Spring rolls

It's been hot here. My 5 year old loves munching on salads. We had a big salad for dinner last night. She suggested spring rolls for lunch because of the heat. It's basically a salad in a rice paper wrap. Actually, we put anything in them from rice and lentils, to cut up fruit and yogurt. They are fun to eat too. 

Today I made rice paper wraps with black beans, tofu, arugula with a homemade vinaigrette. You can get the rice paper from any asian market. I go to an Asian market called Ranch 99. They come in square or circle and many different sizes. I find the small square size is easiest to wrap. 

Black beans, tofu, arugula and vinaigrette on a soaked rice paper.

First, you wet one sheet of the dried rice paper by soaking in a big bowl of water for about 10 seconds. Remove and put on a plate. It will start to soften by itself. Add your ingredients to one corner. Try not to over fill or you won't be able to wrap it. Next, you fold the bottom corner onto the ingredients. Then fold over the 2 side corners to the center of the ingredients. Roll until you get to the top corner and voila, a spring roll! 

my 3 year old couldn't wait until lunch to eat her spring rolls!

Once you make them, they have a tendency to stick together so make sure you add something to prevent them from sticking to each other or it will break when you try to separate them. I used some celery sticks to keep them from sticking. In the top tier, I added strawberries and peaches. In her cloth baggie she has some gluten free cheese crunchies. 

Her lunch is not completely zero-waste because she has a mango gel cup and a yogurt stick. I went to volunteer at her school for snack time and she already ate one! :-)

Half Day = A Big Snack!

Today my 5 year old has a half day. This means no lunch. I thought I could try and increase her snack and see how she does. My friend Denise, mentioned that this is what she usually does too. 


Since my daughter decided on breakfast and lunch for her first day of school, I thought I'd let her pick what we ate for dinner. She picked pizza. Gluten-free pizza and a salad with balsamic dressing. I really love Bob's Redmill Homemade Wonderful Bread mix. I use it instead of the GF Pizza Crust mix because it tastes better in my opinion. We put onions, spinach and olives. I don't eat dairy so I made the other half without cheese. 


For her snack today, I popped in a slice of the left-over pizza, sans onions (notice the circles in the pizza?). Cut it into small bite size squares.

Added some celery sticks, a clementine and a cloth fold-over baggie filled with dried mango and trail mix. Today I used the medium container from the nesting food container set. The lid works really well as a plate so she can pour her trail mix into it and search out all the chocolate chips. :-D

Her cloth napkin is used to tie Furoshiki. I'll put it into her backpack with her Kleen Kanteen water bottle and she is ready to go! This would have worked as a lunch for her too!

*I added a little note in there to let her know how much I love her!

First Day of Kindergarten!

Today I dropped my 5 1/2 year old daughter to her first day of kindergarten. I'm excited and melancholy at the same time. Being a natural foods chef and holistic health counselor, I wanted to make something fun and different for her. Alas, she insisted on a sandwich, boring for me but exciting for her. She has gluten sensitivity so we rarely make sandwiches. Luckily there are a lot of gluten free breads on the market. We like the Trader Joe's brand multi-grain, gluten free bread but it is a little firmer/dryer than regular bread.

The school instructed us to pack a snack that is separate from her lunch and easy for her to get to. Snack time is at 10 am.

For her snack, she wanted yogurt and fruit. So I used the smallest container from the nesting food containers. The night before, I put some plain yogurt in the container and popped it in the freezer. In the morning I put chopped strawberries and  drizzled grade b maple syrup on top. I'm assuming it will be nicely chilled but thawed when she is ready to eat it. I really love these bamboo sporks!

You can see the frozen yogurt below the maple syrup:

For lunch (11:30 am) she requested 1/2 a cheese sandwich and 1/2 a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. In her cheese sandwich, I used shredded raw cheddar cheese, grapeseed veganaise and arugula on gluten-free bread. I used a two-tier tiffin. 

I packed the other half sandwiches in my 3 year old's tiffin while we are out and about today. 

On the lower container, I put white peaches, celery sticks, red grapes and half of a cheese string. Again, this was all her idea. 

I made these cloth baggies, similar to the fold over sandwich baggies in the 70's, remember them? I put some some cashews and rice crackers it it. Something a little more crunchy and savory for her. 

I froze 1/2 cup of water in her kleen kanteen overnight and filled up the rest with water so it stays cold when she's ready to drink. One of her (too small for her) pink socks work really well to absorb condensation on the water bottle.


Here is her lunch with snack before I packed it in her tiffin bag. Her nesting container fits perfectly on top of her tiffin and I'm still able to tighten the drawstrings. 

Hopefully she'll let me get more creative with her lunches as she gets used to going to school! 

*not shown is the weelife lunch note I added to her tiffin bag that says: Have a good day! I <3 U!