Like seemingly everyone else in the world, my family became obsessed with Pokemon GO this summer. We downloaded it the first week it was out and we’ve been enjoying taking regular family walks to try to catch them all. I mean…I don’t want to brag or anything, but as of this morning I have 67 different Pokemon in my Pokedex. (But now that I write this, I see there are 147 Pokemon varieties so maybe that’s not very good? Hmmm….) We’re all pretty into the game, but my kids have also reignited their passion for Pokemon in general and so there are cards on the floor of literally every room in my house. They are Poke-obsessed.
Naturally, this means that I needed to start making Pokemon lunches for Augie! (Wyatt — now a middle schooler! — is not interested.) This first Pokemon lunch had a sunflower butter and jelly Pikachu sandwich, a Babybel cheese Pokeball, snap peas, cucumber slices, cantaloupe and a strawberry. I packed it in a Yumbox Panino.
To make this lunch, I began a couple weeks ago by gathering my supplies. First up was this Pokemon sandwich cutter set that a friend pointed me to on eBay:
It includes stamping cutters for Pikachu, Pichu, Chikorita, and a Pokeball and a few mediocre bento picks. If you can’t find this particular set, I noticed a lot of other cool looking stamping cutters that were made with 3D printers on eBay. Amazon has a pretty good number of Pokemon cutters as well.
The cutters in my set work very well and I’d recommend them for making quick, good-looking sandwiches! If you’d like some tips for making perfect stamped sandwiches see this post: How to Make Kick-Butt Stamped Sandwiches.
After I made my sunflower butter and jelly Pikachu sandwich, I converted a Babybel cheese into a Pokeball using this tutorial at Cute Food for Kids. It might look a little fussy, but it’s pretty easy. I recommend cutting out a few of the black strips at once to speed up the process if you want to make more Pokemon lunches in the future.
I cut the cucumbers into rounds and used a melon baller on the cantaloupe to enhance the Pokeball theme but the lunch looked a little boring so I decided to make a couple Pokeball picks as well. I had tried to find some Pokemon cupcake picks on Amazon when I ordered the cutters, but holy crap they were expensive! I guess the people who have Pokemon merchandise know they have a good thing going. I also looked for Pokemon stickers so I could make picks using toothpicks, but couldn’t turn anything up at a reasonable price. These Pokeball picks worked out pretty well though.
To make them, I punched a circle out of sticker paper (for printing stickers), then I drew a circle and a stripe on it using a sharpie. I cut half the sticker away, like so:
And then carefully put the rest of the sticker on a plain red circle pick. (Sorry — I couldn’t find a current source for these.)
I poked the picks into the cucumbers and melon and now my lunch had an extra bit of pizzaz!
Are you making Pokemon lunches? I’d love to see what you’re making!
