What's for lunch this week?

 Scones with peanut butter and jelly, cherry tomatoes, honeydew melon

Holy cow, where has the time gone?  I can't believe it has been almost a month since I last posted my lunch photos!  I've been faithfully snapping away every weekday morning, but when Monday rolls around, I've either been too busy, too sick or too lazy to actually write the post.   It doesn't help that school is ending a lot earlier than usual (our school district altered the school calendar to end in May instead of mid-June because the earlier calendar will give high school seniors the chance to finish their mid-term exams before the holiday break).  It also doesn't help that I'm going to co-president of our school PTA board for next year.

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Kids, kids and more kids: A visit to a goat farm

May is always a crazy-busy month, what with all the end-of-year activities like class picnics, sports days, thank-you brunches, field trips and classroom activities.  Yes, field trips and classroom activities happen throughout the year, and I could just stop volunteering and make my life easy.  But this year all the coolest ones seemed to happen at the end of the year, so busy or not, I had to make time for them!  Take the cow eye dissection -- no way I was about to miss that.  Then the very next week came Jammy's field trip to Harley Farms Goat Dairy, and I've been wanting to visit that place since forever, so of course I had to go.

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Jennifer Perillo's Lentil-Ricotta "Meatballs" (sort of)

Last week I attended a launch party for food blogger Jennifer Perillo's new cookbook, Homemade With Love: Simple Scratch Cooking from In Jennie's Kitchen.  Everything we ate at the party was one of Jennie's dishes, cooked by Jennie and another food blogger and cookbook author, Gina Von Esmarch.

One of the tastiest dishes there was Jennie's Lentil-Ricotta "Meatballs" -- obviously, the quotes are there because this is a vegetarian version of traditional Italian meatballs.  Since we're always looking for ways to cut down on our meat intake, I resolved that this would be the very first thing from Jennie's cookbook that I would try to make.

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Gumdrop Bridge Challenge

One of the activities that 3Po and Jammy enjoyed most during their week at Camp Galileo was building a suspension bridge out of pipe cleaners, wood, cardboard and rocks.   It wasn't just a beautiful art project: the bridge actually had to support the weight of 100 pennies!  It was exactly the kind of challenge they relish.  Even more important, they applied and learned some important engineering principles:  forces, weight distribution, counterbalancing, etc -- have stuck with them.  Now they know the difference between a cantilever and a suspension bridge, and every time we cross the Bay Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge, they can look at the structure and understand what the trusses and cables are for.

Those lessons have definitely stuck with them: one afternoon a couple of months ago I found myself browsing through the Galileo Learning blog and came across a post describing a Gumdrop Bridge Challenge.  It was a slow afternoon, and I already had toothpicks and mini marshmallows in the cupboard, so I challenged the boys to build a 10-inch bridge with just 40 toothpicks and 20 gumdrops.

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A sweet party for a sweet 12 year-old

If I'm not mistaken, it has rained almost every year on the day that The Pea has had a birthday party.  This year, we finally wised up and realized that the best way to ensure clear skies would be to hold her party in late April instead of early April -- less showers, more flowers.  Here's how we celebrated:

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How to Dissect a Cow Eye

Warning: This post contains graphic, gross, gory photos!  If you feel squeamish at the thought of raw body parts, here is the gist of today's post:  3Po and Jammy dissected a cow's eyeball in class today.  No need to read further.

For those of you who like the gore, read on...

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What's for lunch this week? Who cares?

Without a doubt, this was a week that sucked.  So far we've had the horrible tragedy at the Boston Marathon on Monday, an earthquake at the Iran-Pakistan border on Tuesday, and a fertilizer plant explosion in Texas on Wednesday.  I actually need a calculator to figure out the total number of dead and injured (I'm lazy at mental math).  The US Senate voted down an already watered-down background check bill for gun purchases (the Manchin-Toomey amendment), which means even more bodies added to future death/injured tolls.

On the shallower side (far shallower, but focusing on the inane helps calm my agitation at the injustices of the world), my favorite soccer team Arsenal tied 0-0 with Everton and Manchester United managed to pull off a last minute goal to tie the score and deny West Ham a well-deserved victory.  To top things off, a virus has entered our home.  I've felt crappy all week and I've infected the rest of the family.  Is it any wonder that I don't feel like making lunch?

This was not my week for homemade lunches with colorful fruit and interesting sandwich fillings.  It was a week for school hot lunches, for bread and cheese, for bagels with cream cheese and PBJ, for Oscar Mayer Lunchables.  It was a week to sit on the sofa and watch the news and explain to the kids the meaning of words like pressure cooker and fertilizer and amputation.  Yes, a healthy, beautifully presented lunch shows your kids that you care, but so does a hug.  This week, I chose hugs.

Grilled cheese and mushroom sandwich

Today is National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day, but I didn't find out about it until mid-morning, so I wasn't able to make grilled cheese sandwiches for the kids' lunch. I'm not about to let such a delectable holiday pass by without any fanfare, so naturally I put grilled cheese sandwiches on the menu for dinner.

Tonight's grilled cheese sandwich has two kinds of cheese, brie and cheddar.  It also has sauteed mushrooms, onions and roasted garlic.  I bought roasted garlic from the deli, then sauteed it with the mushrooms and onions for about 10 minutes.  Then I sandwiched the sauteed mixture with the brie and cheddar in a sandwich roll.

To grill the sandwich, I used our panini press, which has rendered our actual grilled cheese sandwich press obsolete ever since Alfie got it for our anniversary in November.  It's so easy to grill any kind of sandwich, of any thickness -- and it marks the sandwich with those pretty grill lines.  Every time we use it, I remember the days we spent in France and Belgium, sitting in chic little sidewalk cafes, munching on paninis.  Our panini press doesn't just serve up great food, it serves up great memories as well :)

Happy National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day! Here's hoping your grilled cheese sandwiches bring back lots of good memories for you.

Thirty-eight lunches to go....

Honeydew melon, olives, cherry tomatoes, string cheese, Ritz Crackers

Spring Break is over, and after nine days of leisure it's difficult to go back to the daily school schedule.  It makes it even more difficult because the days are getting sunnier, the air is getting warmer, the daylight is lasting longer.

Summer is almost here.... except it actually isn't.  We just say it's almost here because we so badly want it to be.  We still have eight weeks of school left -- or to be more precise, we have 7 weeks plus 4 school days since school lets out on a Thursday.  Plus 3 school days, not 4, since today's school day is pretty much over.  That's thirty-eight more school lunches to pack.  That's 114 servings of fruit for my 3 kids.  And 228 slices of bread, assuming I pack a sandwich every day.

Can you tell I'm ready for the schoolyear to be over?

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Celebrating Twelve

Three years ago I wrote a blog post about how sad/scared/sentimental I was about The Pea turning nine.  Ha.  If only I knew how good I had it back then.  Now her younger brothers are nine, and this beautiful creature has turned twelve.  Twelve.

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