For KK & RF & all other MS fans of the daily bento preview

Back by popular demand...David's lunch. GF spaghetti, Greek yogurt with honey, two apples and cheese. Pretty simple.

This is what happens when you forget your lunch box at work; you get your three-year-old son's box instead.

Family life updates - Nov. 2009

1. We've been down with The Flu--yes, that one. Not as bad as it could have been. Mostly fever, cough, aches, more coughing.... Tylenol and lots of fluids, tissues and cough drops have seen us through. Hopefully we are on the last few days of it.

2. Great Wolf Lodge water park & hotel: lots of fun. Remember to bring Tylenol next time. As I've been told, us middle-aged persons were not made for hurtling through tubes of water at high speed! Wave pool was the best. Kids had a blast.

3. Open Wednesday website here; very cool hand-illustrated weekly lectionary readings and visual reflections on the Gospel.

4. My new Corelle Livingware Classic Cafe Red dishes. Love 'em! Cleaned out the whole dishes cupboard and the top of the fridge for good measure. Started in on the pots and pans cupboard but need some sticky hooks to hang the roasting rack and splatter guard to finish it off.

5. Advent starts this Sunday! Fiona made this very neat Advent wreath with the middle school youth group last week. The logs and greens are gathered from the parish property every year and the youth sell them to parishioners as a fund-raiser.

6. Fiona and I attended the "Medieval Cooking from Primary Sources" class at Falling Leaves Ithra in the Canton of Wyewood over the weekend. The who in the what in the where? It was my first SCA event in a decade, since Fiona was a toddler! We reconstructed a recipe for Pippin Puddings and baked them there on site. Super fun to catch up with friend Anne-Marie and introduce Fiona to the "Current Middle Ages." I think we'll be doing more of it in the future.

7. My brother got married on Oct. 30 to Erin Musolf of the lovely state of Wisconsin. We traveled to San Diego for the wedding, where Ellie was a flower girl for her second time and Fiona and Helena graduated to usher status. It was a very short trip. The only sightseeing we did was Cabrillo National Monument and several stores as we ran around getting our wedding clothes and gifts.

8. I am re-reading "The Lord of the Rings" very slowly. I cannot tell you how relaxing this is in the cold winterish evenings throughout all the little stresses and illnesses we've had lately. I've been at it a couple weeks and I'm only up to "The Council of Elrond." Lovely! The poetry especially is a treat right now. I'm having visions of doing up the bedrooms in a Middle Earth theme. ha ha

9. A Kids Gluten-Free Support Group has started up in the area. I'm going to try and make it to their next meeting in December. It's being held at Pizza Works which sells gf pizza/pasta. We now have four restaurants in the area selling gf pizza and we are by no means in the "big city." Pretty amazing!

10. I watched an entire season of "Dancing with the Stars" for the first time ever thoroughly enjoying all the performances of my childhood heartthrob Donny Osmond! I think he will win it! They would have to get Bruce Boxleitner or Pierce Brosnan on there next for me to watch another season though. :) Or maybe Lynda Carter!

Have a happy Thanksgiving day!

Lantern Walk on St. Martin's Day

This morning we made almond flour cookies that were supposed to look like horseshoes but spread out during baking and ended up looking like horse hoof prints.


Then we made a glorious mess with tissue and glue creating lanterns (one milk jug, one balloon and two jam jars--it's "use what you have liturgical-celebrating") in anticipation of the evening's lantern walk.



We (I) cleaned the house--must have been energized by that little bit of sun!--beautified the prayer corner and made shepherd's pie (cowboy's pie? it's beef not lamb) for dinner, setting it in the oven to bake while we took our walk.







Originally I'd meant to head out with the kids at dusk and arrive home by dark, but darkness comes quickly these days--and dinner takes longer to make than you anticipate naturally!--so we didn't head out til full dark and I didn't bring a flashlight.



We had our little lanterns though and we stumbled through the Very Dark Trail behind our house without injury and sang a bit (the parts of the Credo we could remember in Latin) as we talked about St. Martin of Tours and Martinmas traditions.


If today's weather is supposed to be a preview of winter, we're in for a pleasant one--today was the first dry and somewhat sunny day in weeks! Still crazy cold though!


We came home, ate our horse hoof cookies and sat down to dinner (the beef pie substituting for the traditional autumn butchering of meat animals, thankfully), prayed for our soldiers and veterans and afterwards played "The Beatitude Game" from MagnifiKid! until it was time to get ready for bed.


A good day. St. Martin, pray for us~

To arms! To arms!

Halloween 2009

David's triple-chocolate-chip birthday

David requested chocolate-chip cupcakes for his birthday. I used a Betty Crocker gluten-free yellow cake mix and just added a bag of Nestle semi-sweet chips. For frosting I made basic butter frosting with a stick of butter, a couple cups of powdered sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla and a little milk. To that I also added another bag of chocolate chips! In retrospect, I think mini-chips would have been easier on the teeth. This was served with chocolate chip ice cream (of course).

Bento Post No. 26

Some kid-made bentos recently...

Fiona made a kitty sandwich by actually opening the package of nori we've had for a month and cutting out little whiskers and such with scissors; they're held on with a dab of mayo.

Yes, she wears her iPod shuffle everywhere now. She's got about four albums on there...lots of "sorry, I didn't hear you...." LOL

Helena made her own steak bento. Those are apple chunks at left. I forgot to tell her the lemon-water trick.

Another Fiona creation, this one made in a bit of a hurry.

I am pretty much only making David's lunch at night now since he leaves so darn early (or he's supposed to). If I have left overs I dish them into the bentos after dinner but leave the rest of it empty for the girls to fill in the morning. I set out a variety of things for them to choose from and they do pretty well. If there are no leftovers they make sandwiches or bagels or sometimes gf chicken nuggets. This enables me to stay up late watching "Castle" without having to stay up *really* late making bentos til midnight! ;)

Bento Post No. 25

Sorry for the unannounced blogging break. I've been kept busy reacquainting myself with a favorite series of books, the "Outlander" series by Diana Gabaldon. Reading three books, each 800 to 1400 pages, has kept me quite occupied.

I have been making our usual daily bentos though. Although staying up late reading has moved bento-making to early mornings which hasn't been as terrible or frenzied as I worried it would be. Here are today's lunches:

Ellie has four gluten-free chicken nuggets, some steamed carrot slices, a tiny floret of broccoli, one measly grape (not really measly...it's just that she never eats the grapes and I keep thinking if I just put ONE in there maybe she'll it out of pity or something), a eggcup of ketchup for the nuggets and a plum-flavored hard candy from Daiso.

Helena's lunch is one chicken leg, some steamed veggies, grapes, a Babybel cheese and a plum candy. There are a couple of tiny blue ice packets in there as well.

Fiona has the same lunch as Helena but with more veggies and fruit--although I didn't pack her any silverware for the veggies. Oops.

I love those pre-washed bags of veggies you throw in the microwave to steam. Yes, it's much cheaper to buy unwashed veggies in bulk but inevitably I end up wasting a ton and throwing them out.

I'm also working on some kitchen cupboard organization--making space for all this bento stuff I've acquired! Photos forthcoming.