Half Pint Pixie

VeganMoFo Day 11

Vegan Lunch Box by Jennifer McCann

I’m sure all of you have heard of the amazing Vegan Lunch Box book and the original Vegan Lunch Box blog that started it all.

I started reading about the fantastic meals that Jennifer would make every day for her son before I was interested in blogging and before I was pregnant. I think it was the only blog I used to read back then!

The lunches were amazing, healthy yet fun, nutritious yet fun and best of all vegan yet still fun!

I used to cut and paste all the pictures and recipes I liked into a folder so that when LP was bigger (I was nesting by this stage!!!) I would be able to make her delicious lunches. We even got ourselves a Laptop Lunchbox (ok, it was big time nesting!).

When Jennifer self-published Vegan Lunch Box, I was clicking on the “buy” button as soon as I read her announcement.

And just recently I splashed out on the new edition too, mostly because it has been reorganised to make it easier to get around. The sample lunches are now listed at the start and now all the recipes are grouped into relevant sections, whereas with the original the whole book was divided into lunches, which was nice but a bit harder to browse.

Littlepixie is still too little for a packed lunch, but that hasn’t stopped us sampling some of the delights in VLB, the “Massur Dal & Carrot” soup is yum, as is the “Sneaky Momma’s Black Bean” soup. The assembled lunches are inspirational, might I point you to the Hallowe’en entry on her blog as a wonderful example of the creativity involved! It’s worth noting that the recipes yield reasonably small amounts, presumably as they are intended to be lunches for children not dinners for big heffalumps like me & Mr. HPP!

Jennifer has kindly posted lots of her recipes on her recipe blog shmooed food, including one of our current favourites, Full Meal Muffins.

And she has just added a recipe for homemade maple syrup to her recipe blog, which is wonderful because that stuff is so expensive in Ireland, and it’s such a waste when you’re just chucking it in a cookie mix to sweeten it! So you can use this “maple syrup” in your cookies and save the real stuff for your pancakes & salad dressings, where it really counts!

Now, I need to send Jennifer a bill for all the bento items I’ve been accumulating over the past year or so, I’ve gotten so many ideas from this book & her blog. I now have a box full of exciting lunch accessories and nik-naks just waiting to be used and it’s all her fault

So my recommendation to you, dear reader, is that whether or not you are raising vegan kiddos, or indeed any kiddos, buy this book, your lunch-time tummy will thank you!

For those of us with the self-published first edition of her book, there is a list of some typos here. And as always, you can find yummy looking photos on Flickr.

So, dear reader, are you a fan of Vegan Lunch Box too? What have your favourite Lunch Boxes been?

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