I promise I'll work harder on my puns, guys. I promise.
But I'm trying to simultaneously feed Baby Jaguar and type at the same time, while my loads of laundry, dirty dishes and messy bedroom loom on my mind. Doesn't leave a lot of space for punning. That's my excuse. I'll try harder next time.
This morning, I made dinosaur lunches. Or shall I say "bento-saur"? (I'll try harder, I swear!) At first, the going didn't look good. Feebz came in, saw the dinosaur cutter and moaned, "Not dinosaaauuurrs! I'm not a boy!" I quickly turned it around by telling her you don't have to be a boy to like dinosaurs just like you don't have to be a boy to be a scientist, which is what she wants to be, or a doctor. Besides, I told her, some scientists, called paleontologists, study dinosaur fossils, ooh, how cool is that! And she was convinced. It's all about the spin, people.
(But then later Lolly came in, saw the dinosaurs and shrieked, "Aughh! I'm afraid of dinosaurs!" With nothing better to come up with, I just retorted, "No you're not.")
So.
I started out with the kiwi fruit. This is where the inspiration for the prehistoric theme came from. Not that fun lunches have to have a theme; it's just that I kinda get carried away sometimes if a theme presents itself. To make dinosaur egg kiwis, you just use a paring knife and cut a zigzag all the way around the kiwi. If your kids will eat the skin (the skin is edible, just wash it first), great! If not, either peel it or provide a good solid metal spoon to scoop it out. My kids like the skin by some miracle, so I leave it as is. I do cut the bottom and top off, though.
Then I used my dinosaur sandwich cutter and cut out ham and cheese sandwiches. To finish the scene in Feebz's, I added blueberry "skies" and moved onto the other half of her bento. With Lolly's, I just worked on a single bento tier (the pink one above). I cut out cucumber "trees" and added a few more cherry tomato "eggs". I've never tried "cracking" a tomato egg before, but I gave it a go today, and it turned out all right. I chopped a bit of banana with the peel (to keep it from absorbing too much tomato juice, though it will have absorbed some because I cut the tomato) for the "sun". There was still room, and I didn't want to fill it completely with more blueberry sky, so I went back to the fridge for inspiration. This is where rice always comes in handy, but it was too late for that. I saw the chicken chunks I'd bought yesterday, so used a few slices of it for "clouds" and then filled the rest in with blueberry.
Oh, and of course, I had to add a bit of flair: "ROAR" spelled in cheese. (Cut from a cheese slice with alphabet canape cutters.)
Hint. Chicken chunks will need to be tomorrow's lunch, now that I've opened the package.
They turned out all right, and what matters is that the kids were happy. I was worried though about the fact that the bentos weren't packed to the very top of each tier and that the contents would move around too much to be recognisable as a scene by lunchtime. I asked Feebz if her lunches still looked like pictures by the time she ate them. She said they were sometimes a bit moved around "like the wind moved them" but she could still see the pictures. Good.
To finish them off, I added a string cheese in the lids for snack time and a juice box and water bottle, and there they have it. Jurassic Parked Lunch!
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