Wendy Copley's Blog, page 3

Happy Valentine’s Day! Here are some bento boxes.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Cutesy lunches — especially ones filled with hearts and pink stuff — are not exactly my boys’ favorite right now, but I usually can get them to let me make them something on this lovely day. Here’s what I sent them to school with:

Augie let me go all out with a heart eyes emoji sandwich, a ham rose, cucumber and strawberry hearts a few tomatoes and a little pink gummy heart. I packed this in the PlanetBox Rover and made heavy use of the small heart cutter in this set.

Careful negotiations with my middle schooler resulted in this Valentine’s bento. I asked permission for everything I did and had to tone down the number of heart-shaped strawberries. The fact that he let me put ANY in was my Valentine treat! He also had a pb&j with a small heart cut-out and a couple of strawberry-chocolate donuts. This was packed in an EasyLunchboxes bento box.

Stranger Things Bento Box

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Join me as we journey to the Upside Down — in a lunch box! Oooooooh!

It’s not often that my 12-year-old is interested in fun bentos anymore — and it’s even more unusual when he wants to help me design one — so I felt like I’d been invited to Steve Harrington’s super-exclusive get-together when he sat down with me to brainstorm for a Stranger Things bento box. His dad and I watched the entire first season of the show in about three days last summer and then when we turned our middle schooler onto it he steadily made his way through it too. We all loved the show and joke about it pretty frequently, so making a Stranger Things lunch was pretty much inevitable.

Here’s how I did it:

Start off by choosing a lunch box. I went with the PlanetBox Rover because I wanted a nice spot for the sandwich, which is kind of the star of the show here. (Sorry Eleven!)

The starring sandwich is cream cheese and ham on pita bread.

To make it, I trimmed the pita to fit in that big section of the PlanetBox. I did this by eyeballing it, checking the fit and then trimming a little extra off where necessary.

Next, I spread cream cheese on the pita and trimmed the ham to fit inside the bread without showing (the scraps also went inside).

Once the sandwich was assembled, I decorated it. First step: roughly write out “STRANGER THINGS” with food markers like Joyce did with the alphabet on her living room wall. Then draw a cord for the Christmas tree lights above each word, leaving a bit of space between the cord and the words for the “lights”.

Next, put a tiny dab of cream cheese on the back of each “light” to glue it onto the pita bread.

The candies I used were part of a gingerbread house decorating kit that I got a while back, but it appears that this set is no longer being made. I found a different set on Amazon that would work too (though the lights aren’t as colorful). Another idea would be to use candy covered sunflower seeds. The shape is just about perfect and I think they’re probably the easiest of these options to find.

Once you’ve got all the candies glued on, put the sandwich in the lunch box. Looking good, right??

And before you ask, no — I don’t think a kid would like a ham, cheese and candy sandwich!  In my experience, kids always eat the candy in their lunch box first thing so I don’t think it’s much of an issue, but if you’re really worried, make the sandwich with peanut butter and jelly.

Next, make a couple of demogorgons out of a kiwi. I didn’t take photos of this part — and frankly it turned out a little messier than I was hoping — but here’s the gist of what I did: Cut the kiwi in half, leaving the skin on. Carefully cut the tough stem out of the rounded end of the fruit. Make five cuts in the kiwi, starting where the stem was and stopping about halfway down the side of the kiwi. It should look kind of like this:

Then, carefully cut down into the kiwi for each of the five sections and peel them back so they make a star shape. Repeat for the other half and add the demogorgons to the lunch box.

I had to include Eggo waffles in the lunch too, right? To do this, I toasted a mini Eggo, separated it into four little waffles and then made sunbutter and banana sandwiches with them.

Finally, I added a handful of grape tomatoes (no symbolism — I just wanted to get a veggie in there) and added a couple of picks to say “11”. Technically those are capital I’s, but we are not nit-pickers, are we? And I had to get Dustin’s baseball cap in there too, right?

All right then! Let’s go get Will!

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Interesting Finds at the Winter Fancy Food Show

Every year about this time, the Fancy Food Show rolls into San Francisco. It’s a huge event packed with food and beverage companies showing off their newest products as well as old favorites. I’ve attended this event most of the last few years and it’s great fun to walk the aisles sampling tasty bites and checking out all the cool new stuff that will be coming to the shelves soon. I attended the show on Monday and tried to chronicle some of the most interesting stuff over on my Instagram page, but in case you missed it I’ve decided to share some of the things I found most interesting here.

First, I want to share my two very favorite items from the show. I didn’t take pictures of either — probably because I was so happy and excited to be eating them! — so I borrowed images from their sites.

First up: Sugar Bowl Bakery‘s new apple fritters. It feels kind of boring to say that a pastry was my favorite thing at the show when there were so many unusual items everywhere, but these fritters were off-the-charts delicious — buttery, cinnamon-y, apple-y. So good, that I went back for a second sample! I’ll be checking my local Costco to see if they have these the next time I stop by.

My other favorite was a bit more unusual — a savory yogurt from Fage. Fage was debuting their new Crossover line at the show. The yogurts come in the now familiar divided pack with yogurt on one side and toppings on the other. Most of the eleven flavors in the line are sweet, but they also have four savory flavors — carrot, tomato, olive and my favorite Coconut Curry with Cashews. I’ve seen a lot of savory yogurts at this show in the past few years but I often have a hard time finding them in stores. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get my hands on these more easily!

 

Peanut Butter and Co. were showing off these individual peanut butter dipping cups. The chocolate flavor was rich and delicious and would be great tucked in a lunch box with apple slices or pretzel sticks (if your school allows peanuts, of course).

Another great lunch box item I spotted were these fruit gel pouches from Zellee Organic. My kids both loved the samples I brought home and not only are they vegan, they are also free of the eight major allergens. Bonus: no added sugar.

I’m not generally a big fan of coconut water, but I really enjoyed this new beverage from Harmless Harvest: Harmless Coconut Probiotics. This drink is made with coconut water and meat along with probiotic additives and organic fruit. It reminded me of a drinkable yogurt.

My favorite trend I spotted at the show was edible cookie dough tubs! These little containers are filled with eggless, safe-to-eat dough that’s not meant to be baked. I tried several different flavors from a two or three brands and they were all great. The snack sized containers would be a nice lunch box surprise.

Another new-to-me item was Brazilian cheese bread made by Brazi Bites. Warm a few up in the morning and tuck into a lunch box.

Last but not least, we have a whole apple in an individual serving bag. Huh.

And before I sign off, I’m going to show you a beautiful picture of Wonder Woman made entirely from Jelly Belly jelly beans! Have a great weekend!

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A Fresh Bullet Journal for the New Year

Happy New Year! I love the start of a new year because it’s a good time for two of my favorite things: a clean slate and lots of new goals!

I just finished setting up a fresh bullet journal yesterday and I thought I’d share a little bit about how I use it day to day and show you some of the special pages I maintain. I wrote a little bit about my first bullet journal a few weeks after I adopted this method of organizing my life almost three years ago(!!) but since then I’ve tried lots of different things and I’ve settled into a basic method that really works for me.

For the most part, I follow the basic bullet journal methodology for daily lists, notes and to-dos, but I’ve dropped a few of the other elements that just don’t work for me. I found that I never used the future planning and monthly calendar lists so I’ve stopped including those in my BuJo. Instead I’ve settled on this weekly overview page:

On Monday mornings (or Sunday night) I draw this basic layout up and then write anything on my personal and our family Google calendars into the “Events” column. I rarely have appointments myself, so mostly I end up writing the kids’ activities here — practices, camps, games, etc. — anything where I need to be somewhere at a specific time.

The meal planning column is fairly self-explanatory. I fill that in with pencil because it changes a lot, but I use the events as a guide to determine what we’re having which day. Slow cooker meal on basketball practice night, for example.

I also have work and personal to-do lists where I list out the major tasks I have to get done each week. (It’s Thursday and I still haven’t taken the car to get smogged. Crap!)

And finally I have a little goals section where I check off boxes for the things I try to do every day. The basic household tasks are to help me keep on top of the daily drudgery, but I also include longer term goals on this list that benefit from daily attention. These change from time to time but currently include a daily walk, actually responding to email instead of just reading it, working on cleaning off my horrible, messy desk and sending snail mail regularly.

Special Pages:

Yearly Goals

I like to write up lists of Big Goals as well as some smaller, specific goals each year. I suppose most people would refer to the big goals as resolutions, but I like to be super practical about these and come up with concrete steps to take so I don’t give up too soon. In fact, I often don’t start working on some of my bigger goals until I’m several months into the new year. Taking on too much at once is overwhelming for me and it often makes me sort of shut down and do nothing at all. The page following this spread is actually a planning page where I have started listing off ideas and tasks that will help me accomplish each of my unicorn goals.

The second side of this spread has fun stuff I am interested in trying, tasks I’ve been putting off for too long and things I would like to look up on the internet and possibly take action on. These can usually be easily accomplished in a day or even a few minutes.

Books to Read and Books I’ve Read:

This page is specifically designed to help me accomplish one of my big goals: read a lot of books! The left side is a list of books I want to read and I have decided to mark the ones I already have in my house (or on my Kindle) with a star so I can grab a new book as soon as I finish one. I have a really awful habit of buying three or four books at a time and then forgetting a few of them in a pile for months. This should help with that!

I’m going to record the books I finish on the super cute page on the right. This is not my original idea — it’s all over the bullet journal boards on Pinterest — but I love it! I’m planning to color each book spine when I write in the title (as soon as I locate my darn colored pencils!).

Snail Mail Log

This is one of the primary tools in my quest to send real letters and cards. My goal is to average one piece of outgoing mail per week and I like keeping track of what I’ve sent out and who has responded to me. (People who answer my mail get bumped to the top of my “to send” list!) I had this same log in my last bullet journal and I almost filled the whole thing up in 2016. I’m kind of impressed with myself for that!

Favorite Tools:

Finally, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite bullet journal tools.

The Book:

My first bullet journal was a Moleskine Squared Notebook which was fine, but a few years ago I learned about the Leuchtturm 1917 notebook and I instantly fell in love. Why is the Leuchtturm 1917 better than the Moleskine? For starters it comes in more and prettier colors. It also starts off with several index pages and all of the pages are numbered — both of which make it perfect for the bullet journal format. I always choose gridded pages, but of course lined or dotted pages work fine too. The grid is just my personal preference.

The Pens:

I generally keep my Bujo pretty basic and practical and treat it like a tool instead of a place to be creative. I sometimes will throw in some washi tape or a few stickers and doodle in it pretty regularly, but mostly when I’m using it, I’m in a hurry so I ignore all of that stuff. That being said, I love to include lots and lots of color in my book and the primary way I do that is with my big set of Staedtler Triplus Fineliner Pens. Not too thick, not too thin, twenty colors, they don’t bleed — perfect.

The Ruler/Stencil:

I saw this Westcott 6 inch ruler in a Buzzfeed article about bullet journals last year and immediately bought one. It slips into the pocket in the back of my notebook and feeds my need to perfectly straight lines. If you are not a fussbudget you can probably skip it. I also am liking this little stencil I picked up at my local Daiso store last month. I mostly use it to make perfect circles. It also fits in the back pocket of my journal and can be skipped by non-fussbudgets.

Do you Bullet Journal? What special pages do you include in yours?

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A Week of Christmas Bentos

Wow! It’s been awhile since I posted a full week of bentos, but my Christmas bento box game has been strong this week and I’ve somehow managed to make one every single day for six school days in a row.  An event like this calls for a celebratory blog post! Woo hoo!

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Tuesday

I kicked off the Christmas lunches a week ago today when I decided to get my holiday bento gear out of storage on the spur of the moment. Augie and I were talking about his lunch as I was making it and we decided his sandwich needed to be way more fun, so I dug my stuff out of the cupboard over the fridge and pulled a couple things out to decorate his already completed lunch. He had candy-striped apples, rice crackers with an elf ring and a sunflower butter and jelly sandwich with a Santa ring tucked between the two halves. This was packed in an EasyLunchboxes bento box.

Wednesday

The next day I had a little more time to think about what I wanted to put in Augie’s lunch and this is what I came up with: candy-striped apple, Tannenbaum chips (from Trader Joe’s), mini salami sticks, a sugar snap pea Christmas tree with carrot ornaments, hummus and some crackers. This was packed in a green Yumbox original (Ooh! Festive!).

Normally I wouldn’t put in both crackers and chips but I ran out of time while I was making this and suddenly had one minute to finish it so I panicked and filled the last compartment with the first thing I could find — the crackers. Thank goodness for crackers! They’ve saved a lunch more times than I can count.

Thursday

I was part-way through this lunch when Augie announced that he wanted it to be a Pokemon Christmas lunch. I hadn’t made his sandwich yet, so I grabbed our Pikachu cutter and used that. We both agreed that Pikachu needed a Santa hat, but I didn’t have a Santa hat pick so I had to improvise. I ended up using a Santa pick and sliding his face under the bread so all you could see was the hat. I think that worked out pretty well. (The pick I used was made entirely of paper so I told Augie to be careful to get it all out before he ate his sandwich. Nothing ruins a sandwich like a big wad of paper in it.) The rest of the lunch (packed in a PlanetBox Rover) was: cucumber ribbon trees, Mandarin oranges with a Santa pick and Christmas tree chips with a few sprinkles.

Friday

Friday morning I was in a rush again, so I toned things down a bit: Christmas tree chips, red and green veggies (cukes and tomatoes), apple chunks and some meatballs from the freezer that I warmed up and threaded onto cute Christmas cupcake picks. This was packed in an EasyLunchboxes bento box.

Monday

Yesterday’s lunch was all Santa: alphabet pretzels with a Santa ring, a Christmas stocking cupcake decoration, Mandarin orange slices, cucumbers with a different Santa pick, and stamped Santa and sleigh sandwiches. I also spelled out “SANTA” with the alphabet pretzels. (Packed in a PlanetBox Rover.)

Tuesday

And finally, let’s keep things real. I was fresh out of inspiration this morning and this lunch was as much as I could come up with: meatballs, oranges, rainbow carrots, holiday Ritz crackers, tomatoes and a peppermint candy.

Is it as decorative as the other lunches I posted? No, it is not. Was Augie as excited about this lunch as the others? Yes he was. Never underestimate how powerful adding a single piece of candy to a lunch box can be!

Interested in packing bento lunches yourself? My book is filled with cute ideas, fun techniques and step-by-step instructions showing how you can make them yourself:

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A Pokemon Bento Box

Like seemingly everyone else in the world, my family became obsessed with Pokemon GO this summer. We downloaded it the first week it was out and we’ve been enjoying taking regular family walks to try to catch them all. I mean…I don’t want to brag or anything, but as of this morning I have 67 different Pokemon in my Pokedex. (But now that I write this, I see there are 147 Pokemon varieties so maybe that’s not very good? Hmmm….) We’re all pretty into the game, but my kids have also reignited their passion for Pokemon in general and so there are cards on the floor of literally every room in my house. They are Poke-obsessed.

Naturally, this means that I needed to start making Pokemon lunches for Augie! (Wyatt — now a middle schooler! — is not interested.) This first Pokemon lunch had a sunflower butter and jelly Pikachu sandwich, a Babybel cheese Pokeball, snap peas, cucumber slices, cantaloupe and a strawberry. I packed it in a Yumbox Panino (use code “Wendy15” for 15% off at check-out).

To make this lunch, I began a couple weeks ago by gathering my supplies. First up was this Pokemon sandwich cutter set that a friend pointed me to on eBay:

It includes stamping cutters for Pikachu, Pichu, Chikorita, and a Pokeball and a few mediocre bento picks. If you can’t find this particular set, I noticed a lot of other cool looking stamping cutters that were made with 3D printers on eBay. Amazon has a pretty good number of Pokemon cutters as well.

The cutters in my set work very well and I’d recommend them for making quick, good-looking sandwiches! If you’d like some tips for making perfect stamped sandwiches see this post: How to Make Kick-Butt Stamped Sandwiches.

After I made my sunflower butter and jelly Pikachu sandwich, I converted a Babybel cheese into a Pokeball using this tutorial at Cute Food for Kids. It might look a little fussy, but it’s pretty easy. I recommend cutting out a few of the black strips at once to speed up the process if you want to make more Pokemon lunches in the future.

I cut the cucumbers into rounds and used a melon baller on the cantaloupe to enhance the Pokeball theme but the lunch looked a little boring so I decided to make a couple Pokeball picks as well. I had tried to find some Pokemon cupcake picks on Amazon when I ordered the cutters, but holy crap they were expensive! I guess the people who have Pokemon merchandise know they have a good thing going. I also looked for Pokemon stickers so I could make picks using toothpicks, but couldn’t turn anything up at a reasonable price. These Pokeball picks worked out pretty well though.

To make them, I punched a circle out of sticker paper (for printing stickers), then I drew a circle and a stripe on it using a sharpie. I cut half the sticker away, like so:

And then carefully put the rest of the sticker on a plain red circle pick. (Sorry — I couldn’t find a current source for these.)

I poked the picks into the cucumbers and melon and now my lunch had an extra bit of pizzaz!

Are you making Pokemon lunches? I’d love to see what you’re making!

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A Fancy Bento Lunch for the Last Dang Week of School*

* Not really…but kind of really.

You guys! I am so sick of our morning routine and packing lunches. The kids are refusing to eat school lunch and we are so busy with end-of-the-year activities that I’ve been having trouble finding the time for my usual weekly shopping trips. This is making lunch-packing…challenging.

To vent my frustration a little, I packed this lunch and took a photo of what I want to put in my boys’ bento boxes these last weeks of school. Here’s how it broke down:

Protein: Chili cheese Fritos — they have “chili” in the name so there must be beans or meat or something in there, right?
Veggie: a dill pickle — pickles are made from cucumbers and those are definitely a healthy vegetable.
Carb: bottom-of-the-bag trail mix — combine the crushed tortilla chips at the bottom of the bag, the last few stale Cheerios and some of those crackers that only Dad liked. Fancy!
Fruit: an old banana — he didn’t eat it the first or second time you put it in the lunch bag, but maybe he’ll eat it today?

How are you muddling through these last days of school? Or are you one of those lucky people who are out already?? Only THREE MORE DAYS for us!

A Golden State Warriors Bento Box Lunch

In a development that completely baffles me, I have gone from being a person who has barely cared about sports for her entire life to a crazy basketball lady who is obsessed with the Golden State Warriors.

I blame Steph Curry.

I first took notice of him (and the Warriors) during the playoffs last year when Wyatt (my 10 year old) started asking questions about him. The kids at school were talking about the Warriors and he felt left out so we watched a few games. Watching Curry play is magical and as this season went on and Curry and the Warriors broke record after record I got to the point where I never miss a game where my home town team is playing. Now I am in love with the whole team and I care deeply about this year’s playoffs.

So this morning, on the heels of last night’s hard won triumph in the Western conference semi-finals (all respect to the Blazers!) I did what any basketball obsessed, bento lunch-packer would do: I made my kid a Warriors lunch!

Pictured above you can see my handiwork: cucumber sticks with cheese cut into the Golden State Warriors initials on top, blueberries and pineapple to represent the team’s blue and gold colors, cherries with basketball picks and a turkey and cheddar basketball sandwich. I packed it all into a PlanetBox Rover lunch box.

A few notes about how I made this lunch:

I cut the bread into a circle by turning the round container that comes with the PlanetBox Rover upside down and using it like a cookie cutter. I was going to use it to cut the cheese too (hee! hee!) but it was quite a bit smaller than the container so I just used a knife to cut it into a rough circle. I started off drawing the basketball lines on with a black food-safe marker but it was almost completely dried out so the lines were lighter than I wanted. I found some black gel food coloring in the cupboard and used the tip of the marker to kind of paint the lines on with the coloring.

It came out great, but the gel wasn’t completely dried when it was time to close the lunch box and head to school so i carefully blotted it with a paper towel to get rid of some of the excess.

I wanted to add basketball picks to the cherries, but I didn’t have any in my collection so I made some really quickly. I took two identical stickers and stuck them to each other with a toothpick in the middle. Voila! Instant decoration!

I cut the “GSW” letters using this excellent fondant cutter set from Wilton. They are a nice clean font and a great size for decorating bento box lunches. Highly recommended!

And finally I want to share this photo from the Warriors craft night I had with my college buddies, Sam and Grace, on Monday! We met up to watch Steph’s come-back game and made Warriors necklaces and cheesy foam visors while we cheered the team on to victory. Super fun! And I’m not saying we’re directly responsible for the win, but they did pull ahead the more we crafted, so I feel comfortable taking some of the credit.

Some Things I am Good At

Everyone goes through a time when they feel like they can’t do anything right. Right? I recently had a spell where I felt like I was failing at everything. Literally everything. I even made a mental list of all the things I was screwing up so I could rattle it off to my husband when he tried to cheer me up. If you have a list it proves your point after all and I was determined to feel badly about myself.

And then I decided that that was BS. At that point it was time for me to make a different list — a list of things I am good at. Here is what I came up with:

making lists
eating cookies
walking around my neighborhood
writing database queries
choosing ingredients for unusual and delicious salads
hugging
telling my kids I love them
taking photos
untying tricky knots
ordering the best dish on the menu at restaurants
Scrabble, Boggle and other word games
being outraged on my friends’ behalf
playing in the swimming pool
researching for vacations
alphabetizing
cooking pancakes
proofreading writing that is not my own
cheering people on
singing in a fake operatic voice
pinning things to Pinterest
giving people the benefit of the doubt
packing lunches
driving a little over the speed limit but not so much that I get a ticket
drawing cartoon-y unicorns and pigs
drinking tea
wrapping presents
checking Facebook
making cute things out of paper
making my bed every day
decorating the Christmas tree
empathizing
giving my children unsolicited advice
falling asleep
staying calm when someone is hurt
taking care of babies
using Photoshop
remembering all the things we need from the grocery store
laughing

What are you good at?

Food Prep for the Week

Last night I was feeling stressed out about the very busy week I am going to have and I asked myself, “What can I do now to make things go more smoothly?” Folding laundry probably should have been highest on my list based on the HOURS I’ve spent digging in the clean laundry pile for pants for my kids, but instead I went into the kitchen and started prepping food for the week.

Basically, I just started chopping and boiling and roasting and once I had one thing going on the stove, I started on something else. And in between I emptied the dishwasher, refilled it, ran it, washed pots and pans and made sure all the counters were clean. Phwew! I also pulled a few items out of the freezer to defrost for lunches and dinner tonight — something I always forget to do in advance.

Once I was done, I had:

two quarts of cold-brewed darjeeling iced tea
several cups of cooked farro — my favorite whole grain
roasted butternut squash
a few hard-boiled eggs — I normally would do more, but this was the last of the carton
trimmed radishes — all the raw veggies we had
a dozen blueberry muffins — we ate some for breakfast this morning before I took this photo
Not pictured: a batch of chocolate pudding – we ate some of it last night and I put some of it in lunch boxes for today

You can see the radishes and pudding in action on Wyatt’s lunch box. I just poured it right into the Yumbox tray and put it directly into the fridge.

I was pretty pleased with myself because all of these were just things we had on hand — no special trip to the store, no pre-planning. And I just finished eating a healthy lunch made with some of these items:

I mixed a big scoop of farro, another big scoop of squash and some edamame salad from Costco together and drizzled on a simple vinaigrette. So tasty! I had a big glass of iced tea too.

In other news, I bought an Instant Pot this weekend and it’s supposed to arrive today. I’m so excited!