Dora the explorer and a Invention!

Today I decided to go with the star catcher herself Dora!  I definitely had a little fun coming up with a different way to create this adorable little girl. So this is what I ended up with today...

Here in this lunch we have:

1. "Dora" Potato smiles (home made using instant potatoes, need to perfect my recipe though.)
2. Fish sticks with lemon slice
3. sauteed spinach
4. garlic mayo and ketchup for dipping
5. more potato...this time (salad) was out of the girls favorite cottage cheese. There's also a cherry tomato with a star pick.

I love the idea of potato smiles; this is what they look like, if you have no idea what I'm talking about! (Lol) Smiles   They are simply smiley face tater tots or baked mash potato. I doubt if I'll ever find them here in Finland so I tried to recreate them myself. I used instant potato mash and corn starch to help the consistency and baked in the oven...but they were a little stodgy, so I need to keep experimenting. (The girls ate them fine smothered in mayo and ketchup of course.) I topped my baked potato smiley with nori and voila it's Dora!

For Missy Lulu's snack bento I did more experimenting. To make the Dora potato smiles, I used a biscuit cutter for the face and some small bento cutters for her eyes and mouth; I did the same on some left over tortilla from yesterdays lunch. I spread the tortilla with cream cheese and sprinkled on  raw organic coconut palm sugar. Coconut palm sugar looks and taste like brown sugar, but has a lower GI than brown or white sugar; and it has essential vitamins and amino acids. Mixed with the cream cheese was it quite nice. After the sammie was done, I was left with this:

Not very cute right!!?

I didn't want "creepy skeleton Dora", even though it is October! I wanted the cute little face on my daughter's napkins and party hat left overs...then  it came to me!

I'm calling it a sandwich protector! All I did was cut out the card board hat and used my home laminator to seal! My scary sammie went from scary to this:

Much Better Amigos!! I figure I could adapt this idea around a lot of her sandwiches, just make a design more generic like a circle with flowers or a simple hello kitty bow. No more messy sandwiches no matter how rough my kids are with there backpacks!  What do you think? 

Linking this lunch to What's for lunch Wednesday week 123 .