Mothering Corner

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.

My kids will be having a long school break soon, and I might be slowing down in bento-ing again. So, don’t be surprised if you don’t see any bento posts but lost of cr*ps and rants here ya? LOL!

But this morning, I felt like packing a repeated theme again, chickens (or chicks)! If you are interested, check out the previous related bentos here, here, here, here and here.

This time, I’m using sandwich rolls. I used to pack sandwich rolls for the kids, and did some decoration such as this panda bento. Oh boy, that bento was like 2 years ago!

Anyway, this is what I did this morning:

I spread some jam on the bread and roll them up as shown. Wrap the sandwich rolls with food wrap for a few minutes, so that they will stay in shape.

Then I cut them into halves.

Pack them in bentos.

And prepare some heart picks.

Pin the heart picks on the bread.

Add some nori and artificial crab meat as details and that’s it!

It’s the same preparation steps just like my previous chicken bentos huh?

Here are the bentos:

My boy’s.

My gal’s rooster and hen bento.

I supposed to fix these bentos on Valentine’s Day, but since I don’t pack bento on Mondays, my Valentine’s bentos are a day late.

My gal’s Valentine’s Day bento.

The characters are cut from cheese and decorated with kamaboko (pink), artificial crab meat (red) and nori (black).

My boy’s teddies.

Happy belated Valentine’s Day!

I haven’t fully recovered from the exhaustion over Chinese New Year, so I thought of packing simple plain looking bentos throughout this week. This is what my kids will have for today’s after school meal:

There are corn, papaya, guava, blueberries and tamagoyaki, which I fixed with this new pan from BentoCraft.

But then, my boy came to me and asked, “So mommy, what are you fixing me today?” O.o

Upon hearing that, I quickly took out these cute piggy picks and added them in the bentos. Voila! These cute picks really sparked up a simple fruity bento.

Piggy picks!

I guess I should try to fix a kyaraben this week…just to meet my kids’ expectation.