Mothering Corner

I really enjoy blogging. Not only that I have a chance to keep an online journal for my life and passion, I made a few good blogger friends over the years too. Some of us share our daily ups and downs in our blogs and through our private chats, and it’s always nice to get some sincere comments in our blogs. A few of my friends have been suggesting that I should publish a Bento book, but honestly, I’m not ready for one.

Writing a book is totally different from blogging, and most importantly, I have no idea how to write one either. Should I draft out a copy first before looking for a publisher? Do I need a massachusetts oui lawyer to go through the details with the publishers? And what should I write?

In short, I’m still clueless about the whole idea, and I don’t think I have a lot of new ideas in mind for a book. All my “creations” have already been shown in this blog, so I can’t see the point of coming out with a book with similar ideas, when anyone can just read the blog.

So, thanks for your suggestions. I truly appreciate that.

Nonetheless, I’m still very new in this, and I’m not ready!

Frankly, I don’t have anything in mind for today’s speedy bentos, and it’s only after I finished packing everything in, I found that the two cute faces looked like a cave boy and a cave girl.

I have some leftover spaghetti from yesterday’s bento, and I reheat the spaghetti this morning. Some was used as the kids hair as you can see in the bentos and some went into my kids’ tummies. LOL! They just love pasta.

My gal’s bento with a cave girl holding a stick (it’s baby carrot). Please click on the photo if you are interested to know more about the bento meal.

Here’s my boy’s bento.

I really like the cave boy’s expression. Very cheeky huh?

Obviously, today’s bento is inspired by Sanrio Charaben Contest! I showed the bentos to my kids the other day and my boy wanted to have that cute little Shinkansen quail egg. He even drew a picture of Shinkansen last night, hoping to fix it by himself, but I didn’t prepare any ingredients for him. I haven’t tried preparing hard boiled eggs a night before, and I’ve always prepared them in the morning.

As for my gal, I decided to fix Hello Kitty for her as it’s pretty easy. I know that I would be spending more time on Shinkansen, so I have to pick an easier Sanrio character for her bento. Besides that, she’s a big fan of Hello Kitty mah…

So, here’s how I decorated an quail egg as Hello Kitty:

I cut 2 small triangles of kamaboko as Hello Kitty’s ears. Make 2 small cuts on the top of the quail egg and gently slip in its ears.

Hello Kitty’s eyes were punched from nori and her nose was cut from a tiny piece of egg sheet. (Try to prepare the egg sheet a night before, and freeze it for next use.)

Next, add some whiskers for Hello Kitty.

As for Shinkansen:

I cut the tiny strips of nori and punched some circles for its wheels.

I added his eyes, eyebrows (cut the sad smile into halves) and his cheeks from egg sheet.

I punched a few tiny strips of nori as its windows.

 After that, I placed the quail eggs in their bentos, consisted of spaghetti Bolognese. Their fruits were packed separately as shown:

Today’s bento with Shinkansen and Hello Kitty quail eggs.

A closer shot of the mini bentos.

If you have food coloring, try to make a blue egg sheet for Shinkansen and it will look better than mine. So, give it a try!

P/S: If you would like to have rounder shape of quail eggs, only put the eggs in when the water is boiling and roll the eggs for 1 -2 minutes before leaving them to cook. 

 I let my kids fix their meals once in a while, and I would like to share how I do this with them.

Out of the blue, my boy wanted “to play with his food” last night, but I didn’t prepare any ingredient for him. Thus, I asked him to draft out his idea, and I promised him that I would fix one for him the next day. If you would like to get your children involved in decoration their meals, try to get them to visualize how they want the lunch box to be decorated. If they are too young for visualization, you may ask them to draw a picture first, like what I would usually do with my kids.

My boy’s drawing his favorite train.

After that, you might have to spend some time brainstorming with them about which food can they use in their lunch boxes. Try to go for colors like cheese for yellow, carrot for orange, ham for light pink and etc. Some times, I would let my kids pick the food from the fridge and freezer, and I will prepare the food ingredients according to our “discussion”. If you don’t have time for that on the same day, you can always keep their drawings away and do this during your free time. I guess I can put my kids drawings in art storage soon as they are so many pending food ideas! LOL!

I try not to pack process food every day, and I prefer to pack more fruits for my kids. I don’t worry much about those tiny details of ham, fish cake and artificial crab meat as I only use them in very tiny bits.

Try to get your kids involved in cutting the bread with cutters, and also decorating the food, if he’s old enough to use the tweezers. Just make sure that their hands are clean before they start off with the food! Rice molds are great for kids too, and it’s not too hard to form the rice balls, if you have some fancy rice molds. If you are preparing the food decoration a night before, try to wrap the food ingredient in cling wrap and refrigerate them in air-tight container. So far, I haven’t tried refrigerating rice balls as I hardly pack rice for after school tea.

For older kids, you can get them involved in packing food into their lunch boxes. Silicon cups and food dividers will be great to separate different types of food. For example, if you don’t want the bread to be moist by fruits, try to place the bread in silicon cup first. Then, add in the decorative details you and your children have prepared. Even if the end result might not be exactly the same as their drawings, it’s still a great achievement for kids.

My kids will have a satisfying smile on their faces if they take part in preparing their meals. Nonetheless, cleaning up the after mess can be quite tedious, if you don’t have an extra pair of hands at home! But it’s fun, so give it a try.

 I bought something from NST last week and thought of sending the parcel to Ipoh as my FIL was back home for a few days. But too bad, no one was at home to receive the parcel and it was returned to Poslaju, and I am not there to pick it up. I guess the parcel will be sent back to NST again if no one collects it after a week.

I didn’t buy a lot of tools recently as I’m cutting back on my shopping budget, which includes bento tools as well. I might not be able to save up enough to get any rare coin but I feel much better that I spend lesser.

Besides that, I have most of the tools I need.

I try to use most of my bento tools if time permits, so that I won’t feel so guilty of buying them.

My kids have always wanted an Old McDonald bento, with the farmer and a few other farm animals in it. Thus, it’s a great opportunity of using the various animal cutters in my toolbox.

Various cutters (please click on the photo if you are interested to know more about how I used the cutters)

I prepared the farm animals yesterday to speed things up. Besides that, I got my kids to help me to flatten the milk bread as it’s too thick for the cutter. By doing so, it would prevent the bread from getting stuck in the cutter, and the bread is more compact after a few rolls too.

I packed more fruits for my kids today, and there are rambutans, oranges, blueberries, cherries, guava (for my gal only) and some corn and baby carrots too. Old McDonald was decorated with meat floss as his hair and mustache. I should have made his a hat with egg sheet, instead of corn, and it might look better that way.

My boy’s bento with a dog, a chick and a sad horse. I decorated the horse a sad face for the horse because I don’t think it looks like one. LOL! Nonetheless, my boy likes his bento.

Here’s my gal’s bento with a cat, a pig and a lamb. I noticed that I’ve forgotten to add some whiskers for the cat!

 My gal doesn’t like her bento because she complained that it does not look like her kor kor’s bento, and she wanted a horse. O.o I was running out of time to redo her animals, so I just “ignored” her request.

OK gal, mommy’ll fix you another Old McDonald bento next time ok? And it will come with a horse!

I shared the link with Ellena yesterday, and both of us went “woo wow wah ah…” all the way on MSN when we were drooling over the results of the 3rd Sanrio Charaben Contest. If you are a bento-er who loves Sanrio characters, please hop over to the link and check out the wonderful bentos, which are too nice to be eaten!

I can recognize a few bento-ers’ creations, but not all. Too bad Sanrio didn’t link the bentos to the bento blogs (assuming that some of them are bloggers), if not we would have a chance to check out their other creations.

These Japanese mothers are not only talented in decorating the lunch boxes or picnic bentos, they took nutrition into consideration too when the charaben bentos were created. Personally, I think all these bentos need a lot of planning, preparation, skills (you really need to be good at forming rice balls and cutting the details) and time to be done, so don’t you think they are awesome?

I bought some cutters from Daiso yesterday. Again, it’s an addiction. Whenever I go to Daiso, I will surely check out the bento tools (more like baking tools) section and see if I can resist myself from getting more tools. Anyway, I brought these cutters:

Simple shape cutters

Frankly, I don’t have anything in mind when I bought those cutters. But when I showed them to my kids last night, my boy wanted to try them out. He picked the house and airplane cutters and thus I asked him to draw a sketch with a house and a plane, so that he has an idea on how to decorate them.

He told me that he wanted a house with a lot of windows, a door WITH a DOOR KNOB (Haha!), a plane in the sky, some clouds, the sun, a bird and some flowers.

My gal asked her daddy to start for her, and then she continued her drawing by herself. She wanted a house, the sun and a bird.

After that, I talked to the kids about picking a few main “characters” as it would be hard to fit everything in. So, after some “brainstorming” (and washed their hands, of course), my kids started their bento work.

My boy’s working on his bento decoration. He can manage on his own with my guidance now.

As for my gal, she did what she does best….play with the food and eat it!

She tried to slice the steamed carrot with her toy knife. So, it was so smashed, I could not use it for the sun. LOL!

After my boy had done with his “work”, I wrapped the pieces in cling wrap and refrigerated them in air tight container. I did the decoration work for my gal since she didn’t do much.

So, here are their bentos before decoration:

It’s just something light with sandwiches, custard apple, strawberry and watermelon.

And here they are after I placed in the details:

My boy’s bento. He took a big piece of ham! LOL!

That’s why his sister is left with a smaller piece of ham, which is only enough for the roof and a flower.

Here’s the little bird requested by my gal…

I cut an oval, a circle and a small triangle for its wing. The beak was a tiny bit of carrot, which I managed to “save” last night.

My boy is happy with today’s bento. I guess it means a lot to him since he made the decoration part by himself.

P/S: If your kids do not like the taste of cheese and fruits, please replace cheese with egg sheet.

Firstly of all, I would like to thank all the readers who drop by my blog, and I truly appreciate your comments and emails.  I will try to answer your questions as much as I can. If you are a regular here, you might have known that I do share some tips and experience in bento-ing, but I guess I didn’t label my posts well, so it’s quite hard to find the posts. I myself was lost looking through my achieves too.

Anyway, if you have the time, please check out the older posts, and maybe you can see how I used to pack my kids’ bentos initially. *wink* I have gradually “improved” over time, and I noticed that my bentos are getting simpler and faster too. As a mother without a maid (which is pretty common in Malaysia, but my hubby is a great helper la ) and one who has to rush to school and office in time, personally, I would prefer speedy bentos with simple decoration. Most importantly, I hope that my kids would love to eat their bento meals, and that’s the main factor that keeps me going.

Ok, let’s get back to today’s bento…

Some of you who follows my kids blog might have known that my boy was sick, but he’s feeling better now. He’s slowly regained his appetite, and he wants to have macaroni and cheese as his afternoon tea. It took me awhile to prepare the macaroni, but at the same time, I cut the fruits and boiled the fish balls and mini wieners too.

Cut some lines on the wieners before you boil them. The wieners should curl up slightly when they are cooked.

I pinned the wieners to the fish balls with spaghetti strips. (Why I use spaghetti strips)

By the time the mac and cheese was ready, I packed everything in bentos and here they are:

I decorated the fish balls and wieners as little flower kids. You may use 2 mini wieners to form a complete circle for each fish ball, but my bento boxes are too small for that. The strawberries, kiwi and blueberries were packed separately.

Here’s the closer shots:

My gal’s flower girl

And that’s my boy’s bento.

If you would like to know more about the decoration details, please click on the photos and hop over to my Flickr account ya?

My kids have having a short break until Wednesday, and we don’t have plans to go for a trip. Besides that, my boy is still down with flu and he passed the flu bug to me! Thus, it’s best that all of us spend a few days at home, instead of spreading the flu bug around.

Anyway, my kids and I were quite bored today, so we decided to “play with our food”.

Our simple lunch consisted of teriyaki salmon fillets, stir-fried spinach and minced pork and the spare ribs were still roasting in the oven when this photo was taken.

As for bento decoration, I boiled 2 pieces of artificial crab meat, a piece of ham, 2 pieces of fish balls and also prepared an egg sheet.

I let my kids play with the round rice mold, which I got from Daiso. My boy knows how to use most of the rice molds, but my gal still needs our help. I let her koh koh fix the rice ball for her, while she just cut some circles from the ham. After some explanation, my boy proceeded to adding nori on the faces, and I’m glad that he’s still pretty good at holding the tweezers, even if he has not done this for some time. I helped my gal with the nori since she still can’t hold a pair of tweezers well.

After the rice balls were done, I helped the kids to pack the onigiri and dishes in their bentos. My gal couldn’t wait to have her meal, and she kept picking up her rice ball! Thus, her onigiri was slightly deformed.

She chose the purple ribbon and the duckling pick from my toolbox. Too bad she tore the artificial crab meat when the pick was inserted. But overall, I think she did a great job pinning the ham onto the face.

My boy’s bento, and I’m so proud of his work! He chose Shinkansen picks, and even if they don’t quite match the rice balls, but I should respect his choice huh?

The best thing of getting kids involved in preparing their meals is, they are more keen to finish the food. But then, my kids managed to finish 70% of the meal by themselves, while I fed them the rest. Both of them likes to leave the veggie behind and if I don’t feed them, they will just leave the veggie untouched!