The knights who say “knit”

Here at Bunn towers we have gone all knights and castles since Christmas. Well really its since October when we acquired free tickets for Warwick castle. Spider has been mad for horses knights castles falcons and anything medieval. He made some armour over the holidays with grandma out of baco foil and cardboard and just as this was falling apart some kind friend gave him a sword and a shield for Christmas.

Cheese and tomato shield

I don’t do cute food for children as a rule. You won’t often see me turning cupcakes into teddybears or burgers into people with pasta hair, but yesterday I just caught part of Big Cook Little Cook where they were just taking out of the oven a pizza shield, so I thought, as we were having our home made pizzas again this evening I would give it a go – but only for Spider, much as Teenager and Husband might have enjoyed it, I usually leave them to make their own pizza. Anyway, I wouldn’t say it was a roaring success, it’s easier to get a pizza to keep its shape if you use a scone dough which I think they did on the TV. Anyway it served its purpose namely helped with the cheese mountain we are still working are way through since Christmas.

Tiger Hat, no feet

I mentioned just before Christmas that I’d been trying to finish some knitted presents I’d been making for Flapjack Queens children. This morning when I tidied the top of the house I finally managed to undo the spiders web that the cat had made of my knitting bag.

After we put Spider to bed I hoped to settle down to a couple of hours noodling around on the internet, only to discover that Husband had nicked my laptop – so I thought I’d better get cracking on trying to finish 1 of the 3 presents I have on the go at the moment before the cat rediscovers the knitting bag and undoes all my hard work.

This hat is for FQ’s youngest (wheatflake ?) I’ve made it before for Spider, for his 2nd birthday when he was going through a tiger phase…unfortunately 3 hours after he first put it on it got left behind in a cafe in Banbury and was never seen again

Just Bento’s bento box challenge

Just Bento and Just Hungry are two of my favourite sites. I stumbled across them last year when I started taking a packed lunch to work again…something I should have been doing anyway but rarely remembered except on occasions when my Mum hands me sandwiches when I dropped Spider off.

The spur to being more organised was Spider’s pre-school starting a lunch club. As it was on mondays it was an incentive to think about packed lunches over the weekend for the rest of the week (admittedly perhaps FQ and I did spend slightly too much thinking about it and from time to time wasted hours discussing what to put in our childrens lunch bags). Anyway, it worked, for the space of a term I remebered to take lunch with me everyday.

I should point out that when I don’t take food with me, I don’t buy lunch elsewhere – I just don’t eat. Which is a bad thing for many reasons and can contribute to a weight problem as your body gets used to storing calories when it gets them !

I used the internet to get ideas for lunches as I have a limited interest in sandwiches and quickly discovered Lunch in  Box which reminded me about bento boxes, and searching for that brought up Just Bento. Both these sites are jammed packed with ideas not just for lunches but for speeding up preperation of lunches and greater use of the freezer for staple items (I am as you may realise from early posts totally dedicated to my freezer).

I have treated myself to a genuine Bento Box from the Japan Centre but I haven’t used it much – mainly because there was no lunch club last term and as a result I stopped taking lunch – besides  I  found  a cheap partitioned plastic box from a supermarket much more versatile (and its dishwasher safe !).

Anyway, not only is lunch club back this term but Just Bento is running a bento box challenge, starting on the 11th January – it has 3 stages to it Basic, Going Deeper and Weight Loss (in theory the size of your box can be related to the amount of calories it can hold – but that I guess depends on the type of food you are putting in it).

So this is my new years resolution, make lunch for work daily and to keep me on track I am taking the Just Bento challenge…cooking my way through Delia How to Cook 1 & 2 is a personal challenge and not a resolution and I’m giving myself a year for that one due to financial constraints…