"It's A Wonderful Life" Bento

On Monday, I posted a picture of one of my all-time favorite Christmas movie, and I challenged you to name that movie.

One guess was "A Christmas Story"; nope, but good guess.

Others guessed "It's A Wonderful Life" - if you were one of those people, you were right!

I tried to use several components to portray the "George Lassoes the Moon" scene.

(1) First, there's the Babybel cheese that I used to depict the moon.

(2) The "person" is made from buffalo chicken bites, and is using a Twizzler Pull-n-Peel rope to lasso the moon. The "person" represents George Bailey, while the buffalo chicken bites are a nod to the song that George and Mary sang in this scene - "Buffalo gals, won't you come out tonight? And dance by the light of the moon."

(3) The broccoli florets are placed to illustrate the bushes that Mary hid in once she accidentally lost her robe.

(4) The mini bell pepper is cut into a bell shape, to represent Zuzu's phrase "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings."

(5) The angel-shaped angel food cake represents Clarence, George Bailey's guardian angel, who eventually gets his wings in the end.

Hope you enjoyed my culinary nod to "It's A Wonderful Life". If you have not seen this movie, rent it or borrow it from a friend; it's a heart-warming Christmas classic. If you already love this film, watch it again. I know I will be watching it again soon!

Name That Christmas Movie

Today, let's play a little game. I've made a bento lunch of one of my all-time favorite Christmas movies.

See if you can name that Christmas movie, and some of the hidden components. (Hint: there are at least four.)

I'll reveal the answers on Thursday. Have fun!

Lorax Bento

Today, I want to introduce you to one of my personal favorites. I made this lunch a while ago, right after "The Lorax" came out on RedBox. (So thankful for RedBox, since that is how our family views most "new movies". Cheap family date in the comfort of our own home.)

To create the Lorax, I used an oval-shaped cookie cutter to cut slices of bread and a slice of cheddar cheese. Then, I simply made a ham sandwich, topped with the oval-shaped cheddar slice. I hand-cut the Lorax's mustache and bushy eyebrows out of yellow American cheese.  Small circles of ham became the Lorax's eyes and mouth. With a few dots of black decorative gel, the Lorax came to life.

Crisp, green celery sticks represent the grassy hills on which the Truffala trees grew. To craft the Truffula trees, I used pretzel sticks, thin slices of deli ham, and yellow American cheese.  This part was super easy. I simply used cookie cutters to cut various sized circles out of the ham and cheese. Next, I layered them on the "grassy hills", added a pretzel stick to each to symbolize the trunk, and voila ... tasty Truffula trees!

I added a few finishing touches of blue corn chips for the sky, a yellow container of salsa (in my husband's lunch) for the sun, and goldfish to represent the Humming-fish.

As you can see, I made three different lunches - one for my husband and for each of our 2 kids. This just goes to show you that it is possible to make a creative lunch, no matter what size or type of lunchbox you have.

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.