Mothering Corner

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!

I’m still reading bedtime stories to my kids and recently, my gal fell in love with this classic story called Heidi, which was written by Johanna Spyri. She would love me to read it every night but I must let my boy choose his stories too. So, I decided to fix her a simple Heidi bento today, along with her grandfather.

Heidi and her grandfather.

I decorated the sandwich balls as Heidi’s grandfather, and Heidi was cut from cheese and nori. I’m trying to make it as if  grandpa’s hugging the little girl, in the simplest way ever.

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!

My kids complained that it’s been so long since they did kyaraben, thus I let them fixed their own decoration for today’s bentos. Our theme is the characters from The Wizard of Oz, which is one of their favorite books at the moment. Both kids picked their favorite characters, except the Tin Man. Poor thing, no one wants the Tin Man in their bentos. LOL!

As for scarecrow, it’s too hard for my kids to fix it, so I resorted to use a pick. Most of the characters were cut from cheese, with various cutters, and I helped them to add in the seaweed. So, here they are:

The Coward Lion and the Scarecrow bento

My gal’s Dorothy and her dog Toto.

My gal can only manage cutting cheese with cutters. So after stacking the cheese on nori, I helped her with the cutting.

When I mentioned that I will fix bumblebee this morning, my boy thought that I was fixing the Bumblebee from Transformers. O.o Oh no, I didn’t have time for complicated kyaraben lately, and this is the bumblebee I had in mind:

Little Bumblebee (decorated with sandwich balls) in fruity bento

It’s simple and quick! LOL!

It’s been raining cats and dogs for the past few weeks and suddenly, we are back to summer again. It’s so hot and sunny now that I have got a tan without going to the beach! Nonetheless, we plan to bring the kids to Hua Hin this weekend, just for a short trip and spend some quality time together. I hope that the weather stays this way, and we can all enjoy the beach and pool. Forget about pool heat pumps as it’s really hot hot hot this week!

So, for today’s bentos, I tried to modify this cute little panda from Naokyaraben, and place it on the sandwiches, as if it’s chilling out on a vacation. Ok, let’s have some imagination here. LOL!

Here’s how I did the panda:

I prepare a piece of kamaboko (slice the pink from white) and a piece of artificial crab meat.

Cut the white kamaboko into smaller pieces and cut again diagonally.

Cut them with a teddy cutter.

Here’s the side view of the teddy shaped kamaboko.

Use a small bit of spaghetti strip to join them up.

Here’s the little panda.

I repeated the same step with a bunny cutter.

And added arms for the bunny.

Next, punch some nori and add them in. So, here are the little panda and rabbit chilling out on some sandwiches:

My boy’s bento.

Side view of the little panda.

Bunny says…relax….

We are going to have a long day today, and the kids won’t be having dinner early at home. Hubby and I have to finalize the interior of our condo, and both kids will be tagging along to the designer’s office. Considering how “cha poh” my hubby is, I can foresee that both kids will be pretty hungry and tired waiting at the sofa, and after a late eating out, they will probably doze off in the car on the way home.

So I decided to pack them some ham sandwiches and fruits, and maybe I might grab some snack for them too, just in case they are too bored waiting for us.

Since I had already fry some ham for the sandwiches, I used another piece of ham and a piece of cheese as decoration.

I prepared these Minnie and Stitch cookie cutters.

Cut 2 pieces of ham with Minnie’s cookie cutter. Make an imprint on one of the pieces.

Cut the cheese with the same cutter.

Stack the cheese on the ham without the imprint.

Gently cut off the excess part of the imprinted ham to get the outline of Minnie’s face.

Add a flower kamaboko for Minnie.

Punch nori with this Mickey seaweed cutter and add in the details.

Repeat the same steps for Stitch. With the cookie and puncher set, this kyaraben can be done in less than 15 minutes each. So here are the bentos:

My gal’s Minnie Mouse on her sandwiches.

A Stitch Ham and Cheese for my boy.

I still can’t manage to get the Care Bear bento boxes which I saw online. So, is there any local online store selling them?

Anyway, I fixed some sandwiches today and decorated them as Care Bears. I used to be a big fan of Care Bears, but my kids are not so fond of them. These might be my first and last Care Bears bentos. LOL!

Here’s how I decorated the bears:

I cut the bread with this Pooh bear cutter. I spread jam in between the sandwiches.

Cut the nose and eyes from while cheese with these round and oval cutters. You may use white egg sheet since cheese melts fast in hot climate.

I used a smaller oval cutter to cut the eyes from kamaboko.

Stack the kamaboko on white cheese as eyes. I cut off the tip of the eyes, but it’s optional.

Cut a heart for its nose.

Punch nori with this Pooh seaweed puncher and add the details on the bears.

Repeat the decoration steps for other bears with smoked cheese (for orange), and green peas. Hence, here are the bentos:

My gal’s Care Bears Bento.

And this is for my boy.

My gal “accidentally” watched Anpanman on TV some time ago, and she asked me to fix her an Anpanman bento. I’m not familiar with this character but since she likes it, I might as well fix one for her. Furthermore, it’s very simple!

A plain looking bento (sorry, photo was taken before I remembered to open the curtains.)

I pinned some blanched carrots on the sandwich.

Next, I punched some roasted nori with this puncher and added the facial details on the bread.

There you go! An Anpanman bento was fixed in less than 5 minutes!

A very simple Anpanman sandwich bento.

It’s another SPAM sandwich attack Tuesday! Yeah!

Added a pig peeping out from the sandwich.

Oink oink.