Mothering Corner

It’s been awhile since the last time my kids and I fixed bentos together. So last night, all of us decided to have some “playing-with-our-food” fun by fixing a mini Santa Claus. My boy did most of his Santa Claus by himself, but my gal was enjoying leftovers after cutting them.

I wanted to fix the Santa Claus with quail eggs, but I couldn’t get any last night. Thus, the eggs were replaced by fish balls. Besides that, I prepared a white egg sheet, a piece of ham, a blanched baby carrot and some tiny spaghetti strips. Here’s how we did our Santa Claus:

Cut the ham and egg white with a small flower cutter, and stack them together.

Actually, you may skip this step if your egg sheet is thick enough. But to prevent it from tearing, stacking it on a piece of ham will help a lot.

Cut off the top to form Santa’s beard. (The top was later used as my boy’s Santa’s mustache)

Pin the beard on a fish ball with spaghetti strips. (You may replace it with quail egg)

Cut a small heart from the egg white and cut it into halves.

Pin the beard and a nose for Santa.

Pretty simple huh? My boy had no problem fixing his own Santa Claus, but I helped him to pin on the details.

He used a bigger flower cutter though…

I refrigerated the bento work in air-tight container, and took them out this morning. I pinned the fish ball on a cherry tomato, and added the eyes and lips with nori. I’ve forgotten to add the buttons, which were cut by my boy, but I guess he’s forgotten about them too. LOL!

Mini Santa Claus

Anyway, here are the bentos:

My gal’s Santa Claus, with tangerines and spaghetti too.

My boy’s Santa, which he’s very proud of it.

You must be wondering how I closed the bentos huh? LOL! Actually, my gal voiced her concern too. She’s too worried that her Santa will smashed when I closed it, so my boy suggested that they packed the tangerines in smaller bento boxes. So, their Santa could nicely lay down in the bentos, and I filled in the gap with some lettuce. Both of them are sooooooo “kan cheong” about Santa, I guess they really like today’s theme.

It’s quite fun doing this with my kids, even if it might be kind of messy some times. My kids have been asking me to bake with them, but I’m too tired to do so by the time we are back from the office. Besides that, weekends are quite packed with activities and TV, and some times, the mommy is too lazy to do anything much. If I have a maid or central vacuum to clean up the mess, then maybe we will bake some cookies for Christmas.

In short, mommy is simply too lazy. LOL!

It’s another speedy bento today, and I decorated my kids’ sandwiches as ladybugs.

I prepared some sandwiches. Since I can’t find such a big puncher, I had to cut the circles freehand.

I used the squid balls as the ladybug’s head. Gently wrap the squid ball with a thin layer of artificial crab meat (only use to top part). Pin a spaghetti strips on the ball so that you can easily secure it to the sandwiches.

I cut some smaller circles of wiener with this wheel cutter. Then, I pinned the wieners with spaghetti strips and they would be used as antennas.

So, here’s the end result:

My gal’s bento with a ladybug, some Thai and imported oranges and a small piece of apple. I decorated her bento with some flowers and a butterfly which are cut from cheese, ham and carrot.

If you wonder how I close the bentos, do you notice that there are gaps in the lunch box?

I would normally just tilt up the cutie details for photo shooting, then I will rearrange the food before closing the lunch box. For this bento, all I did was just to “turn” the ladybug’s head to the other direction near the apple so that I can close the lid without spoiling the details.

And I would like to clarify about using spaghetti strips and toothpicks in joining the details. Personally, I would prefer to use spaghetti strips as they are edible. Furthermore, based on my observation, the spaghetti strips will be softened after some time, probably due to moisture. So it’s less risky for little children to chew on them, as comparing to reminding them to remove the toothpicks. Not all children will be having their bentos under adult’s supervision. Try to shorten the spaghetti strips intead of securing the parts with long strips, that’s what I do mostly.