Showing posts with label cookie cutters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cookie cutters. Show all posts

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Lunch on February 24 - stepping up my game

I really enjoy this blog.  Forgetting that I love to pack lunches these days, I just really like the distraction.  I have a lot of work to do tonight and this is a great way to relax and procrastinate.

I was not relaxing in the kitchen on lunch duty tonight though.  I mentioned my friend Leemore in my last post who is also a PlanetBox fan.  She told me she has also photographed her lunches from time to time and yesterday she sent me a few.  They completely put mine to shame.  You'll notice I stepped up my game a bit for tomorrow's lunch and it's all because of Leemore.  More about her in a moment.


Tomorrow I am serving falafel chips with edamame hummus, strawberries and grapes, an egg salad sandwich with cucumber letters, and vegetable "flowers" with string beans as stems and cucumbers as the petals.  I put small circles of carrots and even smaller circles of strawberry pieces in the center for color.  Dessert is a granola bar cut into the shape of a heart.  In case you were wondering the letters are stuck on the sandwich using hummus as glue.  Perhaps I should have used the same method with the flowers.  I don't have any confidence that they will arrive to the lunch table in this condition. . .

I completely stole the flower idea from Leemore who did something similar using cucumbers as stems in this at home lunch to the left.  She told me she served: "cheese and avocado sandwiches in the shapes of airplanes and clouds, flowers made with cucumbers as stems, strawberries, carrots, and pomegranate seeds as flowers."  I took one look at this lunch and wondered how this is not yet a competitive sport.  Keep in mind that not only is Leemore a mom but she is a full-time fancy schmancy lawyer and she still found time to pull this off.
Her other lunches are equally amazing and she makes fantastic use of sandwich cutters.  I'm jealous of her tools but I'm trying to take a break from spending on my lunch stash these days so I will just have to live vicariously through her bread slicing.  Here are just some of the amazing lunches she has sent to school recently with her descriptions below:


"avocado and cheese sandwich in shape of a truck, homemade sweet potato chips, homemade kale chips, apples rubbed with lime (tastes like a green apple jolly rancher, and citrus keeps it from browning), and a sliver of date wrapped in coconut"


"turkey avocado sandwich in shape of whales or dolphins, strawberries and mango, green peas, carrots, and one choco chip for dessert"


"valentine inspired: almond butter and jelly sandwich in shape of a mommy elephant and baby elephant, strawberries and cherry tomatoes, apple with lime, red pepper (which r loves and i now force myself to eat), and tart dried cherries for dessert"


"an avocado crackerwich (i am out of bread and we all love ak-mak crackers), mango and strawberries, leftover potato medley from dinner last night (sweet potato/potato), carrots and cherry tomatoes, and homemade granola for dessert.  cant wait to see if the granola spills over into the other compartments, but i dont think it will."

Amazing, right?  I told you so.  I also have to thank Leemore for reminding me that my family loves kale chips.  We made some tonight and they were delicious!  A warning, watch the kale while it's roasting, I burned the first batch because I wasn't paying attention!

I already knew Leemore was gorgeous and smart, but now that I know she has such a talent at the lunch table, I'm expecting her to share more lunches and ideas with me and all of you.  Maybe we can even get her to guest blog.

Have a great weekend!


Sunday, June 19, 2011

Gilding the silly

Remember when I mentioned that I wanted to play with my cookie cutters again?  Well, this time I went too far.  In fact, if you looked up the term "gilding the lily" in a dictionary of idioms I am quite sure you would find the following photo.

I used a heart shaped cutter to cut hearts out of mozzarella cheese.  I placed them on small crackers.  Then, I cut hearts out of Trader Joe's fruit leather and used two of them to fill in the negative space on the slice of cheese.  I then went crazy with a "J" shaped cutter and a small Persian cucumber.  Overdone, yes?  But Juju ate 90% of this snack so I think it was worth it.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Star studded snack

I pulled out my cookie cutters! 

We recently transitioned Juju from a crib to a bed which means she hasn't been napping everyday any more.  This puts a serious crimp in my work-from-home schedule.  It does however give me time to hang around the kitchen while she's awake and come up with cute snacks.

Today I served up star-shaped cheese and cucumber on 12 grain mini crackers: