Colored Carrots

This lunch isn't that exciting except that it has colored carrots in it! Red chile quesadillas, peaches and colored carrots. These carrots not only look beautiful but each carrot has it's own unique healthy feature. For example yellow carrots contain xanthophylls, a substance that supports vision and lowers lung cancer risks. Red carrots contain lycopene, which helps prevent heart disease and some cancers. Purple carrots contain anthocyanins, pigments that act as powerful antioxidants to neutralize harmful free radicals. White carrots lack pigment, but may contain other health-promoting phytochemicals. So now you know. Stores around here carry these carrots every couple of weeks so they really are a treat.

Yaki -Onigiri and Hot Dogs

Believe it or not as much as I love bento I've never given my kids octo-dogs. So I bought some nitrate free hot dogs from Trader Joe's and thought I would try it. Also at Trader Joe's was frozen yaki-onigiri. Now I've always just made regular onigiri or rice balls, so being as these were different and already made well I figured why not? Turns out my kids loved them! Also they even ate the cold octo- dogs. This was a pretty successful lunch overall but definitely an occasional one. A great recipe for yaki onigiri is found at

lunch in a box. I think I will try making and freezing some myself.

St. Patricks Day

Happy St. Patty's day! Last night I thought I would get lunch started for today by making bagels and mixing in some green candied cherries. So here's how it went down. Problem number one: apparently candied cherries are a Christmas only item. I only tried two stores but that was enough. So I thought I would substitute green jelly candies. Okay so this is where that rule "read the whole recipe first" comes in. I have made these before but it's been awhile and I ended up adding baking soda to my bagel dough that was only supposed to go in the boiling water. I didn't give up hope right away, but yes they were are disaster. So at this point I realize I'm out of eggs and it's too late to go out. So fortunately I had a vegan recipe for pretzel dough, and out popped these green pretzel shamrocks. So there you have it. Whipped up some green pudding, snap peas , crackers and cheese-voila! St. Patty's day lunch!

Pirate Lunch

I have been trying to find a way to use these skull baking cups for awhile. So I decided to give the boys some pirate muffins, grapes on swords, pirate flag stuck into an orange and these scrumptious pomegranate vanilla flavored cashews(wow are these good). Of course I felt like it needed a little something more so I found a silly pirate joke and threw that in there too.