Are you even ready for this?...
I’m honestly sorry for the quality of the following two boxes. We were in the middle of packing for nearly two weeks of camping, and I was more preoccupied with clearing the fridge than making pretty lunches. I did think I’d be able to post it at the time, but... life. We moved around eastern Washington, somehow always managing to stay off the grid, then came home to piles of laundry and a tent in need of extensive repairs after force 6 winds got the better of it at Wanapum State Park. And no sooner that was done, I whisked the two of us away to the “family-friendly” Timber! festival, for some more open-field camping and eating out of Mountain House pouches.
Where we also established that Mr T. (and a few other tender-eared souls) are not Recess Monkey fans. But I digress.
Good news is, I think I’ve gotten all that outdoors-ing out of my system now, and can get back to eating better, sleeping soft, and telling more silly stories. Here it goes.
- steamed carrot “flowers”
- broccoli and peas “meadow”
- ham and cheese sandwich with veggie chip “dry leaves”
I was rushing this as much as possible, so instead of shaping perfect petals, I just cut bits off with an arm of a little star cookie cutter.
Then, I quickly and messily sliced those into individual flowers.
And scattered them on a bed of steamed broccoli and peas. There, meadow.
The bag of chips was for camping, but I cracked it open early. Couldn’t resist including some “rustling dry leaves,” and we do love the treat of a snap-crackle-pop ham and cheese sandwich from time to time.
Mr T. swiped it happily enough as I tried putting the top of the sandwich on.
It met with bemused approval, and got eaten, meadow and all, though Mr T. insisted these weren’t flowers at all.
As long as it gets eaten, I’m happy.
As I’m working on getting back to this blog, Mr T. keeps asking to have this or that lunchbox again. The flower-gears came up a couple of days ago, and it seemed like a good opportunity to try something slightly different. (I’ve rewritten that day’s story “bite” as well, to account for the supposedly falling rain, so it made sense there would be no more crunchy veggie crisps.)
Baldrick at the edge of the now soggy forest.
I’ve taken some ideas from Yum-Yum Bento Box and enslavedbyfaeries, and put them together into this meatball mouse.
It did require some investment:
Tweezers, mini condiment pen, and two sets of metal flower cutters. Luckily, we live in a city sizeable enough to have a few Daiso Japan stores, so it all cost barely as much as a single latte.
I knew from my previous experiences with a plastic bear-shaped cutter that punching shapes out of fresh pepper was going to be tricky, but Mr T. loves his peppers, and multicolored carrots are not in season yet, and there was a chance metal cutters would fare better. They did, somewhat. The edges were still ragged and some of the flowers cracked, but they were just the pop of color I wanted, and the gloss was very rain-like. I did perch them on a pile of steamed carrot flower-gears anyway, seeing as that was what the boss requested.
The mouse was another challenge. I liked the enslavedbyfaeries’ idea of using a mini corndog, but wasn’t going to buy a whole bag of them just to make this one thing. Mini sausages were another option, but I couldn’t find any without corn syrup in them. I was, however, making myself some Whole30 breakfast sausage, so I rolled some of the meat into balls and baked them along my patties. Yum-Yum Bento Box recommended frying dry spaghetti to make it hold up in moist food, and I used that trick for the whiskers. It was their idea as well to use a straw to cut out small circles and ovals (squashed straw), and that’s what I did for eyes and nose. Then, I used a condiment pen filled with mayo to attach the eyes and nose (though a dipped toothpick would have worked as well), and finished the eyes with a little seaweed. I made ears from sliced almonds and tail out of cheese, and sat the mouse on a bed of fried green tomatoes and leafy greens, mixed in with fresh pea shoots for that shaggy, mossy look.
(Mr T. won’t touch tomatoes unless they’re fried or cooked down to a sauce, so that’s how it has to be done in our house. I won’t touch melon no matter what, so I can respect his aversion to that one particular mouthfeel. Which is to say, do whatever works for you and your family, and have fun with it.)
We made this on a day off school, and started a little late, so by the time the box was all set, Mr T. had already eaten most of a can of chickpeas, all the carrot and pepper offcuts, and whatever else he’d scavenged from the fridge. By the time the box made it to the table, he was no longer hungry. All he ate was the mouse (which he thought was awesome and just the right size to pop in his mouth whole), and the pepper flowers (his favorite vegetable). But that’s the great thing about mostly-veggie bentos:
You can always mix them with an egg and make them into a mini omelette or two. That’s next day’s breakfast sorted! Just pop into a toaster (in a folded strip of parchment paper), and you’re golden. I served ours this morning with a side of fresh strawberries, and Mr T. ate it all up.
