Mothering Corner

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.

Here’s something simple and quick for a busy Monday morning. All I did was punched some nori and added a smiley face on each of the egg tarts and voila, it’s done!

Don’t you know that I’m not a Monday person? LOL!

After days of plain looking bentos, I decided to decorate 2 quail eggs for today’s snack.

Do you know who they are? They are Crayon Shin Chan and his dog. It’s a speedy bento, so maybe Shin Chan doesn’t look like himself. LOL! Anyway, my boy likes it.

But he has declared to me that maybe, just maybe he won’t need me to pack him after school bento anymore. He’s going to primary 1 next week, and he would like to buy food from the cafeteria like the rest. So, my boy has grown up huh?

Actually, packing kyaraben bento for my boy is getting harder and harder. As he grows, his interests have changed from simple characters as Pooh bear to harder ones like Ben 10 and Naruto. I can’t possible fulfill all his bento fantasies as much as I like. But it’s a great “journey” for both of us, and I’m glad that I have a blog which captures most of the bentos I’ve made for him over 3 years.

As for my gal, I might still be packing for her because she has to  wait for her brother before I pick them up from school. She will finish school earlier but I won’t be picking her up on time.

Lets see how things go when school starts next week.

Durian, the king of fruits. You either love it or hate it, and there’s hardly something in between. My kids love durians since the first day they tasted it. They were only toddlers but their tiny taste buds were immediately hooked to the fruit, and since then, they have always looked forward to durian season.

Most Thai I know can’t take the pungent smell of durian fruit and they only eat it when it’s raw and tasteless. There was once when I brought durian to the office room due to the constant pestering of my kids who couldn’t wait until we had gone home to eat the fruit, and caused all the office staff a very bad nausea because they couldn’t take the strong smell of the fruit. Since then, durian is banned in our office! LOL!

So, these durians bentos are not meant to be taken out. My kids had them at home yesterday, as their afternoon snack. No doubt, they LOVE it.

So, are you a durian fan?

My kids are waking up later during this summer break, and some times, it’s way past 9am. Needless to say, I’m late for work everyday. Thus, I have some spare time in the morning to prepare the soup, mop the laminate flooring or do the laundry. But this morning, I decided to pack them snack bentos, and added Snoopy in their bento meals.

I prepared some quail eggs and pinned them together with spaghetti strips.

I punched Snoopy’s ear with this leaf puncher, and cut off the tip.

Stack the nori on cheese and cut it out by a toothpick or exacto knife

Pin the ear on Snoopy

Add facial details on Snoopy

There you go! A simple Snoopy Bento

I decorated a Sleeping Snoopy too.

When my boy was a toddler, he was very fascinated by owls. I bought him a couple of books about owls, but there weren’t many. Even clothes with owl characters are not a lot, except one or 2 from the Owl in Pooh’s bear collection. After some time, he switched his interests to horses and dinosaurs. LOL!

Then last night, out of the blue, he took out his old owl books and asked me to read to him. They are in Chinese, and my boy can’t read Chinese. Nonetheless, I read and translated the stories to him, and he said, “I remember these books, I used to love owls.”

That’s why I felt like fixing an owl bento today. There are a mother owl and 2 owlets, cut from quail eggs.

Owls Bento

My gal’s bento

As much as I felt like I’m walking down the memory lane, the owls didn’t excite my boy anymore. He said he would prefer me to fix him a Naruto bento. O.o

That shows how much my boy has grown up!

MIL bought some prepacked mini pancakes from Hong Kong, and gave some to the kids last night.

So, these mini pancakes went into today’s bentos. All I did this morning was cutting the Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty from cheese and nori, and topped them on the pancakes. On top of that, I packed some mangoes and blueberries too. Oh ya, MIL gave the kids lots of blueberries! They are way much cheaper in HK, as comparing to BKK.

My gal’s Hello Kitty and pancakes bento.

My boy’s Mickey, not so well cut though.