Mandarin Chicken Salad with Carrot Flowers

   I realized I haven't had one of my very favorite lunches in a long time - so that's what's for lunch today.
    I dressed mine up a little with carrot flowers and I brushed each flower with honey so the black sesame seeds would stick ( it tastes really good too!). The rest of the salad is made from mixed salad greens, sugar snap peas, sliced almonds, cucumber slices, mandarin oranges, leftover turkey (from dinner yesterday) and my homemade Sesame Ginger salad dressing. Now I can't wait for lunch!

  The rest of my meals today are as follows:

breakfast - 1 cup of homemade gluten free granola with 1/2 cup almond milk

snack - celery with protein peanut butter and 1 tbsp. raisins

lunch - the bento above, along with some lite lemonade

snack - a slice of cheesecake (from Clean Eating magazine) and an apple

dinner - TBD ... I actually haven't done my weekly food prep yet! I am woefully unprepared : ( My week does go so much better when I have food prepped and planned for the week - but it will have to wait until Tuesday this time around.

 For exercise, I did yoga, followed by a 40 minute run. I wish I could say that I ran for 40 minutes straight, but I took my dog, Molly, and she had to stop and check every sniffing point in the neighborhood! So I ran as much as I could, but was jerked to a stop by Molly about 10 times : )

   BTW, today is my 90th post!  Ah, time has flown by since my first post  last November. Hmmm, maybe I should plan something fun for my 100th post...  : )

Here are some things I used to make my lunch, and where to buy them:

Olympics Bento

 Who's excited for the Opening Ceremonies tonight? I am!

So today I'm participating in the Bento Bloggers and Friends Olympic Blog Hop!

I've decided  to watch as much Olympics as possible over the next 2 weeks, so maybe that will inspire a few more Olympics bentos in the near future : )

 So my first one... is a little ridiculous.

My son saw it and said "cooooool! ...what is it?"

Thank goodness for those cheese letters! If your bento turns out to look nothing like you thought it would, then you can spell it out in words made of cheese, ha ha!

  I attempted to re-create a race track with forbidden rice, which is naturally black. I used rice noodles for the lines on the track, and green veggies for the grass/shrubbery. Underneath it all is chicken curry sauce. At least it will taste good!  The runners on the track are little panda picks : )


 My next attempt is for my son - it turned out fairly good, but  the light was really, really bad outside when I took the picture so it's a little blurry :(

  There's a sandwich with the Olympic rings cut out with a mini circle cutter, cucumber stars, carrots, and a brownie topped with a gold medal - a chocolate coin and some fruit leather. You just might be able to make out the words " Go team USA".  I also tucked in a paper napkin covered in flags and added some flag picks for an international touch : )

  One of my favorite bands, Muse, wrote the theme song for the London Olympics. You can hear that song in the following video - and if this doesn't get you stoked for the Olympics this year, then you must have a heart of stone : )

  Now are you hungry for more?

I'm just one of many bento blogs in the Olympics Blog Hop - so if you want to see more of my friends' Olympic themed lunches, just click on this logo to see what  my friend Astrid is making: ( all posts should go live by 9.a.m.)

Here are some things I used to make today's lunches:

Gluten Free Teriyaki Chicken Bento

 Here it is Wednesday again - time to keep myself accountable by showing anyone who's interested what I'm eating all day. I apologize for the bad photos - the lighting is so weird in my kitchen this morning!

  My morning started out with 1/2 cup oats cooked with 1/2 scoop vanilla protein powder and 1 Tbsp. natural peanut butter. I ate a sliced peach  with that :

  Then for a snack at 10:00 a.m. I had a piece of chicken ( not shown)

Lunch will be this bento packed with 1 rice onigiri,  2 boneless, skinless chicken thighs covered in Gluten Free Teriyaki Sauce ( one of my favorite foods!) and some broccoli, carrots, edamame, and a mini purple potato:

  BTW, I used 1/2 the sugar called for in the GF teriyaki sauce recipe ( replacing it with evaporated cane juice), and it tasted as good as ever!

  My snack for this afternoon will be a cup of raw veggies with some cottage cheese dip, and a homemade chocolate coconut protein bar. I've been searching for a good homemade protein bar recipe, and I've finally found one that I LOVE! The recipe came from Oxygen's website here. And here's the photo of my snack:

  For dinner, we'll be having tacos. Mine will be made from super lean ground beef, served on 2 corn tortillas with some fat free refried beans, lettuce, tomato, and lite sour cream and 1 Tbsp.  shredded cheese. If I'm still hungry after that, I'll have an apple : )

 So that's my food, and I'm sticking to it!

Added to What I Ate Wednesday and What's for Lunch Wednesday. Come see what the rest of us are eating today! 

Gluten Free Pita Sandwich Bento

  Today I packed everyone in the family a bento. I think that's the first time I've done that this summer!  I usually pack lunches for my husband and myself, but I have been a slacker about making lunch for my kids - they are all old enough to make food for themselves, so I have enjoyed a bit of a break by letting them : ) Everyone was pleasantly surprised that I made them their own lunch though, so I'll probably do it more often now! I packed them in these semi-disposable takeout containers, just in case we had the chance to go on a picnic. We never did go out together, but everyone enjoyed their lunches anyway. I caught my son eating  his at 11:00 a.m. - he said it looked too good sitting there in the fridge and it made him hungry!

  The picture above is my bento - I made myself a tuna sandwich on homemade gluten free pita bread. A few days ago I had an idea pop into my head  for baking pita bread, so I tried it and it worked! It's one of those recipes that would make a good blog post - when I have time : )

  We also had potato salad, fruit, and veggies.

 Here's an example of what the rest of the family had for their lunches:

   I really like these containers! I bought them at a local asian market where I get some bento supplies, and they were only 50 cents each! They have clear lids, and they're really very sturdy - that's why I say they're semi-disposable. They are very easy to wash and re-use, but at 50 cents a piece, I wouldn't cry if someone lost theirs or threw it away.

  You might notice that I wrapped the sandwiches in waxed paper. I did this once out of desperation, but I really like it! I like how it looks, and it's a very easy way to eat a sandwich on the road -  the crumbs stay contained in the paper, and your hands stay clean if you have to eat while you drive : )

  Tomorrow is a holiday here in Utah - Pioneer Day! That's the day when we honor the Mormon pioneers who sacrificed so much to travel across the country to come to Utah, many of them walking the whole way. We celebrate this holiday much like July 4th - with parades, picnics, and fireworks : ) It should be a fun day!

  Here's where to get those very versatile silicone baking cups that I used in this lunch:

Breakfast Bento

   I didn't make my husband a lunch today, so instead I  made him a breakfast bento : )

   It contains hash browns, a banana muffin, sliced fruit, and 2 egg muffins. The egg muffins recipe comes from the wonderful blog, Kalyn's Kitchen. I like to bake a batch of them and reheat them for quick breakfasts and snacks - they're awesome!


  My breakfast was similar, but I didn't have a muffin. Here's my food for the day:

breakfast - 1 cup hash browns, 2 egg muffins, a strawberry and 2 small peaches

snack - a banana/chocolate protein shake:

  lunch - a taco salad bento:

  It contains 3 cups salad greens, extra lean taco meat, tomatoes, low fat cheese, lite sour cream, fat free french dressing with a few drops sriracha sauce, and a bell pepper "chili".

afternoon snack - fat free greek yogurt with frozen berries and stevia:

   Dinner will be cashew chicken stir fry, with some fried rice and stir fried veggies. Yum!

For exercise I did 65 minutes of cardio! It feels SO good to have my normal energy back again :D

This post was added to "What I Ate Wednesday" and also "What's for Lunch Wednesday"

Here are some things I used to make my lunch and snacks today, and where to buy them:

Pasta Leggero Bento

   I've been craving Italian food lately, so I decided to use pasta as one of my 2 carbs for the week. This is a recipe I've had for quite a while, but I tried it for the first time today - Pasta Leggero.  It's from  "The Best of Clean Eating" cookbook, and it's delicious! It's meat-free, so this is almost a vegetarian lunch - except for the tiny amount of ham in my tamagoyaki.

  This is a pretty good day... last week's blood test showed that my thyroid is now functioning normally, and my body decided to reward my healthy eating efforts by letting me drop 5 lbs. ! Yay! Now I'm on my way ( at last) to losing the 20 lbs. I've gained since my thyroid went haywire!


   For exercise this morning, I did yoga, and took a nice long walk at 6 a.m. It was so peaceful and cool! I need to do that more often : )

  Here's my food plans for the day:

breakfast - 1 egg and 1 egg white, 1 apple, and 1 cup of homemade GF granola with almond milk

snack - 1 chocolate coconut protein bar

lunch - Pasta Leggero, tomato salad with mozzarella stars, sugar snap peas, tamagoyaki, and frozen berries ( frozen berries are so yummy packed in a bento in the summertime!)   This pasta is great eaten at room temperature, so I'll be packing this in my husband's and my lunches again soon. I dumped my tomato salad into the pasta and ate it all together! Yummy!

snack - protein shake

dinner - bbq salsa chicken ( which is just barbecue sauce mixed with salsa and chopped cilantro brushed over grilled chicken) corn on the cob, and salad - courtesy of my salad bar  :)

Have a Happy Monday everyone!

Here are some things I used to make this lunch, and where to buy them:

Mama, Papa, Baby Bento

   Today's lunch is something we sometimes have for dinner at our house - 3 Topped Rice. It's a bowl of rice topped with 3 things - egg, ground chicken, and peas. I took those same ingredients and made it into a bento, and added some purple potato flowers and a carrot ribbon. I made panda onigiri, and when I tucked the panda soy sauce bottle in there, I thought it looked like the three bears - Chinese style!

 For the pandas I used a panda face punch, that I bought at All Things For Sale, here it is if you want to see what it looks like.

  the carrot ribbon was also really easy - I used a vegetable peeler to peel some long strips, and I laid them on top of a pot of rice when it was almost done cooking. The steam from the rice cooked the carrot perfectly, and it was soft enough to bend into a bow shape. It took 3 strips to make the bow, BTW. Here's a closer look:

Here's my food plans for the day:

breakfast - I felt sick from the treat I ate yesterday ( it was ice cream) AND the treat meal we ate last night (we went out for tacos and tater tots - it was 103 degrees yesterday, and I didn't feel like cooking at all) SO... I ate a very small bowl of whole grain cereal with milk this morning. Bleh. My body really doesn't like it when I eat junk food. :(

snack - 1 cup greek yogurt with berries

lunch - the 3 bears bento shown above, with one extra rice ball ( to equal 1/2 cup rice) and an apple

snack - Right Light ice cream, which is a protein shake frozen in an ice cream maker - you can take any protein shake and make it into ice cream! SO yummy! That's what I SHOULD have had yesterday...

dinner - this will be the dinner we would have had yesterday - baked potato, lean steak, and salad. No junk food  : )

Hope it's not too hot where you are - today will be another 103 degree day for us!

Some things I used in today's lunch:

click image to go to website

Daisy and Ladybug Salad

   Today is Gluten Free Baking day at our house ( I try to bake once a week) but it is SO hot! In trying to avoid turning on the oven, I decided to work on a recipe for flat bread that can be cooked on a skillet.  This is my first try, and I have to say it's not too bad. It's still not up to my standards yet, but when I make the recipe juuuuust right, I'll share it with you : )

   The parts of my lunch that I'm happy to show off are the daisies and ladybugs that I made for my salad!
I made the daisies from monterey jack cheese with cheddar cheese centers. Cheese is so much easier to cut with tiny cookie cutters than cookie dough! If you haven't tried it yet, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Just use a straw or chopstick to push the cheese out of the cutter if it won't come out on its own.

  The ladybug was made from half a grape tomato. I cut circles out of nori with a small scrapbook- type punch.  The face I cut freehand - I cut sort of a football shape which fit nicely around the end of the tomato. I dampened each piece of nori with a little dab of water, and they stuck to the tomato very nicely. The eyes are cheese, which I cut with a tiny hole punch - who knew you could cut cheese with a hole punch? Well, now you know. In case you're wondering, the details of my salad took me roughly 5 minutes to create - really! Here's a close- up of the ladybug:

  I'm eating my lunch right now as I type, and it's very good!

The rest of my food and exercise plans are as follows:

breakfast - 2 pieces toast with low sugar jam, 2 eggs, and 1 cup watermelon

snack - 1 banana with 1 tbsp. peanut butter, and 1 oz. dark chocolate

lunch - shown above ( the sandwich was chicken breast, 1 oz. cheese, lettuce, mustard, lite mayo)

afternoon snack - it will be a planned treat! Not sure what it will be yet, but probably something COLD!

dinner - will be grilled steak, baked potato ( cooked in the crockpot to avoid the oven), and my salad bar...
 
   Speaking of my salad bar - I have been getting quite a few questions and comments about it, which I thank you for very much!  I plan to do a post soon showing greater details of how to make one, what the dimensions are, and where to buy the containers I used. So if you're interested, that will be coming up soon.

  Thanks for visiting my blog, and thanks for all your kind comments!

Comic Con Bento

   My daughter just left this morning to go to Comic Con in San Diego with her friends, and she asked me for a bento for the road. I looked up their logo and got super excited! I quickly envisioned how I would create it from cheese, deli meats, and nori...  ( thinking of dreamy harp  music here)...

   I started with a square of monterey jack cheese, which I sized according to the size of the alphabet letters I had (that looked very much like the ones in the logo):

  Then I cut strips from sheets of nori with my kitchen scissors and laid them over the cheese.

 I cut the letters out of * ahem* processed american cheese...

  I know, I know! It goes against the "beneficial" part of my blog... but the processed american cheese has the texture of - oh, I don't know - wet play dough? that makes it IDEAL for sticking to the nori strips : )

  A toothpick always helps nudge everything into place.

  Now,  how to make that cool dramatic eye?

  I put paper right over the computer screen and traced it directly, then I used it as pattern pieces to cut out the  main sections I needed - the eyeball, from white cheese; the eyebrow from nori; and the eye shadow from roast beef deli meat.  I first cut a square from turkey deli meat to use as the background, since it looks like light skin color.

  At this point everything was in danger of melting, since it was about 100 degrees  outside when I was making this! I put it all in the fridge for about an hour, then I cut the remaining details freehand from nori, and bits of white cheese.
   ( I'm sorry there are no process pics of the nori - it was just too hard to cut with one hand and try to wrestle a camera with the other!)

   In the morning I lifted the cheese-concoction logo with a spatula when I packed the bento and nestled it on a bed of my daughter's favorite salad. The other compartments contain strawberries, and cheese and crackers ( real cheese, ha ha)

   I used an Easy Lunch Box for this lunch since I knew it would be eaten in the car, and they are the perfect size and depth to rest easily on a  person's lap.

    She also requested a Chicken BLT with Pesto Cream Cheese which is one of my recipes that will be featured in the Trader Joe's/Easy Lunch Boxes Cookbook that comes out this September ( I'm so excited!)

  My son and I got much more ordinary bentos, but they were still yummy:

 
  My son's had a Chicken BLT, along with strawberries, and gluten-free pretzels and peanut butter.

  Mine also had the same sandwich along with a salad ( made from my salad bar, of course! )

I hope all goes well for my daughter on her trip - I'm sure I'll be seeing some crazy photos from Comic Con in the near future :D

Here are some things I used to make this lunch, and where to buy them:

Making Leftovers Look Cute

  Hmmm... I have had the hardest time catching just the right light for bento photos lately.  There's definitely a difference in how the light looks in the summer as opposed to the fall/winter/spring. The bright summer light is either too harsh for a good shot, or else I miss the window of opportunity and it's shadowy for the rest of the day. This one was the best I could do, but it's a little dark. Blah.

  Today I put my leftover baked ziti to good use in a bento - I covered it with purple potato butterflies, and I made mushrooms from string cheese and grape tomatoes. The leaves are sugar snap peas cut on the diagonal. Here's a close up of the mushrooms:

   Unfortunately, it's a little fuzzy. Curse you, summer light! ( did you notice my background fabric changed? I was hoping a different fabric would help : )    )

   I used 2 circle cutters for the mushrooms - one to cut the stem ( a string cheese stick was too thick) and another tiny one to cut the dots on the mushroom caps. It was fun, and a good way to dress up italian food ( since it's just cheese and tomatoes).  I thought my purple potatoes would rot by now, since they haven't made an appearance in a bento for a LONG time - but they keep very well in the vegetable bin in the fridge it turns out : )

   The salad in the other tier was made really quick from my big salad bowl and my personal salad bar.  I REALLY love my little salad bar!

  I'm trying really hard to pack my lunch and 2 snacks the night before, instead of in the morning like I have been doing. And since I was eating my breakfast when I took my lunch photos, I figured I may as well take pics of all my food today.

So here's breakfast:

  Steel cut oats and quinoa with 1/2 cup milk, a sprinkle of flax meal, and a sliced banana. I also had 1 egg with that.

  Here's my 2 snacks:   some veggie sticks and hummus, which I will eat this afternoon...

  and an apple and string cheese, which I  just ate this morning:

  Dinner will be homemade chili mac, some salad, and some steamed veggies.

    I am having the hardest time losing weight since learning that I have hypothyroidism. I think I may try the dreaded "counting calories" thing. I am very reluctant to do this, but desperate times call for desperate measures! Planning my meals for the week helps make it easier. So, my total calories for the day should be less than 1800, which is supposed to make me burn some of this fat off. I also did 30 minutes of moderately intense cardio, and hope to do 30 more tonight when the weather cools down.  I also had more blood work done this morning to see if the thyroid meds are doing their job, and I'll find out tomorrow what's going on. Wish me luck!

Yin Yang Bento

Hi everyone! It's good to be back at the computer again : )

I've spent the last week taking care of my mom, who had to evacuate her home due to a wildfire. Crazy, I know, but her home is safe and sound and she has moved back in. Whew!  Now I'm back to a normal schedule, and I'm ready to pack lunches again.

I did my food prep for the week on Saturday, and I cooked chicken breasts in the crockpot and made chicken meatballs. I cooked rice and sweet potatoes, and prepared Zip n Steam bags that contained broccoli and carrots, and green beans. As always I have my big bowl of salad greens along with my salad bar. I made some chocolate/coconut protein bars, and I have my packets of Right Light shakes ready to go. I have baked gluten -free sandwich rolls for the 4th, and will be working on my son's birthday cake  in the next 2 days... so I think I'm all set!

Here's what my husband is taking today:

He's having black beans, rice, a tomato heart and words cut from cheese, broccoli, carrots, and some leftover pork.

I'm having something similar:

  I tried to make a yin yang out of white rice and forbidden rice with garbanzo beans in the centers : )

The rest of my lunch is chicken, broccoli and carrots, and watermelon.

Here's my meal plan for the day:

breakfast - coconut breakfast muffin and an egg mug ( 1 egg and 2 whites, some chopped veggies, cooked turkey bacon - microwaved for a minute, topped with 1 Tbsp. lowfat cheese and nuked for 30 seconds more)

snack - Right Light shake

lunch - the bento above, plus a salad

snack - a muffin and 3 oz. chicken

dinner - TBD, but it WILL be a picnic!

Have a wonderful summer day!