Is This All I do?

I look at the weeks and there must be more, but it honestly seems that this is all I do: make lunches. I wonder if that's ok. Probably, though my task-driven productive self longs for something else to prove I've been useful. It's good to know that keeping children alive also counts as something useful, so even though I don't have much to post about, I do have alive children. 

More sushi in this lunch, egg and avocado. I tried to do mini cucumber ones, but I'm not sure they turned out. Soy chips, grapes, grape tomatoes and peach.

Pizza scrolls! Again something you can make ahead and keep in the freezer. These ones are lazy ones, because instead of making the dough myself, I just used puff pastry. Not quite as healthy. Oh well, at least the insides are veggie packed and healthy. It's easy to just make extra spaghetti sauce and then keep it aside for this kind of thing, and I always hide veggies in spaghetti sauce. Dried apricots, grapes, pepitas, popcorn and yogurt.

I found a box of healthy crackers that was about to go out of date in the cupboard, so that's why these appear in this lunchbox. There is cream cheese in the middle for the girls to spread on the crackers. Grapes, grape tomatoes and capsicum, carrot and cucumber sticks. There is also a chocolate biscuit too. Just a little bit of unhealthy for an otherwise very virtuous lunch.

Mini hot dogs! These were so easy and look fabulous. There is sauce and grated cheese under the cheerios. The buns are just dinner rolls. Cucumber and carrot sticks, mini tomatoes, mushroom slices (in Rachel's lunchbox only, because Sophie wouldn't have a bar of them), grapes and pineapple pieces.

In the middle is a little treat that Sophie and I made for Valentines day. I saw a thing on the internet somewhere of heart shaped treats made out of puff pastry with jam in them and hundreds and thousands on the outside. They looked easy and cute. The problem, when Sophie and I went to make them, was that we had no jam or hundreds and thousands. We did have chocolate sprinkles and frozen berries though, so I mixed the frozen berries with icing sugar and used that instead. They turned out like little hearts and tasted good, but don't look anywhere near as appealing as what they were supposed to be.

Do you want to eat a snowman? I know I do! My sister has a Japanese student with her at the moment who showed me a picture of a bento her mum made for her last day of school, including rice balls that looked like Olaf from Frozen. So easy to do, so I did it!

You can see the subtle differences between Sophie and Rachel's lunches here. That mini hot dog that's been cut in half was actually left over from Rachel's lunch box the day before. I cut the grape tomatoes in half and then put them back together like hearts just for fun. Sophie has another of those Valentine's Day puff pastry things while Rachel has some olive dip. Apples, capsicum, cucumber and grapes and it's a yummy lunch.

I don't know why this lunch looks so boring.... it just seems to white. Meh. Rice thins and cream cheese to spread on, carrots (Rachel had capsicum), pepitas and crasins, grape tomatoes, boiled egg, grapes and pineapple pieces.

If the last box looked too white, this box looks too red to me. What's going on!? Rachel's at least (below) looks a little more balanced. Cheerios cut like octopi, cheese sticks, veggi quiche thingy from the freezer (I know they didn't really eat them last time, but I had some left and I needed to fill the lunch box), onigiri with a Pokemon cut out (I got a set from my sister's Japanese student - so cool, though I think a bit wasted on my not-Pokemon-aware children), apples, watermelon and homemade custard (I've nothing against bought custard, but I had lots of eggs and milk, so I thought I'd make my own for fun).

Rachel just has grapes rather than a second octopus, because I know she will be flat out even eating one. To make those cool cheerio octopi, you just cut the bottom half of the cheerio into legs, then "cook" them in hot water and they just magically spread out. If I were really Japanese I would have given them eyes, but I am not, and I couldn't be bothered pretending. 

I have been missing my Japanese family and Japan more than usual lately. In the last three weeks we have had Japanese dinners at least eight times. Maybe making bento is another way I'm just trying to feed my nostalgia.