Kindergarten Picnic Lunch

Last month, Buddy had his Kindergarten Parent Picnic activity and so I was directed to pack up lunch and come do some fun things with him. Mr. Pikko and I both attended, eating lunch in the cafeteria with Buddy as he yakked away about his day and playfully ignored the little girl sitting across him who is actually the daughter of a former co-worker of mine. Apparently she really loves Baby Girl, which I find incredibly cute.

The sad part is, while we were eating, Buddy said, “Why do so many people have McDonalds?” I looked around and saw that he was right. There were quite a few Happy Meal bags. And it’s not like he was saying this because he envied them, it sounded like he was wondering why there weren’t many other lunches like ours, which I’d cooked that morning.

Since the tray of chicken was around $5 and the rice was probably like 50 cents, this meal cost about the same as a Happy Meal, except that it fed three of us. McDonalds is not cheap anymore and whenever we eat there for lunch it comes out to around $20, around the same as if we ate at Zippy’s or some other place.

I made us furikake fried chicken, which is very easy to make (recipe here) along with some plain triangle onigiri. It was a very simple lunch, nothing really elaborate, but the kids love this chicken and I had to slap a couple of little hands filching too much fried chicken in the morning. Buddy happily ate a lot of it.

Afterward, we went to his classroom to make a little gingerbread house, which was really cute.

For this chicken, I recommend the usual furikake, Nori Komi, but $8.67 for a bottle is actually ridiculously expensive so if you can find it at a local Asian market, go for it. Usually it goes on sale here for $2.50 a bottle. Sadly, Asian Food Grocer doesn’t carry it.

Hope you all had a great new year! Sadly, I return to work tomorrow and boy is my big fat lazy butt not looking forward to that at all… Sigh.