New Plate!!

My friend sent me this adorable plate, and I had to put it on here!

How cute is that?

May Flowers Bento 5/13/13

Today I'm posting about the hubby's lunch, and my lunch (and breakfast), in addition to G's lunch. Oh, and I finished my first quilt!  Woo hoo!  I found this GIGANTIC Italian carrot at the produce market a few miles from my house.  I'd never seen an Italian carrot before but apparently they have some kind of steroid in the soil!  Seriously - this thing was the size and shape of a Pringles can!!  It smelled just like a regular carrot so I had to get one to punch shapes out of since none of the carrots at the grocery store are ever fat enough.  Oh, and don't mind the background in the pics today, it's my super beat-up kitchen table.  Hand-me-down from my mom & dad - it's older than me!

G's lunch: cheddar, provolone, & honey turkey flowers with wheat crackers, 4 organic liquid-filled gummy penguins from Trader Joe's.  I know, I know - not fitting the 'May flowers' theme but they didn't have a flowery candy!  She also had Italian carrot & cucumber flowers, with grapes and raspberries.  I packed her a lot of cracker sandwich fixins because she usually shares her lunches with her cousin and he tends to not eat the healthier stuff.  And don't worry, there's actually three thick slices of both the carrots and cucumbers, they're just stacked.

Here's Bear's lunch for tomorrow!  It seems like there's always an excuse not to make a lunch for him, and then I end up mad that he spent money on lunch when we have so much here at home. However, today I packed it!  I used one of my Sistema cube boxes.  They're pretty nifty.  The two compartments on the right are the bottom, and the compartment on the left has a top that clips on, then the whole thing flips over and it all gets secured with a clip on the side.  I use them pretty often for him, not really all that much for me because I tend to graze throughout the day and it's a pain to keep getting it out and putting it away.  He just eats three meals a day.  In the upper compartment, I made him a pepper ham & cheddar sandwich with G's leftover cheddar pieces from cutting out her flowers.  He also got more wheat crackers and dark chocolate peanut butter cups from Trader Joe's.  I like the bottom compartments of these cubes because it seems to be perfectly portioned for fruits & veggies.  In this case, raspberries, grapes, & strawberries on the left, broccoli (with Italian carrot sliced below, & ranch in the white tub.  I just got the white tubs in a pack of 10 hanging in the isle of my local grocery store.  I stuck picks in his because he doesn't always get a chance to do more than wipe his hands with a baby wipe before he eats and I didn't want to make him touch moist food if he didn't need to.

And my breakfast/lunch/snack.  The bottom container is another Sistema one, with vanilla Greek yogurt in the right, and raspberries and my home-made granola in the left in a silicone baking cup. The top container is one I got from Uwajimaya on the other side of Portland from my home.  It's got a removable divider, & a clear, microwave-safe lid.  I don't microwave it, but it has a vent if I did.  Anyway, on the left are the scraps from G's Italian carrot & cucumber flowers, plus one because I didn't think it was enough.  There's ranch dressing in the little round tub.  I also packed strawberries & grapes with more yogurt for dipping in the square tub.  In the red silicone baking cup, I've got Annie's Bunny Friends mix (chocolate bunnies, honey graham bunnies, & chocolate chip bunny crackers) with a few chocolate-covered raisins on top.  I also packed four frozen chicken taquitos from Trader Joe's on top.

And the quilt!  Hubby's cousin B was piecing blocks of fabric together one day when I walked in and sort of took over.  I've made little random projects in the past, and watched my mom quilt for years (she's an award-winning quilter.  Really, she is), but my only personal quilting experience was making a coaster for my craft desk.  I totally redesigned her quilt, then took it to do the actual sewing and quilting because their rinky-dink sewing machine would in NO WAY handle a quilt!  I also did mitered corners, pretty proud of that :)  B was making it for a friend's new baby, so it was nice and little.  I tried to get G to pose with it but she would only make obnoxious faces so you're stuck with a picture of me, taken by her.  It was really warm in my kitchen so I'm super greasy!  (I cropped out all my crap in the background)

Here's one of her obnoxious ones:

It pretty much continued like that for 8 pictures...


*Disclaimer: I do not get any type of affiliate discount, rebate, reward, payout or whatnot from linking to these sites.  I purely go to Uwajimaya about twice a year when I can force myself to drive to that side of town

My Melody/Sea Life Bento 5/8/13

Hey, I just figured out how to view some stats and I've had 6 views from America, 2 from Germany, and 1 from South Korea.  That means that at least 3 of them weren't me!!  Woot woot!  I'm figuring more of this out every day :)

So that this post has some purpose, let's look at G's lunch yesterday (5/8/13)!

I tried (and failed miserably) to make a sandwich pocket.  I've harassed Kendra into giving me gotten some tips about it that have seemed to work a little better.  She recommended that I microwave the bread for a few seconds to make it soft enough to squish.  And that, all else fails, cream cheese makes great glue!  I tried the microwaving on her next lunch, but I had waaaay too much jelly in that one so it slopped out everywhere!  Her sandwich in this lunch was cut with a large egg-shaped cutter & has pb&j.  Under it are some Stauffer's cheddar whales.  I was extremely shocked that they have no artificial ingredients!!  I figured, being $1 at Target, that they'd be chock-full of crap but they aren't!  Which is a good thing, because they have the best, most cheesiest flavor of any cheese crackers we've tried.  Even better than Goldfish!  I used a My Melody (Hello Kitty character) plastic baran to decorate her sandwich.

I put vanilla Chobani Greek yogurt in a little dip tub that I got in a pack of 10 hanging in an isle at Albertson's.  I stole from Kendra came up with a completely original idea, where you put a cookie cutter in the yogurt, suck some out with a straw, and then fill it in with something.  In this case, more strawberry-rhubarb jam.  She loved it!!  She'd never had Greek yogurt before, only regular, so I wasn't sure how she'd react to the tanginess but she asked for more :)

I cut the carrot coins into flowers (sort of - they were skinny carrots) with a veggie cutter.  Not quite sure where I got it, but it came with a cherry-blossom cutter as well.

Some apples on fish and crab picks, alternated to try to fun it up a bit to get her to eat it.  She's not a huge fan of apples (I learned later that it's because she has a hard time biting through the peel, so cutting it into chucks lessens this issue), but she ate them this way.  Gotta be smarter than the five-year old!

The white blobs in the silicon baking cup are these strawberry liquid-filled marshmallows we got on a recent trip to Uwajimaya in Beaverton.

This box at Target is very similar to the one I used for this lunch:

I want this one so badly!!  The one I used is only one layer, does not have flatware, and has a clear lid.  There are cute octopi on the bottom of the box that she was delighted to find after eating, and pink waves on the lid.  Adorable!

*Disclaimer: I do not get any type of affiliate discount, rebate, reward, payout or whatnot from linking to these sites.  I purely go to Uwajimaya about twice a year when I can force myself to drive to that side of town, and am obsessed with Kendra's blog.  It's kinda creepy, actually.  A little stalker-ish. ;D

Gwakermalolee

Tonight's episode brought to you by the letter 'G!' (get it, guacamole...G...hardeeharhar)

Well, it's really a part of a five-layer dip I was coerced into volunteered to make for a work potluck the next day. My guac is legendary. No really, they've written songs about the delicious goodness that is my guac! Ok, might be exaggerating a touch, but only a little ;)

I doubled my normal recipe as I have to feed a horde of fourteen with it, rather than my usual six.

Best-ever guacamole

(I don't even know why I'm doing this as a recipe, I never measure the ingredients!)

3 large avocados (mine were freakishly tiny so I used 6)
1 tsp-ish salt
A few squirts of lime juice
1 tomato, diced (I used a Roma- they were on sale)
1/2 onion, finely chopped (I usually use purple, but I used yellow this time because for some reason, purple ones were only available in a bag of 8 at this grocery store and I wasn't driving all over town for a purple onion so I used what I had at home. My favorite farm stand closed down :( )
3 or so cloves garlic, minced
Jalapeño, minced, to taste (I didn't put any in this batch because it was a work potluck)
1 tbsp-ish fresh or dried cilantro (I used dried because the pup decided my garden was a free salad bar this year)

Peel and de-pit the avocados and plop them in a bowl.

Add your salt and lime juice.

Start smooshing up your avocados with a spoon, then mix in tomatoes, onions, garlic, & cilantro.

 My cilantro is in another picture because I completely forgot about it until I already started mixing.

You don't have any artificial preservatives in your guac, so make sure you store it in a container with plastic wrap right against it, no air space to avoid browning. Yummers!

And the five-layer dip I actually made it to be a part of:

Numero Uno!!

High-roh!!

Wow! It's my very first blog post! I read blogs, I laugh at blogs, I talk to people about blogs, I link to blogs, but I've never had one. It's pretty daunting, to be honest. To have this whole website to yourself, to put whatever you'd like to on. Scary!

So let's start with a little background: I'm Jingle (fake name, obvs!). I'm married to Bear. I've got three stepkids (Z, K, and C), and a little monster of my own (Squirell). We've got a (as of 4/15/13) nine-month old Rottweiler. Oh, and one Beta fish named Bob. I work full-time, and try really hard to make not-too-awfully-unhealthy meals for all the heathens. I have also recently started making bentos on a regular basis, for the hub, Squirell, and myself. I'm in love with two other bento blogs (Biting the Hand that Feeds You & Wendolonia - they're both on the West coast, like me!) and I figured, rather than bore my Facebook peeps with all those pics, I'd slap them on a blog.

So, it'll be bentos, recipes, and random crap from here on out, k?

Yeah, I haven't figured out how to make an embedded link (is that what it's called?) yet...

FYI, I figured it out mere seconds before posting this!  Now to figure out how to upload pictures from my phone...


Figured it out!!

(this was my puppy, Angus, at about two months.  Isn't he the cutest thing in the friggin' world?)