Gluten-Free Chinese Food Recipes

Kids love to go out for Chinese food, but for gluten-free kids, this is always a challenge. Our nearest PF Chang's Restaurant is 100+ miles away from where we live. So I've had to learn how to cook Chinese food from scratch for my family. During the next month or so, I plan to share my recipes. Some are quite easy to make; others are a little harder.

I'm also going to show you how to grow your own bean sprouts, at the end of this month. Growing your own sprouts can be done indoors any time of the year, but right now, if your kids are home from school for the summer months, this little indoor gardening project will give them something to keep them occupied. Watch for that post at the end of July.

What makes Chinese food especially fun, though? It's those wonderful cardboard boxes. Here's a pattern for a Chinese food box, and I'm going to show step-by-step instructions, so your kids can make their own Chinese food boxes to put their Chinese food into:

1. Trace this pattern or print it onto card stock paper. (Incidentally, that pattern comes from this website, called Stay Beautiful. They show a more crafty use for the box pattern (less food-related).
2. Use a pair of scissors or craft knife to cut out the pattern and score along all of the dark lines.
3. Bend the side flaps outward, as you see in this image:

4. Staple side flaps to one another, like you see in this image:

5. Once all side flaps are stapled, it will probably be quite small, as you can see in this image, but it might hold a child-sized helping of Chinese food:

6. You can have your kids decorate their Chinese food boxes with Chinese lettering or put their names on their boxes, or color them with crayons. The whole business just makes eating Chinese food that much more fun!

And how cool would this be in someone's lunchbox? I'm always looking for fun ways to spice up my daughter's school lunches. This project is ideal!