Mothering Corner

My kids are really into tigers these days. So, I’m fixing them another tiger bentos, with little kids dressing up in tiger costumes.

I didn’t manage to snap any photos during preparation because both kids were bugging me and “playing” with the cutters and leftover too. They were very excited in helping out, considering that they haven’t done so in weeks. The preparation was done last night, and I wrapped the decorative cheese nicely in food wrap, before storing it in an air-tight container. Thus, I could bear to sleep in a bit this morning, and only spent about 15 minutes in preparing the fruits and packing the bentos.

So, here they are:

My boy’s bento with little kids in tiger costumes.

Besides cheese topped on sandwiches, there are blueberries, a quail egg, some jackfruit, cherries and a tangerine too.

My gal will have strawberries instead of cherries.

I love the tiny flowers on the girls. They were cut with the flower plunger, given by Ellena. Thanks a million pal!

Today’s bentos are inspired by miho nao chin. I saw the sandwich cutter at Daiso some time ago, but never really thought of buying it until I saw how cute Mihochin’s bento is. Just take a peep and you will know why!

This sandwich cutter is quite big, but I managed to grab a loaf of white bread which fits it quite well. Only the crust was cut off, and I can easily cut the bread into 4 different shapes at a go. Besides decorating the sandwiches as Pikkachu, Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma, I created a tiger, a koala bear and a kitten too.

So, here are the bentos:

My boy’s bento with Pikkachu, koala bear and tiger.

My gal will have Rilakkuma, Hello Kitty and a kitten.

The koala bear and Rilakkuma were cut from brown eggsheet. I mixed some dark soysauce, a pinch of sugar and a table spoon of mirin into the egg mixture to create that color. As for tiger, it was cut from “egg yolk” sheet.  The other characters were cut from cheese and I topped all the characters on the sandwiches.

A reader asked if I’m still packing bentos every school day since she noticed that I don’t update about bentos daily now. Oh well, here are my answers. Yeap, answerS. LOL!

Firstly, my kids are so into eggs lately, they want to fix their own egg breakfast (except the frying part). They will get up about the same time as I do, and with them bugging me at the kitchen, I don’t have much time for kyaraben but just pack some simple bentos like what I did this morning:

Hello Kitty Sandwich Bento, and fruits were packed separately.

My boy’s Tomica bento.

If they are something simple, I don’t feel like posting them. These sandwiches were cut with these sets of sandwich molds. My bread is obviously too small for the cutters! LOL!

Another reason is, SIL may prepare dinner at office once in a while, and she will cook for my kids too. Her toddler has started going to nursery, which is located at my kids’ preschool. Thus, all 3 children will have early dinner at the office if she cooks. She will let me know a day before if she prepares dinner, and I will just pack fruits for my kids because they don’t need a heavy meal. How convenient huh?

Today’s bento is something simple again, and the main tools used is this mickey veggie cutter.

I prepared both Mickey and Minnie last night, when my kids were occupied by the idiot box. They will take every opportunity to watch TV in the weekends since they can’t watch any on school days. They will also stop by the bell tv at the shopping complex just to check out the programs, if we pass by one. LOL!

I didn’t snap any photos during the preparation of Mickey and Minnie, but here’s a summary of what I did last night:

1. I cut the ham as base for the characters by using the veggie cutter.
2. Trace the outline of the cutter and cut a piece of Mickey-shaped nori with an exacto knife.
3. Place the nori on the ham.
4. Then, cut a piece of cheese with the cutter and cut of the excess cheese with an exacto knife so that you will get the shape of Mickey’s face.
5. Stack the cheese on nori.
6. Repeat Step 1 – Step 5 for Minnie.

I wrapped the decoration pieces in food wrapper and kept them refrigerated in an air tight container. The face features were added this morning, after I’ve prepared the sandwiches and fruits.
Hence, here are the bentos:

Mini Mickey and Minnie in Sandwich Bentos

Here’s a closer shot of one of the bentos:

There are raspberry jam sandwiches, 2 tangerines topped with a smiley strawberry and a dwarf apple in each bento.

It’s easier to prepare both bentos with the same decoration. I shall do this more often to speed things up!

My kids love the chocolate milk bread from Oishi, so I bought them a loaf yesterday. This bread is yummy to be eaten on its own, that’s why I love to pack bentos with it. I only cut the chocolate bread with the stitch cutter set, and decorated them with cheese and nori. So, it’s a simple and speedy bento.

Stitch cutter set

Besides chocolate bread, I packed some strawberries and kiwi in the bentos too. Hence, here they are:

My boy’s Stitch Bento in his new Cinnamonroll bento box.

This is my gal’s Stitch bento.

I don’t have any ham left in the fridge, so I cut the ears from kamaboko which is too pinkish for Stitch. Anyway, the colors are quite striking, so my kids didn’t complain about their bentos. Actually, I think they are too sleepy to even realize what’s in their bentos when I showed Stitch to them this morning. I’m still trying to “tune” their biological clock and get them in bed earlier because they stayed up very late during their holiday. I need to get them in bed at least an hour earlier so that they can wake up easily in the morning. Right now, it’s a struggle to get them out of their beds, and I don’t think they can even hear the alarm of the emergency alert system too if I have one!

It’s the first day at school for the new semester, and luckily, both my kids didn’t make any fuss in the morning. It took us awhile to wake them up, but we managed to get them to school just in time.

I only prepared a simple tea bento for each of them, which is consisted of a SPAM sandwich with carrot bun, an apple and a quail egg. I decorated the quail eggs as a piggy and a puppy respectively because they are pretty easy.

My gal’s piggy bento

My boy’s bento with a little puppy. Mmm…it doesn’t look like a real puppy though.

Both my kids didn’t say much about their bentos as they were pretty blur at breakfast. LOL!

I better get back to the paper work and Admin Jobs piling up on my table after a month of holiday. It’s going to be a busy Monday for me.

After 2 days of non-decorative fruit bentos, my boy politely asked me to fix him something nice today.

Some mothers are worried that once we started decorating our kids’ food, our children might not want to eat “normal-plain-looking” meals. But for my kids, they will still eat the “plain-looking” bentos, as long as they are hungry! I found that we don’t really have to do charabens all the time, just to make a bento more attractive. Check out how Sherimiya does her colorful bentos with wonderful fruits and veggies arrangement.

For today’s bento, I cut the bread with Shinkansen rice molds, which I bought from Sanrio at Central Department store. Besides sandwiches, I packed some mango, champagne grapes, pineapple (for my gal) and a piece of tofu in each bento. I did the decoration with nori and cheese, so my Shinkansen does not look like the real train.

My boy’s Shinkansen, which I’ve forgotten to add some wheels at the bottom. LOL! I’d only realized it.

 
This is my gal’s bento.

It’s best to use blue egg sheet, but I don’t have any food color. Shinkansen will definitely look better if it’s decorated in blue.

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.