It's Beginning to Look a lot Like...

Winter! Well, Winter for the PNW, anyway. Rain, rain, and more rain. Glad it isn't snow!

Princess and Bean are of a different opinion. Every morning they wake up and immediately look out their bedroom window, hoping to see the ground covered in a blanket of white. Instead, they see our soggy boggy backyard. Generally our area only gets an inch or two of snow each year, if that much, so they aren't likely to see their wish come true anytime soon. But it doesn't hurt to hope, right?

Since the sky isn't providing the kind of snow they can walk in and toss around, I've been trying to provide a little bit of that wintery spirit in their lunchboxes. 

Today Princess has snowflakes in her lunch. A snowflake turkey sandwich, snowflake pretzels, snowflake yogurt, and snowflake Ritz. Think that will hold over her wish for snow for a little bit longer?

We love the snowflake Ritz. They're so pretty! I also cut some cheddar stars, and tucked in a few grape tomatoes, a Princess favorite.

The pretzels are white chocolate covered with a sprinkle of crushed peppermint. They're delicious! Definitely going to have to try making some myself soon.

For Bean, I packed a fun bunch of Christmas trees. She has a tree sandwich, yogurt with sprinkles (trees, snowflakes, and candy canes), apple pieces, star shaped crackers, and some star pretzels with tree gummi candies.

The sandwich is made with whole wheat white bread and turkey, cut with a tree shaped cookie cutter. It's topped with a cheddar star and decorated with sprinkles and decorating gel.

Both lunches are packed in Easy Luncboxes.

My lunch today was too pretty not to snap a pic of. Greek yogurt over banana slices, topped with berry granola. So very delicious! The Greek yogurt brings a nice tang, the granola a bit of crunch, and the bananas round it all out by lending sweetness. My favorite lunch!

In other random news, our ducks are laying! I was starting to think they were going to hold off until Spring, but then the Dude went out to add bedding to their duck house and found a whole cache of eggs hidden there. Ducks roll their eggs in mud and hide them under grasses to keep them safe from predators. Their eggs are huge next to chicken eggs, and packed full of protein. They taste just a tiny bit more rich than a chicken egg.

In this picture, the big semi-white eggs are from our ducks, and the smaller darker eggs are from our chickens.

To give a better idea of size... the egg on the far left is from Chick, our "mystery hen", or might be from Buffy the brahma. The one in the middle is either from Princess, Lady, or Peach  (the buff orpingtons), or Hawk-Stripe or Rosebud, the Americaunas. And the egg on the far right, and the three behind, are all from Olivia and Nut, our duck hens. Nut is a Pekin (she looks just like the Aflack duck), and Olivia (and her mate, Annie) is a mystery breed.

The story of how we came to have ducks, and our 'mystery hen', is actually kind of interesting. The short story is that a friend of mine posted to Facebook that a friend of hers had found a pair of ducklings and a chick abandoned in her yard. She couldn't keep them, so they were trying to find someone who could take the trio. I lived just a few blocks away and had just recently moved my hens from their brooder pen in the garage out to the chicken run in the backyard. I still had the brooder pen set up, and the Dude and I had been talking about getting a few ducks eventually. I picked them up the next day! 

We named the ducklings Annie and Oliver, and the chick... Chick. A few days later we picked up Cutie and Buffy, our brahma chickens, and added a Pekin (Nut) and an Indian Runner duckling (India). They all grew up together in the brooder pen and moved to the yard together. 

Raising ducks and chickens in the suburbs has been interesting. They're loud, but luckily none of our neighbors has complained (yet). We keep them from smelling by keeping the coop and duck house clean and well stocked with pine shavings and straw. Occasionally I take eggs to the neighbors, to help keep the peace. Shortly after we got our ducks, the couple next door started raising a pair of ducks, too, so definitely no complaints there! It's fun to go hang out in the backyard on warm days - our ducks and the neighbor ducks "talk" to each other through the fence. We can hear them quacking and gabbing back and forth.

Chickens are very easy to care for. Ducks are more work, and they're louder and smellier than chickens. But they're also adorable and a lot of fun to watch. Worth raising, if you're able!

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Corn Dog Muffins

Tried these out and they were a rousing success. The kids all loved them! They're just beef hot dogs, sliced up, baked inside of cornbread muffins. Delicious, better than chemical-filled corn dogs, and easily portable.

Bean and Princess took leftover corn dog muffins for lunch. Bean asked me to draw snowflakes on hers. At 8 in the morning, with a mean sore throat and fever (me, not Bean), after almost no sleep the night before... They look more like starbursts or fireworks than snowflakes. But she was thrilled with them, so I'll call them a success!

Bean has corn dog muffins, blueberries, Annie's Organic cheddar bunnies, a chunk of cherry cheesecake, and purple grapes.

Yep... I still see starbursts.

Princess has the same food, but with HelloKitty decor.

If I can find it again, I'll share the corn bread recipe I used to make these. I think any basic cornbread recipe would work. Just place pieces of hot dogs or mini sausages in a muffin tin and pour the cornbread batter over top, and then bake. Super easy!

Leftovers

I love it when the sun shines. Especially when the day starts with a layer of icy frost on the ground. That shiny bright sun melting the cold away always puts me in a happy mood.

It was still a cold morning, even with the sun. Brick wanted a hot lunch, and I was happy enough to put something together. He took a Thermos of hot bean and cheese...um, goop? What do you call something that isn't quite a dip? The Dude made bean burritos for his dinner the night before, and the leftover bean-cheese-Rotel thick goop is what Brick took for his lunch. Filling. I'll call it filling. Anyway, Brick took a Thermos of filling for his lunch, along with a small salad with shredded cheese on top, some ranch dressing and a big tub of fresh salsa, some crispy tortilla strips, and a small handful of trail mix. Everything he needed for a taco salad, or a salad with chips and dip - his choice.

G-man doesn't do beans, so he took leftover egg nog pancakes for his lunch, along with ham rolls, a couple of strips of leftover bacon, a cheese stick, some trail mix, and some canned pears (drained, rinsed, and patted dry to remove some of the excess sugar and liquid) with a dash of colorful sprinkles on top.

It's the little touches that makes lunch special. Like rainbow sprinkles (or jimmies, if you prefer) and a couple of music note picks.

Princess, on the other hand, loves bean filling goop. I made her a quick happy bean burrito - see how happy he is? Full of glee, that little burrito. Glee, and beans. Glee, and beans, and cheese. With a little snow hat on top! She also has some black olives, a cup of fresh salsa with crispy tortilla strips, and canned pears with sprinkles. I was a tiny bit nervous about sending a bean burrito for her lunch. She loves them, but she usually eats them hot and this would be served cold. I was pleasantly surprised to see that she ate more than half of the burrito at school, and then ate the rest as soon as she got home!

For Bean, who likes beans but only hot and only sometimes, I sent a sandwich made with leftover tuna salad and yummy homemade bread, one of her favorite sandwiches. She also has some black olives, a couple of mini Oreos, some canned pears with blue and white wintery sprinkles, and pepper jack cheese slices with crackers.

Love these snowflake picks!

Seasons: Autumn and Winter

Two simple, basic lunches from today, and a muffin tin, too.

Princess has a loose Autumn theme, with a lot of browns and yellows and some leafy picks for decoration. She has a cup of applesauce with cinnamon, corn kernels, frozen blueberries (which were thawed in plenty of time for lunch, though apparently the juice leaked a bit, turning the corn a purple-orange color. Her friend told me it was "very cool and Fall-like" but Princess was not happy and requested frozen blueberries be very carefully sealed off from now on.), ham rolls and a cheese stick. For dessert and snack she has chocolate rice cakes and a homemade trail mix of honey rye crisps, sesame sticks, sunflower seeds, M&Ms, and candy coated sunflower seeds.

Bean had a similar lunch, but with blue snowflake Winter-y picks and peas instead of corn. Yes, the peas are frozen. They were thawed in plenty of time for lunch, since I put the lunch together the night before. Bean said they were pretty good, and easy to eat (she has a loose tooth; makes crunchy foods a little difficult to navigate, though she did say she liked the trail mix anyway).

 

Both lunches are in Easy Lunchboxes, our favorite boxes.

Beaker had a muffin tin lunch, in honor of Muffin Tin Monday.

He has a loose star theme, with trail mix in a star shaped silicone cup, pineapple "Saturn" rings with dried cranberries in the center (the planet core, of course), some Club crackers for dipping in the star shaped cup of tuna-pickle salad, outer space Goldfish, and a small chunk of German chocolate cake.