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.

It's very easy to get distracted....especially in my world it seems....

I've had a crazy 3 weeks, nothing I can blog about but enough to make my head rattle and for me not to have the capacity to write anything that made any sense to anyone but me. I'm back in college with a very dull class that has me as captivated as a 3 year old learning table manners right now too.
Anyway, I plan on catching up as I've been taking photo's still.

Trying to clean out my big pantry (I have a big one and a small one) I came across 2 boxes of graham cracker crumbs.  I also happened to have a spare jar of peanut butter and so the peanut butter graham bon bons were born....well OK made from the recipe on the box.  They might even last more than one day if I get on and do my work instead of blogging and going on facebook.

They are made from Adams peanut butter which I love, it's just peanuts - no salt, sugar, oil or anything, just peanuts....YUM!  Of course then I added powdered sugar as per the recipe and ruined that healthy jar of smushed peanuts but never mind....it made a lot....that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
They also have graham cracker crumbs and rice krispies in them and I threw in about 1/8 of a cup of ground flax seed to, erm, make me feel better about giving the kids them to binge on after school?  Seriously I throw that stuff in everything, blame Costco and their silly big bags of it.

The white ones are coated in white candy coating and the chocolate ones are milk chocolate chips with a smidgen of coconut oil.

These are tiny and very Reeses peanut butter cup like so really it's impossible for even me to eat more than 2 at one sitting.

My apologies for the bad photo - I was too lazy to get the real camera out and the iPod camera sucks.

Late nights and left over lunches

Due to some late working hours this week, DH will be taking 2 smaller meals rather than one lunch to work.  Made from the leftovers from Sunday's dinner, this little bento (bought from eBay), will serve as a small evening meal for him. As you can see the top of the bento has cut up strawberries and 1/2 an orange.  The lower container has mashed potatoes, cauliflower, mock chicken and veg pie and red onion gravy.

I decided this morning to pack everyones lunch, including my own, so here they are:

Up first is DH7's lunch.  I will be amazed if he eats all this after having a large breakfast but it's chilled so whatever is left will be his after school snack today.  He has a hot dog roll cheddar sandwich, mini carrots, strawberries, 2 granola flats (I just discovered these and love them!), a tea biscuit and a cucumber/tomato salad (recipe - which is basically the dressing, from the Vegan Lunch Box Around the World).

DS5 helped to construct his lunch today and will graze on any leftovers this afternoon.  He has a peanut butter and jelly hot dog roll, 4 cubes of cheddar on piks, cucumber and tomato salad, carrots with ranch dressing for dipping, a few peanut butter filled pretzels and strawberries.

Last but not least is my lunch.  I have the same cucumber/tomato salad as the boys with strawberries and left overs from Fridays dinner - cheese ravioli with some spiral 3 colour rotini and a homemade tomato sauce.  I also had 1/2 an avocado and a couple of granola flats.

I have to add that I wasn't very awake this morning while making mine and managed to over fill the top one so the lid wouldn't shut...not that it really mattered because where I put the ravioli is actually the outer cover so it was all upside down and couldn't be shut correctly anyway...HA HA...good job it was only going in the fridge and not out to work!