Work has been very busy and the kids have been keeping me on my toes! I have not had time in the mornings to make the really creative lunches or blog them daily, so I’m bringing you a roundup of four very lazy lunches from the last few school days.
All four lunches are packed in EasyLunchBoxes. These are lunches that should take less than 5 minutes to throw together, using minimal special tools. Read on for descriptions of each:
Above are MOMables Egg Salad Sandwiches for both kids. Girlie’s was cut with a Flower Lunch Punch and the center was stuffed with grape tomatoes. Dude’s was cut with a Millennium Falcon sandwich cutter and since he is more Halloween obsessed than Star Wars crazed, I added a cheddar cheese jack-o-lantern to the top of his sandwich. They both have cheddar cheese, plums, and pomegranate seeds. Girlie also has some carrots with a mini egg salad sandwich from the flower cut-out. Little Dude has pirate booty.
Below is a lunchbox of leftover pizza (Dude loves to eat cold pizza), oranges, and kiwi. He also has a side of cheerios with craisins. The EasyLunchbox on the right contains PB&J pinwheels, a babybel cheese (with a little fish cut into the wax), goldfish, grapes, and apple slices. Simple, but full of Little Dude’s favorite foods.
This week I also tested out a new lunchbox that I bought at Daiso Japan in San Francisco last month (for $1.50!) and a sandwich box that came in my most recent BOC from woot.com. Check out the new gear inside and out:
Girlie has her orange vanilla Chobani Campions for protein and calcium. She has the happy face sandwich box (which she’s been begging to use) with a fairy Sand*Wishes LunchPunch made of SunButter & Jam. I colored the fairy’s face with food markers. She has the small bento box stuffed with a plum, some carrots, and sugar snap peas. This was a good sized lunch for her and she was excited about her new containers. The new bento says “Clapping march picnic” and features some animals marching off to a picnic. It also says “Have you prepared to go on a picnic? It’s fine! Let’s go out!” It is just too cute!
Finally, I have a grown-up lunch to show off, too! It was a rainy day yesterday and I made a crockpot full of chicken curry for our home’s sole carnivore. The rain continued, so I made him a nice hot lunch to take with him to work today.
The chicken smelled great, even to us vegetarians! It was just perfect comfort food for fall. I did not follow a recipe, but here is how I made the dish: Place a couple of frozen chicken breasts into the crockpot with a jar of simmer sauce (I used Trader Joe’s Masala Curry) and set for 8 hours. Five hours later, stir and add some other chopped veggies. I added garlic, onion, red bell pepper, chard, and some Garbanzo beans. One hour before serving time, I used forks to shred the chicken inside in the crockpot so they’d soak up some more of the cooking juice. Then I just let it cook a while longer. At dinnertime, I warmed some frozen Garlic naan from Trader Joe’s and served those together. It looked and smelled delicious!
For leftovers, I placed the hot chicken in Little Dude’s Superman thermos (he was kind enough to loan that to his dad) and served with a Lock & Lock box full of celery, laughing cow lite cheese, and a plum. I am sure Nate will be thrilled to have a hot lunch today.
Do your kids eat leftovers in their lunchboxes? I’d love some new ideas for vegetarian dinners that can easily be re-purposed into lunches the next day. My kids are such adventurous eaters, but I am a lazy chef, especially when 6pm rolls around and I’m wiped out from work and out of ideas. If you have any good suggestions, I’d love to hear them!
Here are the products I used in this post:
I can’t resist! Here is the closeup from woot’s site: