field trip!

Yesterday, Clara had a field trip where she needed a totally disposable lunch... no lunchbox, no containers, no waterbottles.  Everything needed to be able to be thrown away.  That pains me for a couple of reasons 1)  Clara doesn't eat the traditional sandwich and chips lunch... never has... and containers make packing her preferred lunch so much easier and 2) it's hard to think about throwing out so much stuff.

So, with inspiration from some bento blogs, Clara and I set out on a mission to make her lunch in reused, recyclable containers.

Here's what we came up with...

She had a grilled Trader Joe's nitrate free all beef hot dog (leftover from Monday's dinner), wheat cracker and sunflower seed butter sandwiches, blueberries and a strawberry, and Trader Joe's mini tomato mix and Persian cucumbers.  The only thing added after the picture was a drizzle of ketchup and mustard on the hot dog pieces... Clara decided to add that at the very last minute.

And here are the containers and utensil in their previous life...

As Clara was eating her snack of roasted peppers, pretzel bread, turkey and mozzarella and tomato salad, it hit us that THIS was the PERFECT field trip lunch container!  The poor bus boy kept trying to throw it away when she was done, but we kept refusing to give it up! 

We took it all home... the container, the water bottle and even the fork.  Washed them all up and used them for her field trip lunch!!  And, as a bonus, the museum they went to is really big on recycling, so she was able to recycle it instead of just throwing it all away!