Mothering Corner

A friend told me that she can tell if my hubby is working away for days. I would normally pack less bentos that week, and hardly update my Facebook. She’s right, whenever hubby is away, I don’t need to pack much, and I don’t have time for FB. You can easily tell that I’m too occupied with work, kids and chores and I’m trying my best to keep my sanity. LOL!

Hubby came back from Malaysia with my latest purchase from BentoCraft. I love the Tomica Fire Engine bento, and so does my boy. So, I packed something simple for the kids today.

My boy’s Tomica Fire Engine bento, with cheese sandwiches, a mini wiener and fruits.

My gal has smaller sandwiches.

Very simple huh?

My boy needs a heavier bento today after his extra lesson at school, so I packed some bread and spaghetti for him. I would have just leave the bentos like this, if I’m too lazy.

But then, it didn’t take me much time in decorating the bentos to make them appear “nicer”.

My boy’s bento, with a boy trying to kiss a girl.

And this is for my gal.

Oh well, not exactly fruity as I packed some sweet potatoes too.

Some times, I will just pack fruits in my kids’ after school bento, especially on busy mornings. My kids are not so into greens, so I’m making sure that they have enough fiber and vitamins from fruits. I really missed those days when they were not so picky about veggies!

Most of the time, I don’t decorate their fruit bentos. But since I had some time to kill this morning, I fixed them a nicer fruity bento as shown below:

My gal’s fruity bento.

This bento belongs to my boy.

I left a lot of gap between the fruits so that I could easily rearrange them before closing the lid.

Ah…again, it took more than half an hour to upload these 2 bento photos.

I felt like fixing mee goreng tomato (fried noodles with ketchup) for my gal as breakfast this morning, and I packed some for the bentos. My boy only likes cereals or toasts as breakfast, so he didn’t want to take the noodles. Nonetheless, he won’t mind having noodles as after school tea.

Besides noodles, there are oranges, blueberries, strawberries and champagne grapes in the bentos too.

The bentos looked a bit plain without decoration, so I decorated a piece of fried fish tofu (cut into halves) as smiley faces in each bento.

My boy’s bento.

This is my gal’s bento. I lose the pink ribbon pick, so if you have seen it at 100Yen, let me know!!!

Before closing the bentos, my boy reminded me about the cheese he cut last night. He wanted to add some cheese in his bento, so he prepared them a night before.

He insisted that he must spell his name and added the three teddies in his meal. LOL! Thus, his bento is a bit too “crowded”.

I’m out of idea what to pack for my kids today, so I took out the leftover rice from the fridge, steamed it, mixed some corn kernels in the rice and formed some rice balls for my kids. I spread some butter and soy sauce on the rice ball before baking them for 10 minutes. Make sure that your rice balls are tightly formed as the rice grains might fall out after baking.

Paw rice mold

I wanted to use the paw rice mold, but too bad the corn kernels could not stick well with the rice. So in the end, I formed the rice balls manually with cling wrap. To me, it’s easier and faster to make rice balls manually, and most of my rice molds are bought for my kids.

I let the rice balls cool down before placing them in the bentos. Then, I proceeded to decoration the rice balls and packed a quail egg, strawberry, some blueberries and champagne grapes in each lunch box.

My boy’s bento with 2 smiley rice balls.

My gal has a smaller appetite, so she can only take a rice ball, if she’s hungry.

My rice is a mixed of white jasmine rice and red hom mali rice, so it’s brownish. The rice balls are slight darker after baking too.

BTW, I’ll slow down in fixing bento as my hubby is going for business trip again, and my kids might not be coming to the office frequently. Furthermore, I want to spend some time rushing my crochet poncho so that my hub can bring all my 99% completed knitting projects back to Malaysia and pass them over to the knitting shop. I’m going to be a night owl rushing my poncho! So, I don’t think I can wake up early in the morning. LOL! Luckily, I’m not crocheting anything as big as  adult halloween costumes, so I should be able to complete it in a few nights.

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. *

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?

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!

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!