Mothering Corner

Again, today’s title sounds weird! Anyway, you will know what I mean later.

My gal requested that I fixed her some mini heart, so I thought of decorating the hearts, instead of just packing them as plain heart sandwiches. I spread some jam on the bread and cut and sealed the bread with 2 heart cutters as shown below:

The cutters are slightly different in sizes. Make sure that the smaller one is used “upside down” so that it will seal the bread instead of cutting through.

Then, I proceeded to decorate the jam sandwiches. I fixed two hens for my gal by adding picks and cheese as wings.

They will be hens, after adding nori and kamaboko as their rosy cheeks.

As for my boy, I cut 3 pieces of cheese with 3 different sizes of round cutters to create the shell of the snails.

I stacked the cheese to create the spiral effect.

So, here are the bentos:

My gal’s Two Little Hens Bento. Let’s pretend that the hens are hatching eggs.

There are quail eggs, oranges (hidden under the strawberries) and rose apples in the bento too.

These snails belong to my boy.

Pretty simple huh?

It’s something simple again for today’s bento. My initial plan was to fix a brown egg sheets for Chip and Dale, but I was out of eggs. So, this is what I did yesterday:

I cut the cheese with the cutter and mold.

Try not to press hard with the imprint mold. What I wanted was to get the outlines of the chipmunk, then I cut off the excess cheese with an exacto knife. You can also use a toothpick to cut the cheese.

I wrapped the cheese pieces and kept them refrigerated. This morning, I cut some bread with the same cutter, and fixed some butter and sugar toasts for today’s bento. Once the toasts cooled down, I topped the cheese on them and added nori as decoration. The nori bits were punched with the chipmunk puncher, which came in the same set.

So, here are the bentos:

My gal’s Chip and Dale bento, with strawberries, blueberries and rose apple too.

This bento belongs to my boy.

When my boy saw his bento, he asked me why are there only 2 chipmunks but not 3? I was puzzled, then I realized that he was expecting to see Alvin and the chipmunks!

But I fixed Chip and Dale! LOL!

Ok, next time boy! I think the same set can be used for Alvin and his friends too.

Changed of plan again. I’m leaving this week and will be away for a week with a heavy heart. This is the first time I’m leaving the kids behind with hubby, who keeps assuring me that everything will be fine but I still don’t believe him.

Anyway, I can only pack one bento this week for the kids, and they requested French Toast with honey. I cut the bread with Rilakkuma cutter and pan fried them with some egg. Then, I spread some honey between the French toasts when packing the bento. On top of that, I packed some nuggets and fruits for the kids too. Today’s bentos are quite speedy since I only needed less than 5 minutes in decorating Rilakkuma.

So, here are the bentos:

My gal’s Rilakkuma French Toast bento

This is for my boy.

Ok, I’ll have a short break from bento-ing, and I sure miss my kids! And thanks for hubby for helping out.

Today’s bento theme is inspired by Mari Miyazawa’s blog post, as well as my boy’s encounter with a baby chick which fell from the nest. Just check out the link and see how creative Mari is in decorating food as cute little chicks and birds!

On the other hand, my boy found a dead baby bird a few weeks ago at his school. It’s rainy season here, and the storm can be rather strong. I guess the baby chick fell from the nest accidentally by the strong wind, so it’s quite sad to see its dead body. But my brave little boy just picked up the chick and showed it to his friends and teachers, while the mommy was basically screaming, gosh, that’s gross. Sorry, I’m not so into little animals, especially a dead one.

Then a few days ago, he found a bird nest in our garden, probably dropped from the trees as well. We saw some egg shells but no birds were found in it. Maybe they had all flown away, but the nest was still there. Again, blame it on the strong wind.

With this theme in mind, I decided to decorate a piece of sandwich as a hatching, and some nuggets as baby chicks. This is what I did last night:

I cut the bread with a stainless steel bento. By doing so, the bread can fit well in the lunch box.

Then I cut some smoked cheese with the bento too.

Cut the bread and smoked cheese into semi circles, but the cheese is slightly smaller than the bread.

Cut off 2 smaller semi circles as shown in the pic.

Next, cut a round piece of white cheese. Sorry about the lighting, I know the pics can’t show the different colors of the cheese!

Then I cut off the sides of the circle. After that, cut them in halves.

Cut some kamaboko as the chick’s beak.

This is what you would get after stacking up the details, which will be placed on the sandwiches.

For the little baby chick nuggets, cut some baby carrot as their beaks.

Try to blanch the baby carrots for a minute or so to soften them. It’s easier to pin them onto the nuggets (with spaghetti strips) if they are soft.

So, here are the bentos:

My gal’s baby chicks nuggets.

Here’s the top view of the bento, showing the baby chick sandwich.

This bento belongs to my boy.

My kids love SPAM, but the mommy is trying her best not to buy too much SPAM for them. Nonetheless, I do have my SPAM craving too once in a while. So, I fixed mini SPAM burger as breakfast this morning, and packed 2 in my kids’ lunch boxes. Needless to say, they were so thrilled to see that piece of processed meat!

My boy’s SPAM burger bento, with some star fruits, cherries and blueberries.

I decorated his burger as an unhappy face with a little bird resting on the nose. Ok, it doesn’t make sense. I didn’t have any bug pick, so I just pinned the duckie pick on the nose. The white was cut from hard boiled egg white, and the red was cut from strawberries.

My gal’s burger has a smiley face, as if she’s picking up a hatching bird.

Frankly, today’s bento theme doesn’t make much sense. LOL! But I was running out of time.

My kids love Toy Story 1 and 2 and they have been looking forward for Toy Story 3 for many months! It will only be shown in Thailand next month, so they have been asking us to bring them to the cinema since they saw the poster. On top of that, they requested Woody and Buzz Lightyear bentos too, which I’ve tried my best to squeeze out some time on Monday to fix it.

I was having a long weekend, so I made good use of my day off to fix the egg sheets and cutting the details. Everything was frozen until last night. I could have done the preparation yesterday, but we were out and about. Hey, it’s my long waited day off, thus I wanted to check out some clothes and lingerie at Paragon too.

Anyway, here are the bentos:

Woody Bento for my boy

My initial plan was to fix a smiling Woody, but I gave up on cutting his mouth. That’s why I just replaced it with nori. LOL!

My gal prefers Buzz Lightyear.

I think my Woody looks kind of weird. Maybe he’s too simplified.

Firstly, I can’t remember to snap the Doraemon cutter mold and puncher set, which I can’t even remember which store I bought it from.

Anyway, I guess you know which set I’m referring to, and I used the set for today’s bento. I prepared the egg sheets yesterday, by separating the yolk from the white. I mixed some blue food gel to the egg white before frying it. As for the yolk, I didn’t add any color into it. I needed a piece of yellow egg sheet for Dorami and some tiny details.

Please refer to how to make egg sheets if you are interested.

The cutting part is not hard as I used the cutter and mold to cut the details and sandwiches. You can give it a try. That might save you some time in tracing and cutting with exacto knife. Of course, the puncher is a great help too, it saves me a lot of time in cutting straight nori lines!

So, here are the bentos:

The sandwiches are topped on 2 pieces of corns. I packed some fruits in the bento too.

My gal will have Doraemon and Dorami in her bento.

My initial plan was to make a zoo bento, but then, due to my crazy workload this week (mommy’s out of breathe soon), I could only fix a simple giraffe.

This is what I did this morning:

I boiled some mini wieners and a quail egg.

Cut off the end of a mini wiener.

Do the same for another piece, but cut it off diagonally.

Cut the quail egg into halves.

Join all the pieces together with spaghetti strips.

I secured the wieners onto the sandwich (to prevent them from moving around) with 2 bits of spaghetti strips. I added 2 food picks as its tiny horns.

Then, I proceeded to add some nori and more details on the giraffe. So here are the bentos:

My boy’s little giraffe. He said the nose area looks like a smiley face. O.o

This is for my gal.

Actually, I thought of wrapping the wieners with egg sheets first so that the giraffes will have the right color. But oh well, you may give it a try.

I pack after school bentos for my kids 4 times per week, but I don’t do kyaraben all the time. Some times, it can just be a plain looking bentos of sandwiches, Japanese sweet potatoes, corns, fruits and some protein like eggs and processed meat. I’ve always wanted to do something with sweet potatoes, besides cutting them with cookie cutter. To do so, you can’t over steam the potatoes. I would normally set my steamer to 20 – 30 minutes so that it’s not over cooked.

But this morning, I purposely steamed the sweet potatoes for 50 minutes so that they were totally soft. You can do so with a microwave which might save you some preparation time.

I smashed the potatoes when they were still hot, and gently formed a few potato balls and joined them up with spaghetti strips. I bet the spaghetti strips would be totally cooked and soft too in the hot potatoes. LOL!

So, here are the bentos:

My gal’s froggie sweet potato bento. She had some fun rolling the leftover potatoes and ate them too.

I did the same thing for my boy but decorated it as a teddy bear.

Here’s the complete bento, with corns placed in the lower tier.

Too bad the color of smashed Japanese sweet potatoes is not as nice as those purple potatoes or normal potatoes. But then, my kids love the taste.

My boy is in Pikkachu frenzy lately, and he made me having McDonald for 3 conservative  weeks because he wanted to collect the Pikkachu toys, came together with Happy Meals. Gosh, I really had too much McD lately!

I promised him that I would fix him another Pikkachu bento (sorry if you are already bored with this theme) and he requested that I add a Pokemon ball for him. He said Pikkachu stays in that ball. Ok, I admit it, I know nothing about Pokemon!!!

So, I figured that I could just use this Pikkachu rice mold (bought from Bento Craft) to cut the sandwiches, ham and cheese.

The sandwiches were spread with jam and placed at the bottom, topped with ham and then cheese. Pikkachu was decorated with nori, cheese and artificial crab meat.

As for the Pokemon ball, I used a quail egg. I gently shaped it into a round ball when the quail egg was still hot. I wrapped half of it with artificial crab meat (not so well done actually) and added nori and cheese onto the ball.

So, here are the bentos:

My boy’s Pikkachu and Pokemon ball.

Fixed the same theme for my gal to make things easier for me.

There are corn, sweet potatoes, kiwi, rambutans and cherries (for my boy only) in the bentos too.

My boy loves it but he requested me to fix other Pokemon character next time. O.o That my boy, you will have to wait long long for it….