Ouch! Life has been extra busy and I haven’t made time to post our lunches. I now have a nice backlog of lunch photos to post and am going to attempt to group them into small themes. Today’s is simply, variety!
This Kotobuki Frog box has a cheddar cheese and vegetarian bacon stuffed crescent roll, sugar snap peas, grape tomatoes, cantaloupe, grapes, and strawberries. I also sent in a pomegranate yogurt with granola that Girlie picked. Both kids LOVED the yogurt and rest of the lunch too.
The lunch above is the Kotobuki panda. I love this lunchbox for its ridiculous cute factor, but it is a little bit small, and it always annoyed me that it came with a plain black bento strap. Since it sits at headband position, I always felt like it should be red. Well, my daughter and I got hooked on Rainbow Loom recently. She’s been making bracelets, and I’m cranking out bento straps!! I’ve made some for the EasyLunchboxes too and I’ll show those off in another post! It looks so great on our panda and keeps the box held together snug. This lunch has a CuteZCute panda, some Trader Joes rocket crackers, plum slices, and strawberry. He had a yogurt on the side.
The above lunches are both from Girlie’s Hello Kitty Collection (lids pictured here) and both contain the vegetable soup she helped me make. We took a visit to the farm store and she selected lots of fresh veggies that she thought we go well in her recipe. We used my homemade veggie stock and added her choices of carrots, celery, leeks, zucchini, broccoli, green bell peppers, red bell peppers, and green beans. We made a huge pot of soup and ate it for days! She loved it and definitely felt proud that she participated in both the shopping, preparation, and cooking. She was a great help!
The lunch on the left has star and flower cheese sandwiches with rocket crackers, oranges, banana, cucumber slices, soup, and milk. The lunch on the right has cheesy tortilla pinwheels, pirate booty, cactus pear, oranges, grapes, and soup.
This bento is from our PaperChase set (picture of lids here). Girlie has 2 of my bento scrap french toast muffins (made with cranberries this time), carrots, celery, a small container of lite ranch to dip with, and a power smoothie made with berries, banana, oranges, Greek yogurt, and kale. Delicious and healthy!
This Goodbyn Bynto has strawberries and cantaloupe, crackers with star and flower cheese slices, trail mix, and pirate booty. I’ve been asked before how I deal with bento scraps. There generally are not a lot of bento scraps, but whatever is not used in the lunch gets re-purposed in some way. Cheese scraps can go into a small container and will be used like shredded cheese in other lunches or in quesadillas. Sometimes they get melted on top of broccoli. They often get fed to the dog, who is generally sitting at my feet, begging for scraps. Veggie scraps go into my freezer bag of soup stock scraps if they are usable and into the compost, if not. Fruit scraps can go into freezer for smoothies, pancakes, or bento scrap muffins, and anything unusable goes into compost. There is very little actual waste. You can see below how I store the cheese scraps as I’m cutting it. In my next post, you will see these same scraps get used like shredded cheese! 
What do you do with your scraps? I love all the innovative ways I see my bento blogger friends re-purposing scraps! I just added a new pin board to keep track of all of their recipes and ideas. You can click right here to follow it.
These are the products I used in my post:
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