Mothering Corner

I’m trying my best to reuse my existing bento tools, but I have to admit that I hardly use my rice molds. I’m not one of those who pack rice often, nor would I have time to decorate my kids’ meals at home!

I’m so glad that I learned a new way of using the rice molds to shape sandwich balls. This skill has given me more chances of using my rice molds.

Bunnies sandwich balls bento.

Tomica sandwich ball.

I’m kind of out of idea what to pack for my kids lately as I can’t do pizza or garlic toast without an oven. The renovation workers can’t fulfill their promise of completing my kitchen AGAIN so I’ve given up on rushing them. Thus, there isn’t much variety in my kiddos bento meals.

Then it strikes me that I haven’t made sausage bread rolls for some time. Oh, I didn’t bake the bread rolls but just roll the sausage on flatten sliced bread. After that I cut them into tiny bites and decorated them as boys and girls.

Boys for my boy, of coz.

And this is for my gal.

I packed some blueberries and oranges too.

Nothing special today, but just decorating 2 sandwich balls as Rilakkuma and Korilakkuma in each bento. Oh well, the photos speak it all.

My boy’s bento with Rilakkuma.

Korilakkuma for my gal.

Instead of using cheese, I used hard boiled quail egg white for the details as I will be out and about the whole day, and the bentos will be stored in cooler bag (with ice brick) in my car.

It’s something speedy again.

These are my kids’ after-school meals consisted of corn, grapes and a sandwich bun spread with jam.

I added some kamaboko as ears and nose.

Then, I punched nori with this Mickey shoe puncher and added them in.

There you have it! Piggy bun bentos.

Very simple huh?

It’s something quick and simple again! It’s the first time of me using this pocket sandwich mold, which I’ve just bought from Bento Craft. It’s not a new tool but I didn’t get it until now.

After preparing the pocket sandwiches, I cut some cheese and decorated them as Hello Kitty and Anpanman for each bentos.

Hello Kitty Pocket Sandwiches Bento

Anpanman Pocket Sandwiches Bento

I must share this wonderful idea of molding bread with rice molds by Bento with Love. At least I have something to do with all my rice molds, which I haven’t used for a very long time! I hardly pack rice because my kids have their bento meals very late, probably like after 4 or 5pm and the food is packed early in the morning. As much as the food can be kept cool, but rice doesn’t seem to taste well after long hours. Thus, I hardly use the rice molds and stop buying them.

But this morning, I tried this method of molding the sandwich balls with small rice molds, and I’m glad that they turned out well.

Snoopy and Woodstock sandwich balls bento

It’s easier to shape the sandwiches now! But it doesn’t work for big rice molds, but you can tried “encapsulating” 2 slices of bread together to seal the sandwich fillings.

BTW, this Tomica bento is sooooo cute!

Too bad it’s a bit too small for my boy’s appetite now.

It’s hard to pick up the momentum in bento-ing especially after resting for so long. Instead of trying out something harder, I prefer to stick to simple kyaraben which can be done in 5 minutes for each bento.

Today’s bento is inspired by a Japanese blog, which I  can’t remember which. *so sorry again * I don’t have much time in blogging hopping these days, so I just browse through my Google reader feed, and if the pics show up, I can view the bentos. Otherwise, I won’t be bother much and just mark all as read. Oh boy…I’m getting very lazy!

Anyway, I remembered that it was something about decorating sandwiches as dogs and I tried the same idea by fixing rabbits and pigs as shown below:

Rabbit sandwiches for my gal. I packed her fruits separately.

Piggies for my boy…somehow, I still think they look like dogs. LOL!

It’s my second attempt in creating a dragon bento, especially after my boy said that the previous dragon looked like a cow.

Due to time and space constraints, I decided to make a speedy bento with sandwich balls and quail eggs, instead of fulfilling my boy’s wish of having this dragon.

I would be out of my mind if I want to fix that dragon!

So, instead of picking a kyaraben challenge, the mom decided to do a simpler one.

Another dragon bento, with sandwich balls, quail eggs and fruits.

And a girlie dragon for my gal.

Happy Chinese New Year everyone!

I’m trying to kill 2 birds with one stone. Firstly, my kids have been waiting so long for a Halloween bento, and secondly I’m trying to use this long-forgotten cutter which I bought from Daiso. From the post date, the last time I used this cutter was like almost 2 years ago! Check out these cute little sandwiches cut with the same cutter. Maybe I have other bentos which were prepared with the same tools, but I can’t seem to remember where are the posts. Oh well…

The pink bread cutter from Daiso.

The main reason why I hardly use this cutter is, it’s quite big and most slice breads are too small for it, unless you don’t mind wasting a lot of bread. Nonetheless, I managed to get the right size of bread from Yamazaki. Or you can always bake your own bread!

This bread fits well with only the crust being cut off.

I decorated the mini sandwiches with cheese and nori.

Instead of cutting the nori and paste it on the bread, I cut the shapes with cheese first.

Then stacked on the nori and cut the outline with exacto knife.

For the owl, cut off the excess cheese before cutting the outline on nori.

Cut out the eyes and details from the excess cheese, a small piece of kamaboko and red artificial crab meat.

Due to limited space in the lunch boxes, I omitted the heart sandwiches.

Then, I added the details on the sandwiches, and here they are:

My boy’s Halloween bento with boo ghosts and a black cat.

My gal has a cute ghost, an owl and a witch in her box.

I’ve obviously slowed down a lot in kyaraben!!! LOL! As you know, my life has been pretty busy lately, and I’ve started going back to yoga this month. This means I would have to prepare dinner (yeap I do in the morning), breakfast (occasionally), pack bentos (mostly plain looking ones) and get myself ready for yoga class in the morning before heading to the office. If hubby is away, I would have to send the kids to school too. So, how’s that to kick start my hectic morning?

But this morning, I managed to fix something simple for the kids, just to let them know that I still want to do kyaraben if I may.

My gal’s hotdog bun bento

Oh no, I didn’t bake the bread, I bought the buns. I just cut out part of the crust and decorated it as a little girl dressed up in Rilakkuma costume.

Of course, I did one for my boy too.

Anyway, my kids will have a term break soon so there will be less kyaraben for the coming month. Besides that, work is piling up, and condo renovation is still on going, and the office routers are giving me a problem uploading photos!!! I shall just do my best for the next 2 weeks ya!