Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Basic Butterfly Bento

Monday, 7/16/12 - We were planning on going to go to an art activity, but opted not to, for some reason. I made these for lunch and for her to snack on to and from swim class that afternoon.
These were "use 'em up before they go bad" lunches. We were down to the last of our CSA cherries, the last of the pita bread, my bagel thins and our ham slices were nearing the end of their reign, the grapes were on their last legs, and I'd been accumulating uneaten peas and berries from her previous lunches. The CSA lettuce is always ready to go bad, since we aren't huge leaf-eaters. I've been forcing myself to add a leaf or two to my salads, but I prefer spinach. Lettuce tastes fine in my dip sandwiches, and gives a nice crunch, but I only needed two leaves for all these sandwiches. So we're not exactly plowing through it at an alarming rate!

Basic Butterfly
Lemon Pistachios, Ranch, ham and Very Pink Dip sandwich,
peas, blackberries, raspberries, Rainier cherries
Pretty basic lunch. The loose peas and the blackberries were left uneaten from previous lunches. The golden raspberries were from our garden.

The Lemon Pistachios were from my July NatureBox. She LOVES them. She actually loves four out of the five snacks we got in our July box, only because the fifth one was too spicy. She still likes the spicy one, but can only eat it sparingly, until the heat builds up too high for her! (If you're interested in getting a surprise assortment of healthy snacks delivered to your door each month, go to NatureBox.com and use code CRISTI for 25% off your first box and give it a try!)
She likes to lick the shells too, so she insisted that I open each pistachio for her, but include the shells and the nuts.

The sandwich is a little bit of red lettuce, ham, and Very Pink Dip on mini pita pockets from Trader Joe's. Really yummy, but she doesn't like the VPD as much as the regular Pink Dip. *sigh*

I decided to spruce it up a bit by making a quickie little butterfly out of four of the loose peas and a little strip of green onion in her Ranch dip. 

Mama's Lunch
Ham and Very Pink Dip on Everything Bagel Thins,
grapes, snow peas and Asian PB Dipping Sauce
My sandwiches are the same as hers; red lettuce, ham, Very Pink Dip; except that I used Everything bagel thins instead of pita bread. I couldn't fit two full sandwiches in, since I had kind of piled on the ham, so I cut them in halfes and lay them fanned out to fit. But I couldn't get all four halves in. So I ate one as a midnight feast! (I also ate the last of the grapes, since there was no point in putting the five that wouldn't fit back into the fridge!)
I initially added some loose peas onto my Asian Peanut Butter Dip to make a shamrock just for fun. But it's what inspired me to decorate her Ranch dip later. I just used four peas, plus a half-pea stuck in sideways for the stem, that had been cut by accident when I was making my pods smaller to fit in the compartment.

She totally surprised me by eating most of her lunch - everything except half of the sandwich, some berries, and one of the pea pods. Then she busted into MY lunch! She ate my grapes!

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2 comments:

  1. Looks delicious! I feel your pain, my kids dig into my lunch too. Usually because they blast through theirs and when I can finally sit down to eat mine, they start picking at it. I guess we can't complain, at least they are eating. ☺

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  2. What pretty lunches! I love the butterfly!

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