A love for children and food spurs a prepacked lunch businesses in Taranaki

A home business is seeking to make healthy food fun for children by packing lunches with "a-pee-ling" characters.

Minions - a popular childrens' cartoon character - are getting drawn on bananas as part of the crafty cuisine venture, Our Lunch Box.

Owner Lisa Strampel-Menzies opened up her pantry for business in Taranaki just three weeks ago as a way to encourage students to enjoy healthier options.

Lisa Strampel-Menzies dresses bananas as Universal Pictures' Minions - a popular childrens' cartoon movie.

"I know what it can be like trying to get children eating healthy," she said. "This just makes food fun and more appealing."

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Using icing for eyes and edible markers, Strampel-Menzies packs boxes with the fun bananas as well as grape caterpillar sticks, vegetable flowers and tasty tiger mandarins.

Lisa Strampel-Menzias has started 'Our Lunch Box'. A venture to get kids eating healthily in school.

Placed in a box with a fun food fact, Strampel-Menzies then delivers the prepacked lunches to a school.

Our Lunch Box allows parents to order a packed lunch for $6.50 or $8, dependent on size.

However, Strampel-Menzies also included a feature that allows anyone to shout a lunch box for a $5 donation.

Using edible markers, Lisa Strampel-Menzias creates fun characters on healthy food.

"You hear of some students who go to school with no lunch and it's so sad," Strampel-Menzies said.

"This helps feed those students who just need a school lunch."

Strampel-Menzies said the crafty lunch box idea came naturally to her.

"I was a nanny for 10 years," she said.

"And I've always liked food. So, it just sort of came together.

"Plus I get to work from home and be with my daughter."

Seventeen-month-old Isla Menzies watches her mum draw on fruits with edible markers and cut imaginative shapes into vegetables.

"Oh she loves to taste test," Strampel-Menzies laughed.

She said when the Food Act 2014 came into force earlier this year, she wanted to combine her love for children and cuisine and start the at-home venture.

"With council approval, the law allows me to use my own kitchen so it cuts out a lot of costs," she said.

Since the lunch box business was so new, Strampel-Menzies only had one school she delivered to - St John Bosco in New Plymouth.

​"The first couple of weeks were freebies to get the name out," she said. "This week, I dropped off 12 boxes."

But the Minion bananas, crunchy cereal bracelets, and tiger mandarins weren't enough for Strampel-Menzies, as she has added edible bouquets to the online menu.

"There isn't anything like that here and I think it would work really well for afternoon tea."

If the venture gained enough popularity, Strampel-Menzies said she would like to expand and pack lunches for businesses.

"I'd like to offer salad boxes one day," she said. "Maybe some different pairing options. We'll see how it goes."

How to Make Roasted Pumpkin

I had some leftover roast pumpkin in the fridge, and since it’s grilled cheese season, the only right thing to do was sandwich it between layers grilled crisp buttered bread with sage, mozzarella, and a fried egg. This sandwich has everything right going for it: the earthiness of the sage plays well with the sweet roasted pumpkin; the over easy egg gives you a bit of yolk action; and the mozzarella is the meltiest. It’s fall in a sandwich!

makes 1 sandwich
prep time: 5 minutes
active time: 5 minutes
total time: 10 minutes

OIL
1 LARGE EGG
3-4 SLICES OVEN-ROASTED PUMPKIN
SALT AND FRESHLY GROUND PEPPER
1 TABLESPOON BUTTER
3-4 SAGE LEAVES
2 SLICES BREAD OF CHOICE
2 SLICES MOZZARELLA



In a small pan, heat up a bit oil over medium heat and cook the egg, over easy, to your liking. I kept mine at medium soft. Remove the egg and add a bit of butter and crisp up the sage leaves, flipping as needed. Remove the sage from the pan.

Place 1 slice of bread down on a cutting board and top with a slice of mozzarella, the crispy sage, roasted pumpkin, and fried egg. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Lay on another slice of cheese and the remaining slice of bread. Heat up 1/2 tablespoon of butter on medium-low head and add the sandwich to the pan. cook slowly until bread is golden brown and toasty. Most of your cheese should be melted when it’s time to flip. Remove the sandwich from the pan and add a touch more butter. When melted. Add the sandwich back to the pan, second-side in. The second-side grills a bit faster, so turn the heat down to low and keep a close eye on it. When toasty brown and perfect, remove from the pan, and enjoy hot!

How Much Do You Know About Eggs?

Cooking transforms no other food as dramatically as an egg. Whether you prefer them hard-cooked, poached, fried, or scrambled, knowing how eggs go from raw to cooked can help you perfect your technique.

What happens when eggs cook

The yolk and white (albumen) of raw eggs are essentially just sacks of water dispersed with proteins-about 1,000 water molecules to every one protein molecule. Protein molecules are relatively enormous, composed of hundreds of amino acids bound together into long chains. In a raw egg, the chains are folded into compact globs held together by fairly weak chemical bonds connecting the folds. Due to the chemistry of egg albumen, most of the protein globs in the white have a negative electrical charge and therefore repel each other, which keeps the white watery and loose. In the yolk, some of the proteins are bound up with fat, so although some yolk proteins repel each other, the electrical charge of others is neutralized by their fat coating, which makes yolk proteins less repulsive to one another. That's why a raw yolk, though still liquid, is less runny than a raw egg white.

As an egg heats, all of its molecules move faster and collide. Gradually, the collisions become so intense that the weak bonds holding the amino acid chains into folds start breaking apart, and the egg proteins unfold. As the heat increases, these loose protein strings continue to move and become tangled into a three-dimensional web. The egg still contains more water than protein, but the water is now dispersed in the protein web so it can no longer flow together, turning the liquid egg into a semi-solid. This happens at around 145°F for egg white and 150°F for egg yolk.

Continued heating causes more bonds to form, leaving less space for the water. Eventually, much of the water is squeezed out (this is referred to as weeping) and evaporates, causing the egg protein to coagulate. When eggs are overcooked, the protein web becomes so tight and retains so little water that the egg white becomes rubbery and the yolk chalky, a textural difference due to fat interspersed with the protein web in the yolk.



Control texture with heat and stirring

To better understand how heat affects eggs, think of a fried egg. If cooked over a raging hot flame, it'll become rubbery and overcooked. But use medium-low heat, and it turns out tender. If you like crispy, browned edges and a runny yolk, the trick is to use medium-high heat but remove the egg from the pan as soon as the white firms so it doesn't overcook. To keep your fried egg whites from "feathering" (running) in the pan, use the freshest eggs possible-they have thicker whites and stronger yolk membranes, so the yolks are less likely to break, too. It also helps to cook the eggs in a nonstick or wellseasoned pan with butter, not oil. Butter's saturated fat and natural emulsifiers prevent sticking better than oil.

Similar rules apply to scrambled eggs, but there's an added variable: stirring. For soft, small curds, use low heat and stir almost constantly to heat the eggs evenly and keep them from shooting too far past 158°F, the temperature at which blended eggs start to coagulate. If you prefer large, firm curds, use medium-high heat and occasional stirring. You can also create a more silky, custard-like curd by adding about 1 Tbs. of cream, milk, or water for every large egg, which dilutes the proteins and raises the coagulation temperature. The eggs will take longer to cook and need low heat to prevent the extra liquid from weeping.

Omelets cook much like scrambled eggs, except they're rolled or folded at the end. The key is to avoid overloading the pan, which increases cooking time and creates a rubbery omelet with an overcooked skin. For a two-egg omelet, use an 8-inch pan, and for a three-egg omelet, use a 10-inch pan. For a fluffy omelet, start with high heat and rapid stirring to moderate the heat transfer to the moving eggs, incorporate a bit of air, and avoid an overcooked brown skin. Then reduce the heat to low to finish cooking, filling, and folding. If you like a denser omelet, use low heat and slow stirring so as not to incorporate air.

Don't boil "hard-boiled" eggs. A rapid boil can crack the delicate shell. Plus, boiling for more than 20 minutes causes hydrogen sulfide in the egg white to react with iron in the egg yolk, creating a harmless but foulsmelling green ring of ferrous sulfide around the yolk.

A better way to cook eggs in the shell is the cold-start method: Put a single layer of large eggs in a saucepan, and add enough cold water to cover by 1 inch. Cover the pan and bring the water just to a simmer, then remove from the heat and let the eggs stand, covered, in the hot water for 4 minutes (for soft-cooked eggs with liquid yolks) to 12 minutes (for hard-cooked eggs with firm yolks). Next, immediately chill the eggs in an ice-water bath for a few minutes to halt the cooking.