Still At It! Back to School with PlanetBox!

Hey there ... so I'm back at lunch making and I'm going to try to share it as best I can via this and my GypsyChique Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/GypsyChiqueFanPage in case you want to follow there without all the words.  ;-)

I haven't blogged about this in a long time, but I've still been making lunches.  I may just start going through  my old lunches and pull out the ones that are noteworthy for the creative aspects.  What do y'all think?

I have to tell you all though ... I've moved away from the plastic bento box that I was getting through Lunchboxes.com ... I'm now "into" the PlanetBox that I got from www.planetbox.com and the reason I'm so crazy about it is because of our poor lunchbox hygiene.  We've twice gone through a school holiday without washing out the box and have had fruit fly/maggot issues.  That's not good when you're talking about poreous plastic containers.  Not good at all.  If it holds the smell of pesto for a week, you can only imagine how basically useless "maggot smell" makes a container ... for good.  I'm not even trying to deal with that.

So this year, since it was time to upgrade and get new lunchboxes (we had the Laptop Lunchboxes for a solid 2 years), I decided to go with all stainless steel PlanetBoxes to see how those worked out.  We're a week in, and so far, it gets 4 stars out of 5.

First of all, I love their look.  They're all metal, so they're kind of retro-looking and the magnets make them "happy" looking.  Because they are basically two metal trays on a hinge, they're VERY easy to clean and run through the dishwasher.  Sterilization.  BAM.

The "four out of five" start thing has to do with the metal food containers that come with them.  I am glad they're metal for sanitary reasons, but my daughters have had a tough time with the larger container that comes with the Rover kit.  One daughter seems to be able to get hers off fine, but the other one (my 11-year old) can't seem to get it open all the time.  Maybe if it was designed more like the smaller ones they come with, it would be easier to get in and out of?  The smaller containers ... "dippers" ... are easy to open, but they also hold their seal.  So I don't know what's up with that aspect of the lunchboxes, but when it comes to everything else, I LOVE IT!!!

So I'll be showing those off going forward - unless I'm flashing back just for the sake of sharing some old lunch ideas that I've used in the past.  My kids don't have any type of dietary restrictions, so they eat a variety of things, so I don't expect these lunch ideas to work for everyone.  But I am pretty sure just about everyone can find SOMETHING they can use in the stuff I post at some point.  ;-)

Be on the lookout.  I'm on my way back to lunch blogging!