Mothering Corner

I have a few “pending” bento themes, and hopefully I will manage to “create” most of them. I got this idea of Goldilocks and The Three Bears after chatting with Ellena some time ago. I guess most of our kids are familiar with this story. So, my kids were so happy to see their dinner being served as one of their favorite bedtime stories.

Here’s a photo of their dinner, with teddy bear onigiri, some green veggie and a piece of fish fillet. I added some prawns (stir-fried with the veggie actually), egg tofu and a fish ball into their bentos, which are part of the decorations.

Today’s dinner before decoration.

After some decorations, their bentos looked like these…

My kids dinner with Goldilocks and The Three Bears. 

Goldilocks’ face was actually an egg tofu, which is part of another dish. I didn’t give my kids the minced pork which was fried with the tofu because their protein intake was sufficient enough in their bentos.

The sleeping Goldilocks. Oops, Baby Bear dropped his ear. LOL!

Goldilocks’ hair was cut from fish tofu. I’m so into tofu lately, I prepared tofu dishes once a week. Let’s pretend that Goldilocks was sleeping on Baby Bear’s bed, that’s why he cried.

The crying Baby Bear,the angry Mommy Bear (with the ribbon pick) and the annoyed Daddy Bear.

Here’s my gal’s bento. Her Baby Bear was clearly not happy with Goldilocks.

If you are interested to see another Goldilocks bento, check out Pikko’s blog too.

For those who’s been asking about me, I’m fine. Thanks! It will be days before I can remove the stitches, but I’ve slowly “gone back to my old self”.

Today’s bentos are meant for dinner, but I started preparing by noon. I had Little Red Riding Hood in mind for my gal and my boy wanted The Lamb and The Wolf (the same story as Bento#129). So I drew and colored the wolves first and my kids helped me to stick the wolves onto the toothpicks.

When my kids are taking their nap, I continued with the cooking part. When it’s about time for dinner, I started packing the food into bentos. I managed to snap some photos during the process, but I could not remember to show all the tools used for Little Red Riding Hood bento. Sorry about that…

For Little Red Riding Hood:

I prepared the rice with a sushi mold and wrapped one of them with nori and the other one with a layer of artificial crab meat. The onigiri on the left Little Red Riding Hood, who had fringe cut from nori, and the other one is her granny.

Then, I packed some soy sauced chicken (deboned for my kids’ convenience), a piece of blanched broccoli and a mini wiener.

More details were added for the Little Red Riding Hood and her granny too.

For The Lamb and The Wolf:

Here’s how I started packing.

I cut a piece of ham for the lamb’s face with this cutter. Just turn the same cutter over to cut off the ears of the bunny ham and you will get the oval shape.

I added fluffy wool and eyes with cheese (you can replace cheese with egg sheet).

More details added for the lamb.

So, here are the bentos:

My gal’s Little Red Riding Hood, with her granny. The wolf is dead, just like in the story.

My boy’s bento with The Lamb and The Wolf. His wolf is smiling cunningly because it ate the lamb in the end.

As you can see, I packed some blueberries, carrots and baby corns as fillers and decoration too.

I would submit the bentos to Kid’s Bento Contest by Susan Yuen. If you are interested, let’s join in the fun! The contest ends by March 31st, 2009, so you better hurry up! Please check out the link for more info ya?

I got this idea from Ellena when we were chatting about fixing some story bentos for her boy. Then, I felt like fixing a bedtime story bento for my kids too. Both my kids like stories involving the big bad wolf, especially Red Riding Hood, and The Wolf and The Lamb (it’s a Chinese story where the wolf made a lot of excuses to eat the lamb). I can’t find the story about The Wolf and The Three Pigs in their book collections, but I told them briefly about it. I will try to get that book when we go to Kinokuniya again.

I have always tried to keep things simple in bento-ing, so I did a simple version of big bad wolf.

I prepared some sandwiches and cut them into mini triangles to form the faces of the wolves.

The eyes were cut with this wheel cutter, and then I cut them into halves.

Here’s how I cut the ears.

After that, I placed the cheese on a piece of nori, and cut out an outline for the cheese to make the facial parts more obvious.

The eyes and eyebrows were punched and cut with these Carla’s punchers. Just cut off the wings and tail of the airplane to get the eyebrow.

All the ham and cheese were cut last night, and I only had to cut the fruits (mangoes, oranges and a black plum), pack everything into lunch boxes and work on the details this morning. So, here’s the bentos:

My gal’s bento with the Big Bad Wolf who ate the poor Lamb. I’m not sure if there is an English version of this story, but the book we have is in Chinese. As you can see, the poor lamb is KO with the eyes crossed. I don’t know why my gal likes this story so much…Oh ya, I cut a tiny piece of crab meat to form a tongue for the wolf.

 This is my boy’s bento with the Big Bad Wolf and The Three Pigs. The house was cut with the yellow cutter in Bento#114. He said he likes the pigs and the wolf.

Hubby said the wolf is not bad enough and I should make the ears stand up. O.o Let me think about how to fix that first…

Since my kids love their bedtime story bentos, maybe I should try other stories next time.