feeling a little excited {Santa Claus is Coming to Lunch blog hop}

Santa is coming!  My girls are at the age where the magic is fading. They haven't said that they don't believe or even questioned us this year, but I know it's going to be the last year we can hang on to the magic. Santa brings them one big gift that's left unwrapped, since he doesn't have time to do all that wrapping.  I think they love coming down and seeing their favorite gift sitting under the tree. The excitement they have for it is genuine and I have cherished those moments. Last year, my younger daughter had some questions and her big sister would cover her ears and hum loudly to drown out the sound. It was so funny. This year, they're more interested in technology and clothes, so the big gift is going to take a lot of thought. Here it is, December 16 and we've still got nothing!  What we do have is a blog hop...since Santa is coming to LUNCH!

Please check out all the other lunches by clicking the button below, which will hop you over to the next blog and so on.  Comments are always appreciated!  See what Shirley over at Little Miss Bento has whipped up for you...her food is amazing!

I went uber simple with this lunch. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by all the decor and fanfare over Christmas. So I kept it to a bare minimum and hope the sentiment isn't lost. 

The lunch is simply a turkey sandwich cut to look like a fireplace, salad with carrot stars and one of our easiest cookies ever...the recipe for those cookies can be found HERE. The girls had a great time using our food coloring tints to paint on the white chocolate of the cookies. I prefer the cookies without all the paint, but they were having such a great time doing it and working together. 

I cut the crusts off the bread, except for bottom edge, which is the top ledge of the fireplace. Using the back side of the knife I pressed the bread a bit to make bricks. Cut a square out, painted a burning fire with Wilton food coloring tints and BAM! Instant doorway for Santa to come in to. Although now that I think of it, the burning fire may pose a problem for him...poor guy. 

Of course there's a Same Lunch, Two Ways since the older, mini woman would be appalled by a fireplace in her lunch. She came home and mentioned that the food coloring on her cookie had colored her teeth, which none of her friends told her about until two classes after lunch and she was embarrassed a little. She stated that I could still put the cookie in future lunches, but they had to be decor-free.  I haven't packed them salads in a while because I was getting them back and they were hungry. They ate all of the salad so I was pleased. 

If you are interested in any of the products I use, click the affiliate links below, please! Anytime you purchase through one of my links, regardless of what you purchase, I get a small percentage of the sale. It's how lunchy gets paid! Thanks!

  

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feeling a little elf-ish

It's no surprise that we love the movie Elf with Will Ferrell. It was played daily in our house from November until July one year...and my then two year old cursed "Son of a nutcracker!" on a regular basis. So when my friend from What's In Our Lunch Bags mentioned making an Elf lunch, I had to follow suit. Thanks for the idea Karen.  I ❤️ You!

This quote happens to be one of our favorite scenes. If you need a reminder of the scene, click HERE to head on over to YouTube for a reminder. 

The sandwich is just turkey and cheese on Martins potato bread, with a Babybel cheese, pretzels and a candy cane...since it is one of the four food groups according to Buddy. Candy, candy canes, candy corns and syrup! 

I used Wilton food coloring gels to paint on the bread...it's my new favorite medium. 

If you are interested in any of the products I use, click the affiliate links below, please! Anytime you purchase through one of my links, regardless of what you purchase, I get a small percentage of the sale. It's how lunchy gets paid! Thanks!

  

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feeling a little like making the easiest Christmas cookie recipe ever

I'm sure this cookie has been made somewhere before and probably a long time ago, but the recipe was verbally passed to me from my mother in law...that's how easy it is.  She's amazing in the kichen and if you'd like to make a much more involved cookie, check out this post I did last year for Fruit Cake Cookies.

This recipe is the best no bake, not a lot of fuss, most delicious cookie ever. They're truly the easiest cookies you'll ever make. It's so easy, that my 10 year old wild child made the whole thing. I just took pictures. 

Items needed:

Peanut butter or a peanut butter alternative like WowButter

Keebler Town House crackers

Vanilla Bark Coating also known as candy coating

Sprinkles (optional)

Parchment paper to place cookies on to cool. 

First, make sandwiches by spreading your peanut butter or WowButter between two crackers. Try not to have the butter seeping out the sides of the sandwiches too much.  It will end up melting in your candy coating and making a mess. One box of crackers yielded about 60 sandwiches for us. We made half of them with peanut butter and half with WowButter. If you're making these for people with allergies to peanuts, you'll really want to make sure you don't cross contaminate anything. 

Second, melt your candy coating as per the directions on the package. I've done this in the microwave before, but honestly, it burns very easily so using the stove top may be safer since you can actually feel the lumps melting while you stir.  The coating stays well melted for a long time after it's removed from the stove. It can also be reheated if needed. Make sure you melt it on a low setting so it doesn't burn. 

Dip the cracker sandwiches, one at a time, in the coating with two forks. Make sure to turn them over a few times to get an even coating. Hold them over the pan to drip off the excess candy. Place them on the parchment paper to cool. They take a while to cool, but you'll want to add your sprinkles while they're still melty. You can make five or ten, do the sprinkles, then go make more. Or if you prefer more simple, just leave them plain. 

That's it. You're done. Well, you'll have to wait about 45 minutes for them to be cool enough to box up.  Although, a warm candy coated peanut butter cracker is rather fantastic too. I almost prefer the WowButter ones to the traditional peanut butter. The WowButter has this great toasty flavor to it, combine that with the salt of the crackers and the uber sweet of the candy...it might just be the perfect cookie.

Now, my girls went a little overboard and whipped out my Wilton gel food colorings...they painted the twelve days of Christmas on their cookies...and a few scenes from The Hunger Games. They're still delicious!

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feeling a little goofy

Goofy would be an understatement...look at that silly gingerbread man sandwich!  His eyes are making me giggle. The wild child came home and saw it and said it was weird. WowButter is a great allergy free alternative to peanut butter that tastes and looks so much like the real thing that you'd never know the difference...except if you had a peanut allergy, of course!  The eyes are Wilton candy eyes and the mouth and buttons are Kraft Jet-Puffed Mallow Bits. We love those bits around here. Often have to stop myself from grabbing a handful and chowing down. They're just like the marshmallows you find in cereals...without the cereal. Yum!

We are almost ready for the holidays. My store is getting busy as all the shoppers are out and about. It's hard to keep my cool, but fortunately the customers are patient when they see we are working hard to pump out those drinks.  The big gifts are bought and now is the fun part of finding all those little special somethings to round out the presents. My big gift was the camera, but I'm hoping Santa brings me a mustache camera strap and a wifi adapter for it. The camera is great. The mini woman had a chorus concert this week and I used it to shoot some great photos and even better videos. So clear and so nice to have it to add to our pile of memories. It took longer to upload than it did to make. Like twenty minutes for a two minute video...ugh!

Of course, there's a boring seventh grade lunch with this one...her bits are hiding. 

If you are interested in any of the products I use, click the affiliate links below, please! Anytime you purchase through one of my links, regardless of what you purchase, I get a small percentage of the sale. It's how lunchy gets paid! Thanks!

  

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feeling a little bright

The house is all decorated for Christmas. I bought this chalkboard at an antique store a few months ago and it hangs in my kitchen. It's an old twin sized headboard that was modified.  How clever.  It's one of my favorite things in the house...even if I suffer greatly every time I write on it. In fact, just the thought of drawing on the wooden surface painted with chalkboard paint sets off a series of chills and goosebumps down my arms. Wish I knew why I physically react to chalk.  Must be the sound and feel of it combined. I muscle through it and have discovered that if I keep the surface wet and freshly wiped down while I'm working on it, that the side effects are lessened. Scrawled across this board is a quote from the movie Elf with Will Ferrell. "The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear." It's our family's favorite holiday movie by far.  The movie came out on DVD around Thanksgiving of 2004 and we bought it, not knowing that it would be such a big part of our lives. The wild child was completely enamoured by it. She was not quite two years old, and every single day she had to watch the movie before she would take a nap. I used to allow them to settle down on the couch for their naps, so she would curl up with her blanket and demand "Watchy Elf?!" This continued for almost eight months. Every. Single. Day. Even now when I hear the opening credits, I start to feel a little sleepy. 

I can still hear my sweet little toddler cursing, "Son of a nutcracker!" Might explain some of her sense of humor...

My husband is the Christmas light king. He doesn't do anything extravagant...but he sure uses a crap ton of lights. This year we can honestly say that there are no less than 3000 lights on the front of the house. 3000! Thank goodness I decorated the entire tree this year and took off some lights, too. One year he put so many on, I'm pretty sure you could see it from space. I was afraid that we might be falsely accused of being a marijuana grow house by those infared radars the police use as they fly over in helicopters. Looking at this photo now, I may have to sneak out there and remove some of those lights..

Today is the first day back after the Thanksgiving holiday break. It was a long break this year, spanning the entire week of thanksgiving. Usually it's just Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I worked Black Friday, and am proud to say that I survived. I almost skipped making lunches, but the girls are kind of picky about the lunches the school offers, so I made them.  Today's "Same lunch, two ways" is a mini bagel with turkey, cheese and lettuce, carrot slices, cheez-its, a Babybel and one with ranch, one with hummus. Happy little snowman:

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feeling a little Christmas cheer...

It's been a little while since I've actually written a blog post.  I've been hiding out on my Facebook page: Click the image below to go visit and LIKE it!  Special thanks to Beth over at www.aboyandhislunch.com for the logo and web design!  She did a great job, don't you think?

The Bento Bloggers and Friends group has gotten quite large and hops were huge and overwhelming to go through, so we divided it up this time and are adding a linky party as well. This is the second week of the Holiday Ho Ho Hop and it's sure to be just as awesome as last week!  When you're done with feeling lunchy, click the hop button below and head on over to My Epicurean Adventures for more holiday fun.

I asked my 9 year old what she wanted for this lunch and she replied fairy bread!  Fairy bread is really simple...it's so simple, I feel like I'm questioning your intelligence when I write the instructions below.

You will need:

• 2 slices of bread
• 1 cookie cutter
• Peanut butter, Nutella or some other sort of sticky spread
• Sprinkles or we used Jet Puffed Mallow Bits (they're like the crunchy marshmallows in hot chocolate packets and they're amazing! they can be found where the marshmallows are in the grocery store)

Take one slice of bread and smear it with your sticky stuff.  Take the other slice and use your cookie cutter, cutting out a shape in the middle.  Place the cut slice on top of the peanut butter slice and fill the hole with sprinkles.  Be sure to lightly press the sprinkles into the peanut butter so they don't fall out when the lunch is brought to school.  We had a little mustache flair that we added to our gingerbread man.  You don't eat the mustache...never eat. The mustache.

She has her fairy sandwich, tomatoes, Snap Pea Crisps and a homemade ginger bread cookie.  It was her idea to cut the center out of the cookie, too.

The Miniwoman has a simpler lunch of course, since she's too cool for fun lunches...she has an orange, some tropical trail mix, a gingerbread cookie and her sandwich is just like the Wild Childs, peanut butter and crunchy marshmallows, but you'd lever know that because we hid all the fun inside!

Hope you enjoyed the lunches!  Have fun on your hop.

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