Somehow I don’t have a lot of pictures of dinners from the past few days. What I do have are lunchbox pictures and pictures of an amazing cake I made. So that is what I’ll share.
First the lunchbox pictures. I have found that prepping lunches ahead makes my life run smoother. While packing multiple lunches is a little time consuming upfront it saves loads of times on the back end. I mean I’m already cutting up fruit and vegetables so what’s a few more? And I’ve been keeping school lunches in mind during the week when preparing dinner and such. For example, last week we had something with quinoa in it and another night we had lentils (oh yes, in lasagna!). I saved just a little bit of both of these things on separate nights so that I could put together a quinoa lentil bowl for lunches later in the week. No extra work needed! So here a few of the things I’ve been packing for Isabelle’s school lunches:
Easiest grain-free banana muffins (seriously, 5 minute prep time and then you bake them! No sugar, no grains!), grapes, cauliflower, and grape tomatoes.
Hard-boiled egg, olives, broccoli, pickle, yogurt with blueberries and strawberries.
Peanut butter and jam lettuce wraps. These get put in the lunch rotation on at least a weekly basis. I use both creamy and crunchy peanut butter and whatever homemade jam I happen to have the most of. Right now, that’s blueberry!
Peanuts Gone Wild Muffins from the Wheat Belly Cookbook. These grain-free, refined sugar-free muffins have peanut butter, chopped peanuts, and peanut flour in them. For my girls, too much peanut does not exist. I’ve decided that muffins on a weekly basis is just easy. It’s different, they are relatively healthy, and the girls love them.
Now for the second agenda item. Pretty much the most amazing cake I’ve ever made (it rivals the donkey piñata cake I made for my best friend’s birthday last year). That cake was pretty amazing and crazy difficult. This one was not as difficult but did take a lot of my time. It was all I did for two days. I’m just going to go straight into the share and I’ll give you the flavor break down after you lay your eyes on this one:
Luau! This cake was for a luau wedding reception party. And it was my first attempt at a tiered cake. I’m totally the type of person that assumes I can do anything I attempt (much to my husband’s dismay) as I am overly confident in my abilities to figure it out as I go. While that works for things like this taking on this cake it is not as great for other household chores when I am balanced dangerously on a unsteady chair reaching up high to do something I probably shouldn’t be doing anyway. Sorry, honey! This cake was a learning experience for me (learning that dowels in cake are not very much fun but completely necessary for this one!) and was a ton of fun to put together. The bottom layer is the coconut cake recipe I shared before with coconut cream cheese filling and coconut cream cheese buttercream frosting. An amazing cake in its own right and I am not typically a coconut flavored cake fan! The middle layer was a vanilla cake (I used the coconut cake recipe but used vanilla extract instead of coconut flavor) with lemon filling and lemon buttercream frosting. The volcano was a red velvet cake stuffed with cream cheese filling and chocolate cream cheese frosting on the outside. All of the cakes were so good and I’d say it was a draw for me between the red velvet and the coconut. Now, I’ve got a whole pan of leftover cake pieces in my fridge (the trimmings off the top, etc.) that I’ve got to figure out what to do with. If the girls are lucky I will make them a few cake balls out of it. Shhhhh, don’t tell, though.
Food to Live By 