Waste not want not

A few weeks ago I won a $20 gift certificate to a local pumpkin patch.  Not being huge fans of carving pumpkins we only carved one and I cooked the other two to use at a later time.
This week I also got a delivery from Vitacost.com where I had managed to snag some coconut flour for the price of shipping, so off I went today on a search for a pumpkin recipe that used coconut flour.

My search led me to this website Divalicious in Dubai and I made the super easy muffins exactly as posted.  While they smelled great they looked nowhere near as nice as the picture when they came out of the oven, so I decided to frost them.

I used Elana's Pantry recipe for Orange Cream Cheese Frosting and decorated half of them as butterfly buns and half I just frosted (I suck at frosting).  They taste delicious; moist but not gummy, and not really heavy like a lot of gluten free recipes can be.  The kids weren't the slightest bit interested in them, but with a bag of chocolate bars in the cupboard why would they be?

Sushi anyone?

My fridge is on the boring side this week I'm afraid.  We've been drinking fruit smoothies for breakfast most days (made with frozen cherries, strawberries, blueberries, V8 juice, greek yogurt, flax meal and avacado) so the fruit intake at lunch has been on the slim side.

Here DS5 has peanut butter and jelly sushi sandwiches, rice cakes, carrots and ranch and a carrot / flax muffin  the yogurt is lemon Brown Cow brand. 



DS7 has the same muffin, cheddar on crackers, rice cakes, sushi sandwiches and lemon yogurt with an apple sauce pack for snack (I normally avoid individually wrapped items but these were on clearance and sufficiently whined for).

Red White and Blue

For Veterans day on Friday I attempted to make the boys lunch boxes include red white and blue.....which is quite difficult when you have no tomatoes or apples and we try not to ingest red dye.

Here it is, we have veggie tortilla chips (dyed with beets) for the red part. cheese slices, rice cakes, cream cheese sandwich (for the white), dried apricots and pineapple and black grapes (for the blue part).

Dollar Tree finds

I scored in Dollar Tree and Staples yesterday, I found some super cute bento supplies.  Cute little containers that are great for the 'treat' portion of lunch or snack, and great for a small yogurt portion, (Staples $2 for 8) and some snowmen and gingerbread men picks that were part of some little game and not really picks at all but I couldn't resist.

Here is my first Christmas themed lunch of the season.  I saw the sandwich balls on www.easylunchboxes.com facebook page and had to try them.  They are whole wheat with cheddar in the middle.  The tree is half of a huge Bartlett pear with a carrot star and black grape presents.  The mini marshmallows are decorated with food markers.  DS5 LOVES it!  He also got a container of yogurt and some pirates booty.

Here is DS7's lunch. He has the same as DS5 without the marshmallows (he doesn't like them).  The little green tub is part of the set found at Staples and helps a great deal in this older version of a laptop lunch box that doesn't have a small container with a lid.

Finally, here is my lunch for today:  I spent a ridiculous amount of money on the fish shaped sandwich thins because they were cute....yes because they were cute....unfortunately I was more excited about them then the children so I won't be doing that again until the discount bread store starts selling them!
I have fruit and nut trail mix, a tuna salad sandwich, pretzel nuggets and the rest of the pear used in the trees above, seriously that pear was HUGE.

Themed lunches

October starts the holiday season with Halloween followed by Thanksgiving and Christmas.  The month between each is just a blurr and for that reason I am choosing to just make whatever theme I feel like for the next 2 months.
After finding lots of theme food and bento supplies in the last few weeks the lunches have been more for my enjoyment than anything else!

Here's the Halloween lunch I made the boys; they both took the same that day.  In the silicone cup is 2 dried apricots and a piece of dried pineapple (new food for us and very tasty!), peanut butter pretzel nuggets, strawberries, pasta salad made with Halloween shaped pasta (bought at Cost Plus World Market I love their shaped pasta, it is dyed using vegetables so the colours are not super bright but not nasty either), the pasta salad has tomatoes, cucumber, basil and cheddar cheese in it tossed with olive oil, and finally Greek yogurt with a drizzle of honey.