Mothering Corner

I promised Ellena that I will try my best to post about Thai cooking, but since I don’t have a cooking blog, I shall post about Thai tomyam here. So, fellow bento-ers, I hope that you won’t mind about me “messing” up my blog. LOL!

First of all, I would like to clarify that, I have never really cooked before I moved to Bangkok a year ago. I was staying with my mother-in-law, who’s a great cook, and I have a maid who did the house chores. Basically, I just had to take care of my kids.

But since I moved here, I started to learn how to cook and occasionally, I will try to learn Thai cooking from my sister-in-law. She’s Thai, and we are here in the same office. Maybe most of us are bored with “ta pao” food and we are too lazy to think about what to eat for lunch, and thus, she and the office staffs volunteer to cook our lunch. As for me, I just stand there and watch. LOL! Thai cooking is totally different from Chinese cooking, I would say…

So, here are the photos I snapped just now, when they were preparing Thai seafood tomyam nam sai. Nam Sai means it’s clear soup, you will know the difference later…

The ingredients include limes, spring onions, coriander, tomatoes, shallots, fresh lemongrass, galangal, bird eye chilies, kaffir lime leaves, sawtooth coriander (not shown), squids (washed and cut), and prawns (seasoned with fish or soy sauce)

To me, my tomyam must come with kung (prawns)! Prepare some MSG, or you can use chicken stock, salt, sugar and fish sauce too.

Chop the shallots and slice the lemongrass, and galangal into small pieces.

Put them in boiling water.

Let the “soup” cook for a few minutes.

At the same time, pound some bird eye chillies. They are super spicy, but I love it. LOL!

Add the chilies into the soup. Ahh….be generous please, I love spicy tomyam. LOL!

Add in squids and prawns.

Add in coriander leaves, sawtooth coriander, spring unions, kaffir lime leaves, and tomatoes, which are all cut into smaller pieces.

Then it’s time to squeeze in the lime juices (I think it’s about 5 or 6 limes used) and add some fish sauce, salt, sugar, MSG or seasoning. I can’t tell you how much to add…

Get a “tester” instead. LOL! She’s our helper at the office.

If the tomyam is not good enough, tell the chef to add more seasoning or lime juice in. LOL! Say hi to my lovely SIL. She’s a good cook.

When it’s done, scoop up and serve.

There you go, Tomyam Nam Sai. See? The soup is clear huh? But it’s sour and spicy.

Interested to see our complete lunch at office?

Mixed veggie, fried fish, fried eggs, and tomyam on today’s lunch menu. LOL!

Now you know why I don’t have to pack my own lunch? LOL! I have great chefs here.

Bon appetite, everyone.

I bought a small loaf of sesame bread and thought that it would be perfect for animal-shaped sandwiches.

Sesame bread, and that’s how I aligned my cutters so that I can max out the cutting space and minimize wastage.

My initially plan was to fix my kids a penguin and seal bento but the first seal didn’t turn out nice. Thus, I replaced it with koalas.

Here are the tools for the bentos:

Please click on the photos for bigger view in Flickr.

Besides sandwiches, I packed some custard apple, mangosteens and strawberries too. And there are the bentos:

My boy’s koalas bento. I guess nori is not suitable on sesame bread as the facial features are not obvious huh?

Here’s my gal’s penguin bento. She said it’s papa penguin and baby girl penguin (which means it’s her). LOL!

 TGIF! So, have a nice weekend everyone!

Remember my bento corner, where I place most of my tools? Some of you have been asking me where I got my bento tools from, so here’s a summary of the suppliers:

•  Daiso: It’s a nice place to get some tools for a start, and the price is reasonable.
• 100Yen: I can’t find 100Yen in Bangkok, but a lot of bento bloggers will drop by 100Yen outlets to grab the tools.
• Bento Market: My favorite online store for bento tools! I know most of the items are out of stocks, and that’s because they are selling like hot cakes! So, make sure you sign up as member and be notified about the latest arrivals.
• NST: I shopped here too, but not a lot.

As for seaweed punchers, I have always prefered the shoe punchers (check Bento Market) and those from Carl’s.

Some of my punchers

But if you can’t find these Carl’s punchers at your local bookstores:

My friend Arlene might be able to help you to get the designs, directly from Carl’s supplier. So, if you are interested, please drop by her blog, or drop her an email at aloke28@yahoo.com. Bear in mind that she’s not satellite radios so please specify which design of facial punchers, like row #, which color and which expression as shown in the photo above when you are ordering to avoid any confusion. I’m not sure about the selling price, so please find out more from Arlene.

Don’t miss out the facial punchers ya? They are truly useful in bento-ing.

Initially, I thought of packing a simple bento without decoration for my kids, but an image of a dog flashed across my mind when I saw the hotdog bun. Thus, I decorated the buns as little doggies, with cheese, nori and baby carrots.

My gal’s bento with a doggie hotdog bun, some strawberries and oranges.

Here’s my boy’s bento

Do the buns look like doggies? My kids sure thought so.

My boy requested meat balls and pasta yesterday, so I prepared a bigger portion and kept some away for today’s bento. My kids love pasta, and they are delighted to have pasta everyday, if possible. Besides that, I prepared some egg sheets too, by separating the yolk from egg white:

White and yellow egg sheets

Try to mix a tablespoon of corn starch (mixed with water) into your egg mixture so that the egg sheets are thicker and less likely to tear. You can freeze the egg sheets for next use.

This is what I did this morning:

I placed the spiral pasta and some tomato sauce in aluminum cups. I normally use Prego Organic Tomato and Basil Italian sauce.

Top the pasta with more tomato sauce and add a small meat ball in it.

I prepared the meat balls with minced pork and chopped onions, and mixed the meat with an egg, some soy sauce and corn starch to make it more consistent for patty or easy to form into meat balls. Then, I fried the balls until golden brown, served some for dinner last night and refrigerated a few balls away for today’s bento.

I topped the meat balls with a piece of smoked cheese. I added some mixed veggie and starry cheese on the sauce too.

After that, I baked the pasta in the oven for 10 minutes, and 5 minutes before they were done, I placed some meat balls on the baking tray to heat them up as well. The extra meat balls would be used for decoration.

Here are the reheated meat balls. I purposely formed them in 2 different sizes.

I used tiny spaghetti strips to join the smaller meat balls to the bigger ones.

Then, I packed everything in the bento boxes and here they are before decoration:

I added the egg sheets as Rilakkuma’s nose and ears.

Then, I proceeded to add some nori, punched with the following punchers:

The punchers for today’s bento.

 So, here is the end result:

My gal’s bento, with baked pasta, Rilakkuma meat balls, and 2 strawberries.

And this bento belongs to my boy.

 Let’s not forget about Kiiroitori, which was initially the piece of smoked cheese on pasta.

Kiiroitori on meat balls and spiral pasta.

Today’s bento meal is slightly heavier because my kids are more occupied on Wednesdays.

I didn’t pack much for my kids last week as hubby was away from the office, and I brought my kids straight home after school. My kids were pretty glad that they didn’t have to tug along with us for a few more hours while waiting for daddy to finish his work. But start from this week, it’s back to “hanging around” at office after school, and they need their tea bentos again.

I didn’t have anything special in mind, so I decided to use the Pooh bear rice mold as a bread cutter. It’s been awhile since I last used this rice mold, so I better dug it out from the tool box.

Cut the bread with Pooh rice mold.

However, this rice mold is not sharp enough, so it’s not easy to cut into the bread. If you have the Pooh toast cutter, I would suggest you use that cutter instead.

To minimize wastage, I cut the leftover bread with a bunny cutter.

I cut a small piece of ham with the mini Piglet cutter. Cut a small triangule from kamaboko (pink fish cake) for its nose too.

Use the same cutter, and cut the ears for Piglet. Just cut off the excess with a knife.

 
Stack the kamaboko ears on the ham. Then, proceed to adding his eyes and lips with nori (sorry, photo was not taken!)

After that, I packed the sandwiches, quail eggs, cherries, blueberries, mangosteen and papaya in the bentos.  Thus, here’s the end result:

Pooh Bear and Friends bento for my boy

A rabbit family bento for my gal.

Those are the bento names given by my boy.

I’ve always wanted to fix my kids a Stitch and Angel bento, but my boy said Stitch is ugly and naughty, and he never quite likes it. I guess Stitch is not one of those cute Disney characters so he is never my kids’ favorite. Nonetheless, I wanted to change my kids’ perception that Stitch can be cute too, especially after I saw some cute Stitch stuffed toys online.

So, here’s what I did for today’s bento:

I cut the bread in circles and spread some jam between the bread.

I cut the nori with exacto knife (just trace the round cutter on nori), cut off the excess and pasted them on the bread for Stitch. You might need to use some jam or butter to make sure that the nori sticks on well.

Cut some ham for ears.

I packed everything in the bentos. Try to fold the ham ears in halves and slip them in.

Besides bread and ham, there are strawberries, blueberries, cherries (for my boy), grapes and edamame in the bentos too. Then, I proceeded to decorating the bentos:

I cut 3 pieces of round cheese for Stitch’s eyes and nose. By using the same round cutter, try to cut out a piece of nori in circle and place it on one of the cheese for its nose.

Place the nose and eyes on the bread. I cut 2 smaller circles of nori for his eyes.

 
Cut some ham for Angel’s eyes and nose.

Cut 2 tiny strips of ham for Angel too.

Place in the eyes, nose and pin the ham strips on her head with spaghetti strips.

Add tiny pieces of cheese on their eyes.

Add some lashes for Angel

Now, it’s all done! I know it sounded complicated but it’s really not that hard. So, here are the bentos:

My gal’s bento with Stitch and Angel

And here’s my boy’s bento

The first thing my boy said when he saw his bento was, “Huh? This is Stitch?” LOL! I guess it’s not the same as the Stitch in cartoon huh?

I had to drag myself out of bed this morning. It’s Monday, and I’ve never been a Monday person. LOL!

Anyway, I promised hubby that I would fix scrambled egg for him for breakfast, so I better kept my word. To make things easy on a “sleepy” Monday morning, I decided to fix the kids some egg sandwiches for their after school tea.

My boy likes egg sandwiches, but my gal will only take it when she’s in the right mood. She has always been very picky about eggs, and so far, she won’t reject hard boiled eggs. So, I hope that she will be hungry when she’s back from school, then she will be less likely to reject her sandwich.

In order to make their sandwiches more appealing:

I imprinted the bread with their favorite Disney characters.

You can use any bread or cookie cutters of your choice. I chose Tigger and Marie for my kids.

I outline the imprint with the cutter, but make sure that the sharp part is facing up so that you won’t cut through the bread.

Here are the bread with Tigger and Marie the Cat imprinted.

I made the sandwiches, as usual, but placed the imprinted bread on the top. Then, I cut off the excess and sealed the sandwich with this bread cutter.

Don’t put a lot of bread filling in your sandwiches if you opt for a nice seal.

So, here are the sandwiches:

Tigger and Marie egg sandwiches.

You can toast the sandwiches for a few minutes, if you want to have some color contrast. I didn’t do so as my kids will only have their tea by 5pm, and by then, the sandwich toasts will be soft again.

I packed their sandwiches in Pooh bear ziplock bag as they were too big for my bentos.

Egg sandwich in Pooh bear ziplock bag and some mango and grapes in smaller bento box.

There you go! Today’s bento meal is super speedy huh?

If you are interested, check out how I used the bread cutter for Sugarbunnies.

I packed some noodles for my kids today. It’s just plain noodles, but I mixed them with some soy sauce, sesame oil and a little bit of pepper for taste.

Then, I decided to fix mushroom man again because it’s quite simple. I didn’t snap any photos during the preparation of previous bentos. Since Chinnee was wondering how I fixed the little mushroom, I shall share some photos here.

I prepared 2 quail eggs, a cherry tomato (cut into halves and dig out the flesh), the white artificial crab meat, 2 heart picks and Carl’s punchers.

Pin the tomato and quail egg together with the pick.

Then, add some tiny spots of artificial crab meat on the tomato, and add the face features for the little mushrooms.

So, there are the bentos:

Today’s bentos with little mushrooms in dry noodles, some rambutans and baby carrots. Those nori bits were punched by my kids this morning and they wanted to put them in.

It’s Friday, so have a nice weekend ya!

It’s another simple bento today. I pan fried some SPAM for breakfast, and this time, I bought the less-salt-less-oil version from SPAM, instead of Tulip! So, I didn’t have to “struggle” with the can this morning. LOL!

I prepared 2 wheatmeal buns, some lettuce and 2 pieces of Spam.

Obviously, there is nothing special about the mini burgers. I just replaced the burger patty with Spam.

I packed everything in the bentos.

There are mini burger, tamagoyaki (which the lazy mommy bought from the Japanese food section at supermarket ), some blueberries and a strawberry. The strawberries from Driscolls are quite big and I couldn’t slip in more, so I packed a few more strawberries in smaller lunch boxes for my kids.

Since my kids have always preferred to have their food “smiling back at them”, I proceeded to decorate the mini burgers.

I added 2 eyes, cut from fish tofu, to the buns. (Why I use spaghetti strips)

Then I added their eyes and lips with nori (that’s the puncher I used) and 2 rosy cheeks cut from artificial crab meat.

What I had in mind was decorating the buns as frogs, but my boy said, “Mommy, it doesn’t look like a frog.” O.o *sweat*

Anyway, here are the bentos:

My boy’s mini Spam burger bento.

And here’s my gal’s bento.

 I gently pressed down the buns before closing the bentos. Don’t worry, I have an extra pair of tweezers for my boy in the lunch bag, and he might “fix” the nori if he feels that his meal needs some touching up. LOL!

Now, would you please excuse me. I have to go figure out what’s wrong with the buns as they don’t look like frogs. LOL! *just kidding, I have to get back to work. *