This means something?

After the Thing, I decided to get back to lunches that I could ship FedEx. Here's what I came up with.
George is roast beef and turkey with brown mustard on whole wheat, sitting atop banana chips, broccoli and Cheez-Its. The banana is American and Swiss cheese on pepperoni stuck to a Ritz cracker with cream cheese. The little black dots are fish eggs; I don't think you can call something that sells for $4 a bottle "caviar." They taste like salt. The yellow hat has the same ingredients sans fish eggs. Someday I'm (or a cardiologist is) going to do a find on "cheese" in these posts. Had I been making this for myself, I would have done this scene, but I didn't want to give Primo ideas. It's already hard enough to keep him out of my ether. I tell him that it's like the dishes in the glass cabinet - for company - but you know 5-year-olds!
It ended up being another good one all the way around, though. Primo was able to identify it, ate most of it and told me he "liked that Curious George was thinking about things. Like the hat and the banana." The third Ritz was just intended as a flower design, but he interpreted it as a thought balloon, which, as I look at it, makes perfect sense.

After dinner a few nights back I dressed up some leftovers for my wife to have between work and an appointment. The owl is carved from a Bosc pear. His irises are carrot and his pupils are cheese. The branch is also pear and the pine cone and moon are radish. The leaves behind him are cucumber, there are mushrooms at the bottom and everything is on top of some rice noodles.
She was appreciative of the owl. Moreover, she's seemed to like the blog so far, which really means a lot because she's been writing for a living since college.
After the post about the mallard snack, she mentioned that she thought I would have come back to the "Sopranos" ducks in that post.
I created a physical representation of a departure metaphor in sausage and olive. Come back? I haven't even left yet.
Maybe it's a Mars/Venus thing and Teri Garr would side with my wife. "I don't know, I just thought he was going to come back to the Devil's Tower thing."

If you meet the Buddha in your lunchbox, kill him!

You may remember that I learned some lessons from the Joker episode. Well, I figured that the Thing fruit salad over here would be safe to travel when I cemented it in tapioca pudding. The Thing is cantaloupe scored to look like rocks. The "crash" and his mouth are carved apple. He's got ever-lovin' blueberry eyes and the debris is blueberries, grapes and maraschino cherries with strawberry-leather bricks. I even shook this one around a little bit to see how it held up. I didn't go nuts, but I figured it would survive a short walk. It might have, but it didn't make it through being dropped upside-down onto the car floor and stepped on on the way out of the car seat. I went ahead and surveyed the damage right there on the hood. It was, in insurance parlance, totaled.

I'm about to wax philosophical, so unless you are the sort of person who has tiny "Thinker" bookends somewhere in your house, have stopped to watch a street-mime dig a hole, are high and without access to your copy of "2001," are manually verifying a computer word-count (you know, just to be sure,) or think this might be the time I mention you by name, you might want to skip the coming lavender text. Feel free to bail in the middle, too. It will certainly be moving slowly enough.

I was reading a bento blog recently - not this one, which I think is really great and need to acknowledge - and I saw a post about not understanding how people could spend so much time on something that a kid is going to mess up in seconds. The trite response is: "you must not have kids, because that describes everything included in and including your life once you do." That doesn't really answer a valid question, though.

When I was in college, Tibetan monks visited our campus on a mandala-making tour. Over the course of several days, they painstakingly constructed this intricate work of art from sand and then, presumably, destroyed it (I wasn't there for that part, but, with sand mandalas, it's what one does.) My gut reaction was that it was a crazy way to spend time, but as I really thought about it, the zen started to seep in. If this thing was going to be gone forever in a few days, I was lucky to have seen it. Lucky to have been present at this tiny sliver of time when the fruits of these days of labor preceded by years of experience were borne. But that would make people who missed it unlucky, or me unlucky for missing something else to see the mandala. So, not so much fortunate to be at that particular place at that particular time as fortunate to appreciate it - to really be present in a moment. And sometimes it takes something dramatic to remind you that every experience is one that will soon be gone forever, to be replaced by another that will soon be gone forever. And it's worth pondering which moments to remember or anticipate at the expense of the present.

So there are these chunks of time, usually after he's asleep, where I shut other things out and my mind narrows and narrows its focus. From a scene, to a character to a detail, the extraneous falls away and what is left expands to fill my world. It's meditation. At least sometimes. And when I'm done, there's this hyper-transitory artifact that, by its very nature, can't be appreciated fully by more than one person. Anyone who isn't eating it stops short. But it can, in theory, be more fully appreciated than so many other things because it's food. It can be smelled, touched, seen, heard and tasted. It's an opportunity for what was once my complete focus to become his complete focus. But it turns out he doesn't like tapioca pudding, so this particular fruit salad cannot be his daijo.

Okay, why spend so much time on something a kid will mess up? Because I enjoy doing it, I enjoy the thought that he might enjoy it, it's for him and nobody else and he might, in fact, enjoy it. Even if what he enjoys is messing it up. Which it isn't, because as I repacked his lunchbox and told him that I was sorry that his lunch didn't look like the Thing anymore. He waited a second and said: "Daddy, maybe you should carry my lunchbox on surprise lunch days."

I will, if he wants me to. But if you're going to do your creating in sand, you can't get your saffron robes in a bunch when the tide comes in.

Go, Speed Racer, go! Yeah, just keep on going ... further ... further ... no, it's okay, I'll tell you when you've gone far enough. Sure you'll be able to hear me!

Primo is a big Wachowski fan, but since he thought my "V for Vendetta" chopped salad was Professor X talking to a clown, we went with Speed here. I'm kidding, of course. We didn't let our 5-year-old see "V for Vendetta." We learned our lesson with "Bound." The Mach 5 is turkey, pepperoni and provolone with mayo on the heel of a sourdough loaf and the wheels are dolmas. Speed Racer is a boiled egg, cheddar, turkey, nori and a thin slice of honey gelatin for the goggles. Between the crusty bread, the pepperoni, and, let’s face it, the steering wheel that looks like a nearly-slanderous mustache, the checkered flag (apple) seems more like a tablecloth in an italian restaurant. “Speed rounds the bottle of house red and - Oh no! Captain Terror has deployed a rosemary-infused oil slick! Look out, Speed!” Still, I was really pleased that a bath in lemon juice kept the apples red and white instead of red and brown.

The top slice of the sandwich was a little hard for Primo to get his mouth around, so he ate it open-faced. He seemed to really enjoy this one for both the subject material and the ingredients. When I asked him about it, he said: “At first I thought it was Mario, but I knew it was Speed Racer when I saw the 'M' on his car and hat." (We're going to refrain from untangling that little mind-bender until the spelling foundation is a bit more solid.) "The apples sort of looked like a racing flag. Maybe next time, you could cover the red parts up with black pepperoni."

To my ears, that's a kindergartener begging for an introduction to black pudding.

The mallard of jealousy

I made this for my wife. The ladybugs are pepperoni and cream cheese on Ritz crackers, the small mushrooms are radishes and the large one is a mini Babybel cheese wheel. The foreground is California roll sushi with dabs of wasabi, and the plant the ladybugs are hanging out on is cucumber and edamame in the shell. There are spicy pickled cauliflower and carrot accents.
She had mentioned getting herself a bento box if I would make lunches for her. Also a lawnmower if I would cut the grass, a rock if I would make stone soup and a sow's ear if I would sew it into a silk purse.
She's actually really appreciative, both of the effort and the outcome. And she doesn't necessarily need her subject to have a television show. Or promotional DVD(s). I'm going to put a little rant in white type after this next period, but there's a picture of something else if you scroll down. If you skipped that last link, good call - it will be easier to finish reading this while not bleeding from your eyes. Double-plus good call if you have any scientific knowledge tucked even into the dimmest recesses of your brain, because this show goes medieval on science. In the "Pulp Fiction" sense, and in the "heresy of heliocentrism" sense. It doesn't even make as much sense as a Mad Lib. It's like they're scatting using scientific terms. All of which would make me no difference if Fisher-Price didn't contend that "Kids will be having such a blast with the Planet Heroes™ action figures, they might not even realize they’re learning at the same time!" And, really, why would they? You probably didn't realize there was mercury in your tuna sandwich, but you're still just a teeny-tiny bit more poisoned than you used to be. And by the time you're aware of the Planet Heroes™, they's pretty much already done given you all the learnin' they's a-gonna. Namely that there are planets. Not that any of this will stop me from progressing through all the Planet Heroes™as the charaben-ery continues.

Mmmm ... cathartic.

Anyway, this is a little duck snack I made for my wife a few days back. His head is an olive stuffed with blue cheese and he's sitting among seasoned broccoli and mushrooms. There's Swiss cheese behind him and a little piece of garlic toast backing it all. His body is made of sausage. It's pork rather than duck. And it's that tiny flair for droll attention to detail that glares as the solitary difference between myself and Martha Stewart.

Also, we got a positive visual on Primo's friend from school at the park a few days back. We were walking back to our car when someone began screaming our son's name- something they must teach them all to do, if pick-up time is any indication. We looked and saw a small boy trying, it seemed, to climb out of the window of an SUV. When his door was opened he ran full speed to within inches our little guy, locked eyes and shouted "Hello, Primo!" "Hey!" was my son's response and then there was a brief moment of silence until the other boy's mother caught up. Then all of us, including our son, learned that "Robin's" name is Jack.