Playing with Bento Lunch

Gizmo has been attending a program for homeschool kids this year. She attends a school once a week and gets to do exciting things like ballroom dancing, piano, and debate. She has been loving it. In addition to learning a lot, it has also helped provide more opportunities to hang out with kids her age. The school does not have a cafeteria available to them, so everybody brings there own lunch, which is certainly not a problem for us since I would most likely be packing her lunch anyway because of her special diet (gluten and dairy free).

While this has brought me much opportunity to practice my bento skills, I have slacked off. While she has had a nutritious and tasty lunch for her each week, they really were not anything special....just stuff like sandwiches or soup in her thermos. She was telling me last week though that there were plenty of microwaves available to heat up lunches, and that got me thinking. One of the reasons I tended to not prepare bento lunches as much was the fact that my kids did not really like eating the food at room temperature, and now that problem has been solved!

So this week to got a cute lunch. Nothing too fancy, but she got a kick out of showing her friends.

The bottoms tray has three mini burgers, along with a bit of chopped green onion, and the bottom tray has sticky rice with flowers that have green onion stems, carrot and red bell pepper blossoms, and pea leaves. The pink elephant in the middle has some soy sauce.

I packed it up along with a small container with some ketchup and mayonnaise to dip her burgers in. She also took along an oroblanco (kind of like a grapefruit) for some fruit. She said it was a very tasty lunch.