Redecorating

I've been playing with my blog - decided it was time for some new wallpaper around here. Please let me know if it's impossible to read or has horrible formatting on your computer.

I found the beautiful background graphic at Squidfingers, via this famous blog.

Bento-inspired lunches

I thought I'd post a couple of pictures of the lunches that I have made my youngest daughter in the last week. She thinks that I am very funny to be taking pictures of her lunches in the morning!

rolled sandwich and veggies
Originally uploaded by ChrisA

This picture shows a rolled turkey and tofutti-cream cheese sandwich in one tier of a two-tier bento box. The second tier has a selection of veggies and a few bread-and-butter pickles (one of my daughter's favorite treats). I'm not sure how nicely the veggies stayed in their places by the time this lunch was actually eaten, considering how backpacks and lunch boxes get thrown around at school, but I didn't hear any complaints!

mini pita burgers
Originally uploaded by ChrisA

This lunch has mini burgers made of meatball-sized chunks of meatloaf mix, slightly flattened and baked, which fit perfectly into the mini pita breads that I found at Whole Foods. The pitas were a little dried out, but the girls dipped them into ketchup (in the little container), and didn't care. Chunks of nectarines (dipped in diluted lemon juice & honey to keep their color), snap peas, baby carrots and bread&butter pickles finished off this lunch.

Mom's Overture

Anita Renfroe has taken "what a mom would say in a 24 hour period, and condensed it to 2 minutes and 55 seconds".

This is SO funny!

hat tip to my friend Annette via email

update 10/2/07: I see I'm not the only one taken with this video. Since posting this, I've seen this posted on another person's blog, and now on the front page of Yahoo. I think Anita Renfroe's public visibility just went up a major notch! I read that she's speaking at the Women of Faith conference this week in San Jose - it would have been fun to see her, but I'll be out of town and I'm not sure if I would have attended the whole conference just to see her (and I hadn't planned on going otherwise), but I may be checking out her books and/or dvd's soon!

Wanna win a Wii?

Can you say that 10 times, fast? I can't.

The other title I thought of for this post was "If it's Tuesday, it must be... Wichita Falls, TX?"

That's where Tim Borland ran today - Wichita Falls, TX - for his 23rd consecutive Marathon. As I mentioned in my post a couple of days ago, my friend Michelle's husband is undertaking to run 63 marathons in 63 days to raise money and awareness for A-T, a rare childhood disease. Tomorrow Tim will be running in Guthrie, OK. I've been watching the daily video updates of Tim's progress on the ATCureTour blog, and the glimpses into what an impact this effort of Tim's is making on the lives of children and families afflicted with A-T is very inspiring.

They just announced on the ATCureTour blog that they are running a contest to give away a Wii, and all you have to do to enter the contest is post the following section of text about the project, along with the appropriate links. Here's my entry in the contest - and if you have a blog or website and want to enter the contest as well, just follow the Win a Nintendo Wii link to the blog entry describing the contest and follow the directions for how to post the text on your blog. Please help spread the word about Tim's efforts!!

Ultra-runner Tim Borland is running 63 marathons in 63 days in order to raise funds and awareness for the A-T Children’s Project in their quest for a cure or life-improving therapies for ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). A-T is a rare, neurodegenerative disease that affects children, giving them the combined symptoms of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, and cancer. Children with A-T — born seemingly healthy — are usually dependent upon wheelchairs by the age of 10 and often do not survive their teens.

To run with Tim, join a tailgate party, or make a donation, please visit the A-T CureTour website. There, you can also view the daily video blog produced by filmmakers who are making an independent documentary on the A-T CureTour or enter a contest to Win a Nintendo Wii.

If you are at all interested, check the itinerary for Tim's tour at the ATCureTour website, and if he's coming to run near you you could stop by for a tailgate party and show him some support for his efforts! If you do, say hi to Michelle from "Chris and the girls from back at home"!

Bento Box Lunches

Warning: long blog post ahead...

One of my desires is to live, shop and eat more responsibly and ethically. I am attracted to the concept of buying foods as locally as possible, and eating organic fruits and vegetables in their appropriate seasons. I also would love to decrease our use of disposable, unhealthy food packaging materials. This is not an easy shift to make, and I am making slow changes towards these goals.

The lunches that I was packing for my daughters (and my husband and I when we are working), have really bugged me in how much they missed the mark. We were not eating to the nutritional standards that I would hope for, and we were using an excessive amount of disposable packaging.

Then this summer I stumbled onto blogs and pictures of bento box lunches, and I am hooked. As best I understand it, bento lunch culture has developed in Japan into a basic standard for packing healthy lunches in attractive, appealing ways. The resources I have found encourage adapting these standards to our own, usually American-style, cuisine. I now find lunch making fun and creative, which makes the work involved much more satisfying.

So what am I doing different? I have purchased a few different types of plastic lunch containers (bento boxes), which I now use to pack our lunches. A Japanese $1.50 store called “Daiso” opened near me this summer, so I was able to purchase a few lunch boxes there very inexpensively (like these).

I also love my new lock & lock boxes from Target. They aren’t quite as cute as the other bento boxes but are very versatile (and the Target price was much better than what’s listed at the website I linked to).

I have not adapted to the bento practice of cooking hot food, letting it cool to room temperature in a bento box, then packing it up and eating it at room temperature three or four hours later. Evidently there is a whole body of knowledge developed in Japan around how to do this safely, but I am not comfortable with the practice – I still pack either cold foods in our bento boxes, or hot foods into little thermoses (we use these Nissan thermoses, they are truly dishwasher safe and very durable).

My favorite bento blog is Lunch in a Box. The author has put together a wonderful resource of ideas, techniques and supplies for bento lunches. Her blog is my main inspiration. I’ll try to put together a list of links of other blogs and resources that are inspiring me another day.

Most days, I am packing lunches for my daughters with usually either a rolled tortilla-type flatbread sandwich and a selection of fruits and vegetables, or I am putting some hot leftovers in a thermos and packing a small box of fruits and vegetables. When my husband needs a lunch, I am packing a lock & lock box with half chicken salad and half lettuce that he can mix together when he eats. I also sometimes make potato or pasta salads for protein and carbs. I send these lunches to school in lunch boxes with ice packs.

My daughters think that my obsession with the cuteness of the bento lunches and accessories is a little crazy – they do not share my love of “cute”, and will not consciously eat any differently just because mom put it into a cute box! What I have found, though, is that the natural influence of well-presented food is changing the way they are eating.

A typical lunch that I made last year would have included a small thermos of leftover spaghetti, and plastic sandwich bags with some baby carrots and some fruit, and maybe a couple of cookies. They usually would eat the spaghetti and cookies, most of the fruit and maybe one or two carrots. I was continually stressed at the amount of food that we wasted, as well as how many plastic sandwich bags we used up and threw out.

Now I will pack almost the same foods, but - inspired by the pictures of bento lunches that I have seen – I might use one layer of our two-tier boxes to pack maybe 5 or 6 baby carrots, a few slices of apple (dipped in diluted lime juice & honey to keep from turning), and 3 strawberries to go with the spaghetti or sandwich. Somehow, when they are presented with the food in this manner, they eat it all. I have almost dropped the practice of including cookies, and now give them very small reusable plastic containers containing a few xylitol mints to chew, which are possibly (according to some claims) quite good for their teeth.

Wow, I didn’t think that it would take that long just to write an intro to my bento obsession. I want to confess that we still have a long way to go towards really reducing our use of one-time disposable packaging. I still buy prepackaged snacks for the girls to pick for their snack recess, and we use disposable packaged drinks. I still purchase too many overly-packaged foods to begin with. But we are making small steps toward our ideals, we are eating a little healthier, and I am enjoying packing the lunches a lot more than I did before. I do need to work more consciously on streamlining my planning and preparation for lunches, to keep the time spent to a doable minimum – but it’s a fun challenge.