got a big shipment of bento toys from BentoUSA (aka All Things for Sale) so I have some especially fun lunches to share today!

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Monday

Snoopy! Augie loooooooves Snoopy, so I was thrilled to see some Snoopy stuff show up on the BentoUSA site a few weeks ago. I tried to show some restraint, but I bought most of the things they are selling. (Some show of restraint!) Monday I made my boy this cutie Snoopy luncheon: four mini peanut butter sandwiches cut and stamped with Snoopy cutters, carrots and snap peas with hummus in a little Snoopy sauce container for dipping, and a few grapes behind a Snoopy divider. The divider is actually meant to be used as a stencil for decorating rice with furikake seasoning but it also worked pretty well as a food divider. I had to tilt it slightly to get it to fit in the box though. This lunch was packed in a single layer of our monbento box.

Tuesday

Tuesday, I broke out my new Spiderman rings and made Augie this Spidey lunch in the PlanetBox: Spiderman peeks out of a pile of grape tomatoes, meatballs standing in for “impact balls” (Wyatt informed me that these are balls of webbing he can shoot that explode on impact), red watermelon balls with a couple blue Spidey logos, a “radio active spider” (cucumbers in a silicone spider baking cup), and a small blue Lego box filled with hummus. I initially added icing eyes on top of the cucumbers in the cup, but then after I took the picture I decided they were probably going to melt and muck up the cukes, so I ended up removing them from the lunch.

Wednesday

Wednesday I broke out the Yumbox. Augie was my helper when I put this lunch together and I followed his lead about what to put in. He chose honey wheat pretzel sticks, cantaloupe chunks, cucumber spears, hummus for dipping the cukes and the pretzels, a rice ball and leftover chunks of chicken wrapped in prosciutto. He picked a couple cute little kitty and puppy mini-forks to use for eating the melon and chicken too.

Rice balls (called onigiri in Japanese) haven’t made an appearance in the boys’ lunches for quite a while because they both told me quite clearly that they “hated” them about a year or so ago. So imagine my surprise when Augie told me he wanted me to give him leftover rice in his lunch after dinner on Tuesday night. I pulled out my bag of rice molds for him to choose which shape he wanted and he went with the ball shape.

Thursday

Thursday’s lunch was a panda-palooza! It was packed into the Lunchbots Trio and it had a panda sandwich, cucumbers, strawberries and bamboo…er…I mean pretzels.

This lunch is a great example of how you can make a cute meal with very little effort. Really, the most complicated part of this is the sandwich and even that was fairly simple. I used a Cutezcute cutter set to cut the bread and stamp a panda face on one of the slices, then spread the inside with peanut butter and jelly and slapped it in the box. Next it was just a matter of placing the strawberries, cucumber slices and pretzel sticks in the remaining spaces. Finally, I speared the strawberries with a couple of panda forks and slipped a piece of panda baran (food divider) between the berries and pretzels to help prevent the pretzels from getting soggy.  I also put one in between a couple of the cucumbers for purely decorative purposes and that panda peeking out of the green ended up being my favorite part of this whole lunch. Simple can be really cute, folks!

Friday

This is what a preschooler’s lunch looks like when his mom wakes up a half an hour after he’s supposed to be in school. I turned off my alarm instead of hitting snooze this morning and then I woke up 2 1/2 hours later! Yikes!! I pulled out our Lock & Lock box (it’s back in stock!) and threw this lunch together as fast as I could: leftover bratwurst slices, cucumbers, strawberries, Triscuits.

Has your summer started? What’s your lunch situation?

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