Mothering Corner

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?

I don’t feel like decorating lunch boxes this week because…

• I’ve just realized I lost more cutters than I thought. All those cute Doraemon, Melody, Tigger cutters!!! I can’t seem to find the box, so maybe I’ve left it behind when we were evacuating from the flooded house.
• I’m going back to yoga class this week, which means I will have to rush more in the morning.

Thus, my kids will have more plain looking bentos from now onwards.

But today, I felt like spending extra 5 minutes in decorating the egg tart. It is pretty easy to decorate one as a clown, and I’m glad that I managed to fix the broken party hats purchased from Jmama. Jmama was so kind to reimburse the purchase, which I’m truly grateful about it.

Clown bento

My gal’s egg tart was squashed, thus her clown looks a bit weird. LOL!

Again and again, I love this Rilakkuma bento box for being able to fit 3D decoration in.

It’s Valentine’s Day, but we won’t be doing anything special. Hubby is not the type who celebrates special occasions and to him, Valentine’s Day is too commercialized and just wanna rip off $$$ from lovers. Some times, I wonder how I ended up with an unromantic guy, but whenever he’s helping out with house chores and laundry, I know the reason why!

A Valentine’s Day bento for my gal.

I prepared the decoration while waiting for macaroni and cheese to cool down for packing. The mouse was made from quail egg, kamaboko and the heart was cut from mini wiener. Her grapes were packed separately in a smaller lunch box.

I did a speedy and simpler decoration for my boy.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

My boy has pretty hectic schedule on Tuesdays, so I decided to pack some macaroni and cheese for today’s bentos. I topped a piece of sliced egg on the macaroni, and gave it a fast decoration.

Guess who am I?

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….