What's For Lunch Wednesdays - You Make Me Smile

This is my first intentional What's For Lunch Wednesday. I linked a post last week, since my 2-box lunch was pretty neat, but this was the first bento-style lunch I intentionally made pretty. It's not up to snuff compared to most of the other links I see each week, but I haven't reached that level of awesome yet. I don't have much fun food pre-prepared, like mini muffins, pizza biscuits, hard-boiled eggs, etc.

Clockwise from top left: mini saltines, string cheese nibblets, olives, apples, PBJ with a chocolate chip face, carrot coins. Outside are a fruit leather and Ranch dip.

This lunch was for after preschool on Monday. She has snack at school, but then they play outside ('large muscle time') after, which increases the appetite. Plus I usually stop at McD's on the way home, so this was a way to try and prevent that inclination.
I had only originally planned on including 3 items. Sandwich, cheese and either apples or olives. Then I decided after making the sandwiches (there's another underneath, without a face) that there was plenty of room and I could use a baran (divider) to separate something from the sandwich. I opted for cheese, since it would be more easily contained.
I loaded the one compartment with olives, and tucked a pick in with the sandwiches (you can kind of see a hint of blue between the white and orange muffin cups. That's the pick.)
I could only cram 3 apple slices in, as they were big ones, but she didn't eat them until we got home anyway, so I was able to get the rest from the fridge. We hadn't treated them with juice the night before, so they are a little brown.
Then, because there was soooo much room in with the sandwiches, I decided to cut up a string cheese, and put it in a silicone muffin liner, rather than just using cheese scraps as previously planned. There was still more room, so I thought another muffin liner would look cute, and decided to use some of the new mini-saltines I just got.
I didn't have any veggies (unless olives count?) and I still had more room, and most of a long carrot left over from my Birds & The Bees MTM so I used my mandolin and sliced the rest up and put it into another muffin liner.
We ended up going to Staples on the way home to get some manila envelopes for shipping (and I found some great plastic boxes to store my muffin tin and cookie cutter supplies in - on clearance!) and there was a TJ Maxx in the same strip... So I went looking for more Head Chef stuff, since there's a few tools we don't have yet that I still want. They didn't have any at this location, but we found some Scholastic DVDs (Where the Wild Things Are and other Maurice Sendack stories and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight and other dinosaur stories) for only $6 each, plus a flower ballerina/princess dress for $10 that I'll use for her Halloween costume (she wants to be a butterfly. So I'll do a black shirt and black or green pants, flower ballerina dress thing, wings, headband with chenille stem antennae, and glue or sew some fake flowers onto the pants (with felt 'grass' if the pants are black) and maybe some extra black felt butterfly legs, if I feel like it.) AND.... a set of 12 silicone flower shape muffin liners for $4! TWO sets actually. I bought them both. (I'll save one and stash it away for a blog swap or a giveaway when I reach so many followers or something fun!) Plus a load of My Little Money Sink Pony and Littlest Choking Hazard Pet Shop stuff for 25-40% off original prices. And some sparkly fairy princess underpants from Carter's - 3 pairs for $5, which didn't feel like a steal, but I think they're normally $9 for a set of 3. And she chose it over the $5 sets of 5 pig or monkey ones, and the goal is to get HER to wear them, so whatever it takes!














Needless to say, she polished off the olives and chocolate chips in the car. She nibbled on a sandwich. Said the apples were too yucky (but not too yucky to dip in a leftover Caramel Dip from McD's when we got home!) Maybe ate some cheese and/or crackers. But after we got home and she saw me eat a cheese nibble on a mini cracker, she ate several that way, then finished off the cheese. All the apples (including peels!) were consumed until the caramel dip ran out. She maybe ate a carrot coin. Overall, pretty good. She made up for it at dinner at the Japanese buffet where she ate salmon eggs and little mini roe off the sushi rolls like it was goin' out of style, and even had a squid nigiri (the kind of sushi where it's just a slab of fish on top of a rectangle of rice.) Plus loads of edamame.