Emperor's New Groove

Hey y'all. Sorry that I haven't posted recently. My kiddos have been off of school for Christmas break for a week or so now. And when they are home, I love it, but it throws off my groove! We do fun things together , like geocaching or a kids' museum, but I somehow forget that dinner still needs to happen and laundry still needs to get done. Needless to say, I am looking forward to school resuming, and me getting my groove back.

Speaking of 'my groove', that is one of my favorite lines from "Emperor's New Groove". When Emperor Kuzco is dancing and boogying, he bumps into a peasant, and then exclaims, 'You threw off my groove!!!'

Well, my family loves that movie. So in honor of that famous line, I present one of my first ever bento lunches from "Emperor's New Groove'. (Please excuse the not-so-great picture quality. This was one of my first picture-taking sessions of bento lunches.)

In this picture are 3 lunches, 1 for each of my kiddos, and 1 for my husband. This is a perfect way to showcase how to prepare and pack a bento lunch in different shapes and sizes of bento boxes.

First, I made the star of the show, I mean, of the lunch - Emperor Kuzco as a llama. After printing out a cartoon llama silhouette, I used that to form the basic outline on the bread slices. Once I cut out the bread into the desired llama shapes, I smeared them with peanut butter, and placed them into the center of the lunch boxes.

Next up is Kronk's spinach puffs. I unwrapped store bought crescent roll dough, add baby spinach leaves, sprinkled it with cheese, rolled it up, and baked it according to the package directions. Presto ... Spinach puffs! I also tucked in some baby spinach all around the sandwich, for added nutrition.

My favorite part of this lunch:  A pillbug from Mudka's Meat Mug restaurant. My creation is reminiscent of the cartoon pill bug, although much more appetizing and delicious! I began by baking potatoes - both regular and sweet potatoes. Once the regular potatoes were baked and slightly cooled, I scraped out enough potato pulp to make a potato shell. Then I quickly dipped it into blue-tinted water; I say 'quickly', because if you leave the potato in water too long, it becomes mushy. Meanwhile, I mashed up the sweet potatoes. Lastly, I just dropped a few spoonfuls of the yummy orange stuff into the blue-tinged potato shell. Tada ... A yummy pill bug.

Lastly, the broccoli. At one point in the movie, the emperor's advisor, Yzma, is attempting to poison the emperor, in order to assume his throne. When the poison fails to kill Emperor Kuzco, turning him into a llama, Yzma panics. Demonstrating with stalks of broccoli, she tries to instruct her advisor, Kronk, to "hit him on the head". Therefore, mini broccoli stalks in this lunch; however, these are for eating, not hitting people on the head. :)

Although this lunch did take a bit of prep (just how do you cut a llama-shaped sandwich?) and a bit of work (baking the potatoes, etc), my family loved the creativity of seeing a favorite, silly movie in lunch-form. And THAT made it all worth it.