Let It Snow! - Snowflake Salad and Simple Sammies

Thursday 12/13/12 - I actually managed to get up early enough to make her this fancy lunch in the morning before school. Which is good, since I had forgotten to pack one the night before! I made mine while she was at preschool. Both in our EasyLunchboxes.

Z's "Snow Much Fun" Lunch

PB-chocolate almond butter sandwiches,
string cheese nibblets, grapes, kohlrabi and carrots

Snowy Sammies: A snowflake cookie cutter press made her cute sandwiches quick and easy. (Tip: Wendolonia has a great tutorial on how to make the imprint stand out nicely. I always try to cut the bread first, before adding the fillings because the edges come out neater, but I was pressing the filled sandwiches until I read her tips. MUCH better now!)
They rest in a snowstorm of string cheese nibblets and fun snowflake rings.

Grapesicles: I spent so much time on the carrots I didn't have time to get cute with fruit, so I just tossed in some grapes with a snowflake pick.

Veggies Are "Snow" Yummy!: I had a vision in my head of making these great carrot snowflakes, so when they turned out to be harder than expected, I refused to give up. The plastic snowflake fondant plunger cutters were very difficult to push through the carrots and kohlrabi slices, no matter how thinly I sliced.  After pressing down as hard as I could on the cutting board, I had to pick them up and use my thumbs to push the carrot up into the design before popping them out. They turned out great, but ate a lot of time, and my thumbs hurt for a few days after!
(I just made enough to cover the top layer. Underneath were a few coins with the image just imprinted on them, and then simple flower ones cut with a metal veggie cutter.)

I had heard someone at the organic farm we go to talk about putting kohlrabi on her salads raw. Raw? It had never occurred to me to try it raw! So this was our test-run. I had made a random-veggie dish the night before and used most of the kohlrabi there, and saved a few thin slices for our lunches the next day. I just put one kohlrabi snowflake in her lunch to try, and saved the rest for me.

She ate every single morsel! Even the kohlrabi!

Mama Loves Salad "Snow" Much

Hail Merry Macaroons, Farm cheese and Special K crackers, spinach and lettuce salad w/cabbage and carrots
(tucked under,) kohlrabi, broccoli, purple cauliflower, dried blueberries, sunflower seeds, dressing (not shown)

This lunch is the first one I've ever made that I regretted having to eat. It was just so pretty! But when I decided to try raw kohlrabi in my salad, I immediately thought of snowflakes, since it's white. Like with the carrots, the snowflake fondant plunger cutters were a major pain to use. But since Baby and I were just tooling around at home while Big Sis was at school, I was in no hurry.

That's "Snow" Ordinary Salad: I chopped up the kohlrabi scraps, and the carrot scraps from Z's lunch and mixed them with the cabbage and spinach, then put a layer of spinach over the top to hide them so the kohlrabi snowflakes would stand out more. I added purple cauliflower too, since it always looks stunning in a salad. Plus it was going to go bad otherwise! And broccoli for the same reason. The going to go bad part, not the stunning-looking part.

I put some sunflower seeds for crunch and dried blueberries for chewiness in a Mini Dipper so they would stay fresh and not get soggy in with the salad until I was ready to eat. Since I would be eating it at home later, I opted to not root through my unorganized mountain of bento stuff still needing to be put away get a dressing container dirty and added the dressing just before eating.

Snow and Crackers: My original plan had been to just toss in string cheese nibblets as "snowballs" or whatever, but I had this weird Farm cheese stuff, and the kohlrabi snowflakes just looked so gorgeous. The cutters did not work well with the Farm cheese. It's softer than mozzarella, and I think would even be moldable. So it was squishing around and sticking to everything and was generally a pain to work with. But you can't argue with the results! Just lovely!

Just Desserts: With my snowy-themed lunch, I immediately thought of some macaroons from Hail Merry I had been sent to try, since the lighter ones look like snowflakes. But the Salted Caramel and Strawberry ones were so goooooood, and I only got a few of each to sample, I didn't want to gobble them all down in one lunch. So I put one of the Strawberry ones on top of some Chocolate ones. They're all tasty, but the Salted Caramel are my hands-down favorites! So I'm saving them for last!

Mama's lunch is nut-free. Yum! And if you pretend I used soy cheese, and vegan crackers, it would be vegan too.

*I just found out that the Special K crackers use petrol-derived BHT as an artificial preservative (how on earth did I miss that before?!) so we won't be getting them again. *sigh.* We had to say farewell to my Honey Bunches of Oats and our Chex cereals (for home-made Chex mix *sniffle*) as well, since they're bad too. Even though *I* can eat them, I choose to vote with my wallet and no longer bring foods into my home that we can't all enjoy. As long as Americans are fine eating petrol, they'll keep feeding it to us.

Tools of the Trade