New Year New Lunch

It's been a while.  I almost forgot how to sign into this blog.  Here I am with my first lunch in ages.  I stopped blogging because I had less time to do so but also because my lunches had gotten really uninteresting.  Certainly nothing worth writing about.  Tomorrow's lunch is a little bit better than usual so here I am sharing it.

Juju will be feasting on: Fuyu persimmons.  These are simply amazing right now.  They are contrasted in color and flavor by some rather tart pomegranate seeds.  I am also serving English peas - today was the first day I found them at the Hollywood Farmer's Market since last year.  I am so excited they are back!  I also included cucumbers with purple radish.  My guess is she will ditch the radish without even trying it but they are so beautiful I had to include them.  She also has a lox and cream cheese sammie topped off with home grown chives.  So little actually grows in my garden so I will take what I can get.  The dessert in the middle is a dark chocolate square from an amazing kid-less vacation we just took in Napa.  I spent some time today making a delicious vichyssoise which I will blog about later.  It's good to be back!

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.

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:

Lunch on May 4, 2011 - I made a sandwich!!

I get teased by a few of you who chide me for never making anything basic for Juju's lunch.  While I do enjoy that her lunches are sui generis when compared to what most people pack, I have avoided sandwiches thus far only because Juju doesn't really know what to do with them.  She doesn't really get how to hold both pieces of bread plus the middle and take a bite out of everything at once.  So, she usually picks the sandwich apart, eats what she wants, and leaves a considerable mess.

Still, I realize that sandwiches are practical, convienent, and arguably as tasty as anything I've packed so far.  One of the ReSnackIt bags I ordered was sandwich size so here goes:

Lunch tomorrow includes a turkey sandwich on La Brea bakery whole grain bread, carrots and hummus, a container of cucumber stars, pomegranate seeds and crimini mushrooms all chopped together, and a bowl of trail mix made of peanuts, almonds, dried raspberries and semi sweet chocolate chips.  I wish someone would make me a lunch like this everyday. 

I think this is the first time I am sending meat in a lunch.  I am not opposed to Juju eating meat, I just don't always like the idea of meat served cold (plus Juju's lunches are only cooled by ice packs and I wouldn't want a luke-warm meat dish on a hot day either).  But a turkey sandwich seems ok.  Also, when I was younger I went to a Jewish day school for three years and we could only bring dairy lunches so I think I am conditioned to think of sack lunches are vegetarian (well, pescetarian really).  Perhaps I should broaden my horizons.