I’ve been admiring pictures of school lunch bentos for a while now. My girls aren’t in a full day program that would require a lunch of some kind yet. However, I do try to be creative with some of their meals I make at home. We have a dinosaur sandwich cutter that we use on occasion, but I recently came across a new idea – sandwich “sushi rolls”. I know that really it’s only sushi if it includes rice, so maybe these would be more like pinwheels. But, my kids love sushi and since this resembles sushi, that’s what we call it.
I got the original idea on allrecipes.com here: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/peanut-butter-and-jelly-sushi-rolls/detail.aspx. You start by cutting the crusts off the bread, then use a rolling pin to roll the bread out. Then, you decide what you want the filling, peanut butter and jelly, turkey and cheese, turkey and lettuce, lots of possibilities. So far, we have done peanut butter and jelly and chicken lunch meat.
Rolled out bread, peanut butter and jelly spread on
Rolled out bread with chicken lunch meat
Next, you roll it up, then cut into 3 or 4 pieces. The bread I am using here is on the small side, it is the organic multi grain bread from Bountiful Baskets, so I cut mine into 3 sections. I do this twice for each of my kids, so they get 6 rolls each. I like to arrange the 6 rolls into a flower for my girls.
This does require a little more effort than just a regular sandwich, but my girls get so excited to see something a little different on the plate. Plus, I’ve found that they will finish off all the rolls, but as a sandwich, they normally don’t finish it all. I had shared the peanut butter and jelly rolls with my Facebook friends a while back, and one of my friends told me the other day her son wasn’t finishing his sandwich at lunch, so she tried this out and he thought it was great and ate all the rolls. In fact, some of the other kids wanted the rolls too!
My Gems of Parenting 
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