Totoro Lunches

 The boys LOVE Miyazaki, like their parents.  Totoro is a household favorite.  In fact, our youngest's nursery is entirely decorated like My Neighbor Totoro.  Here are their matching lunches.  The Totoros are both turkey sandwiches with cut cheese and spinach for decoration.  The pupils of the eyes are tiny bits of raisin.

The banana trick was new to me this year.  As you can see below, when you first "draw" on the peel (making a firm indentation with a toothpick, as I would draw with pen on paper) you can't see much.  By the time lunchtime rolls around, the peel has bruised to make lovely dark lines where I drew the design.

                              Before:

                                After:

Being a huge Whovian, I particularly like this artists banana designs:
http://ravenriss.blogspot.com/2011/03/i-draw-on-bananas-now-bananas-are-cool.html
As you can see, I did not invent banana art and have not even begun to "scratch the surface" of what is possible.  I will certainly be showing more of it in the future.


**Important note to school lunch packers though, if you like to use bento-style all-in-one boxes like me, bananas can be very pungent when included with the meal.  Be warned that they can often infect sandwiches with a hazy banana smell by lunch time...as well as everything else in that box!  Some banana fans are fine with that.  Other kids lose their interest in having bananas included with lunch very quickly. (you will note that I put a banana in only ONE of the above lunches for just this reason)

Batman Grilled Cheese Lunch

My 4 year old (3 at the time) is obsessed with superheroes (just like his mama) and he requested a lunch to match his Pottery Barn lunchbox.  I obliged with this:

Batman Lunch

This is a grilled cheese.  I started by trying to hand cut out the bat signal from the top slice of bread so that the cheese would show through.  This was not successful, as dark rye is a little too soft to manage a distinct shape with a paring knife.  Pre-sliced cheese IS, however, a fantastic medium for food pictures, as I have since discovered.  So with this one, I made the grilled cheese as normal, then added a bat signal cheese to the top.  My sandwich was not yet cooled completely, so it began to melt a bit (hence the translucency)  Also, note that when including grilled cheese to a lunchbox, always let it cool first, otherwise you get condensation and soggy bread.

I have since seen similar ideas online using Halloween Bat cookie cutters.  I, personally, rarely use cookie cutters, except for my FAVORITE little star one, and occasionally some others.  I really like to hand cut shapes myself.

I would think that if you grill an open-faced grilled cheese, then toast the top bread separately, and cookie cut from the toast, you may get that "window" into the sandwich I was trying to do at first.  I don't know, I never went back and tried that technique, but maybe you can tell me if you have!

Football Lunch

So I suppose I need to start somewhere.  This was the lunch that "kicked" it all off, so to speak.

Football Lunch

Now, I've always been more of a "inside" kid, drawing and reading and watching Star Wars.  I'm not a big football fan, but I just couldn't resist making this one from Dark Rye and hand-cut sliced cheddar.  This is a turkey sandwich on the inside.  You'll see that I always like to keep it healthy, balanced, and low on sugar.  This lunch included fresh fruit, steamed veggies with hummus, and a bonus cheese cut into a star...for my little all-star!  (awwww)