Lasagne Bento

Today’s bento is leftover home-made Lasagne with a peanut butter sandwich, topped with a cheese character holding a bunch of heart shaped balloons. (for the cheese colouring tutorial, click here). If you look closely, you will see Daffy Duck in the lasagne topping – spooky – I didn’t put him there ! LOL

The apple is the other half of the one I used yesterday to make the ZigZag Apple

You could probably eat the lasagne cold, (I have been pleasantly surprised to find a lot of typically hot foods do actually still taste good cold) but I will lift this piece out and warm it up in the microwave before serving – I just don’t fancy it cold!

Quick Lasagne Recipe:

Ingredients:

Bolognaise sauce (Minced beef, 2 tins chopped tomatoes, 1 onion)

Cheesy white sauce (2 tablespoons margarine, 2 tablespoons plain flour, smi-skimmed milk, handful of grated cheese)

Lasagne pasta sheets

Method:

Let the lasagne sheets soak in some water

Make the bolognaise sauce by cooking the meat and onions and adding the tomatoes, stir and simmer

Make the cheesy white sauce by melting the marg in a pan and stirring the flour in and keep stirring it the whole time, adding milk very gradually so you don’t get lumps. Add the cheese and keep stirring. Add more milk if you would like the sauce to be runnier.

Put some of the bolognaise meat sauce into a pyrex glass or oven proof dish, then some lasagne sheets, then the cheese sauce, then the bolognaise sauce, pasta, cheese sauce etc, keep repeating until you can finish with a cheese sauce layer then sprinkle a little grated cheese on top. If you have used all the grated cheese up in the sauce (like I did!) you can tear strips/pieces from a cheese slice and arrange these on top. Then bake in the oven for 30 mins and voila! Your own home made lasagne!

Relevant links:

Krista’s Crockpot Lasagne – Made famous on the FlyLady circuit!

DianeDenmark’s Blog – lots of yummy (and well tagged!) meal ideas!

Pergamano Perforating Tool – Single Needle – PG10241

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Mac n Cheese Bento with Zigzag Apple

Today’s bento is a Mac n Cheese with a Zigzag carved apple and some broccoli and cucumber, with coloured cheese (click for the cheese colouring tutorial) cut into a flower design. This one was served hot, so I had to be quick with the photo before the cheese flowers melted and before the apple started turning brown! It didn’t take very long to do, I just stood and carved the apple while the pasta and broccoli cooked. You will see that there are little bits of green in the Mac n Cheese – that’s because I like to stir some soft broccoli into the cheese sauce. Its a bit of a habit I have when I’m making this dish (we have it very very often) originally because I thought it was a good way to hide the vegetables. But as it turns out both my baby boys love broccoli on its own anyway, which is a blessing! I love to see them enjoying their food, especially when it’s something healthy!

I was doing my WHB (Weekly Home Blessing) this morning and can you believe, my nearly 3 year old was begging me to give him the FlyLady dusters?! I had the big long-handled one and there is a small one that he sometimes gets, and he saw me dusting the shelves and said “Mama, Please. May. I. Have. The other one? Please Mama?” I have been teaching  him to “ask nicely”. My heart just melted!

My fellow Blogger, Flylady and Twitter friend, DianeDenmark has a blog in which every monday is Pamper Day. If you go to her site you can see the previous pamper sessions and get a link to a list of of pampering ideas.

Today my DH bought me a new bedside lamp (the old one was dangerous because little fingers kept trying to take the bulb out) so now I can read again at night.  It will be fitting for me to try to get to bed at a more decent time today (any time before 3am will be an improvement on yesterday LOL) , so I can get my Dan Brown fix! I’m reading “The Lost Symbol”. That will be my pamper, treat or something special to be good to myself, and if I do this for 28 days in a row, then it should become an automatic habit.

There are a lot of things I want to make into habits, like going on my cross trainer and eating smaller portions, and of course getting back into my full FlyLady routines. Some habits that I learned early on (2 years ago?) such as Shining the Sink and doing the Swish and Swipe have always stayed with me, and using the Timer and doing Room Rescues and I’m so thankful for that! Some of the other habits I want to make automatic are the Before Bed Routine (for myself – the kids have had theirs for a long time) and doing more of the Zone Work, Missions, Paperwork and De-Cluttering.  But it is not the best idea for me to try to make these all habits at once, lest I crash and burn! I have to take Baby Steps and just try to learn 1 new habit at a time. “Practise makes Permanent!” Not “Perfect”! This is a swearword on the FlyLady scene!

What I have learned from using FlyLady’s system is that Perfectionism is harmful – it makes us waste time, procrastinate and renders us inefficient. So since I decided to become an “Ex-Perfectionist”  life has become easier! Now I realise that we mere mortals can never be perfect, good enough will have to do! As the Flylady says, “Housework done improperly still blesses your family!”

It’s amazing how this attitude toward perfectionism, or imperfectionism should I say, affects daily life, in every single way, not just the household chores. I definitely have accomplished so much since becoming free of the burden of Perfectionism! It’s made me a braver person! I can “Dive In” and give something a shot, knowing that the end result will not be Perfect but I’m still ready and willing to accept those results, knowing that everything can be improved upon, little by little, step by step, day by day without having to have the end result perfect there and then. For an impatient person such as myself, that is an astonishing achievement!

Especially this year, I have learned how to do some html, some css, make squidoo lenses, use a feed reader, use a Wordpress blog and install plugins, use my camera phone to send photos via wifi email (first time I’ve been able to get a phone to do more than text and phonecalls LOL) , and of course still make time to do something that could be considered my Pamper Time – Bento Making (and blogging about it!) – it’s my creative outlet, a hobby that I do for my pleasure and relaxation whilst at the same time blessing my family by providing cute looking healthy food, which is a bonus! AND the house has not had to go to wrack and ruin in the meantime!

Related links:

CSS and HTML on a Squidoo Lens

More about Feed Readers

Top Wordpress Plugin

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Sometimes it is difficult to get inspired to make a bento, especially if you have limited ingredients. You don’t have to have many fancy foodstuffs or lots of time to be able to turn a normal boring sandwich into a decorative delight if you have some coloured cheese sheets prepared before hand.

To make the coloured cheese slices:

I recommend Gouda because it is a nice texture and flavour, and seems to absorb the colour well, and is nice and elastic-y and non-stick, without being too soft or too hard.

Cheese and food colouring

If you will only need a small amount of coloured cheese, you can use one slice and spread the colours on each quarter of the cheese. This is also a good way to get some of the colour to overlap slightly, which can be an interesting effect if you cut the cheese shapes out going over the join. You can experiment and see what colours or shades you can get. Tip: Red + Yellow = Orange, Blue + Yellow = Green, Red + Blue = Purple. I only have the 4 colours of food colouring so I did 4 sections. I have to wear latex free gloves when handling food, NOT because I’m a hygiene freak (even though I am!) but because of an allergic reaction when food comes into contact with my skin. Great hobby for me to pick eh?! LOL

So using a clean finger you spread the food colouring on the cheese, and rub it in. The food colouring I am using is washable and does not stain your fingers or gloves, but I don’t think it comes out of clothes. In the past I have used bits of boiled egg white or another piece of cheese to do the spreading of the colour, just use a chunk of it like a paintbrush. You could probably try a clean paintbrush, I haven’t but I think it would work just as well. You’re more likely to have a finger or cheese scrap to hand.

Spread the colour on and rub in

Then it will look all messy and wet. Don’t worry! Just put the piece of cheese on a flat tray or plate and cover with cling film. Then put it in the fridge to dry off and for the colours to absorb. You can do this at night and it will be ready in the morning. If you are impatient you can blot it dry with some tissue.

The colour is absorbed

When you are ready to use the cheese, it will be a lot more manageable and a lot less messy, and will be a pleasure to cut into whatever shape your heart desires. My best tip is to use a needle or a needle pen that you an get from a craft shop in the “pergamano” section. You turn the cheese over and cut the shapes on the back,so remember cut out the mirror image!

Cut the cheese on the reverse

If you know you will need a larger amount of coloured cheese, you can of course colour bigger pieces of cheese, and store them in cling film until you need them. I am a big believer in not wasting food, so all the scraps and off cuts get saved and made into “rainbow” cheese toasties!

Larger sheets of coloured cheese

Then you can arrange your new shapes onto a sandwich or cold rice (not hot unless you want the cheese to melt LOL!) add some salad andcrunchy snacks and voila! A decorative lunch!

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And a close up

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Pergamano Perforating Tool – Single Needle – PG10241

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Test driving my new bento box

I have been making bento since January 2010 and up until now I have resisted every temptation to buy any bento supplies whilst trying to make do with what I already have, such as normal food containers and tools such as cookie cutters and craft supplies. Today, the temptation got the better of me! I saw the lovely bright colours of this 4 tier (Yes 4!!) bento box and I bought it thinking it would be extra specially good for family picnics, using all the tiers, and I can mix and match 1 or 2 of the tiers to suit for normal lunch days when we are at home!

Here is a pic to show you what it looks like with the lid.

new bento box with lid

By the way, it is another Moroccan Lamb with prunes! DH made it again as a treat for me! So I put some rice in the long compartment, the Moroccan Lamb with prunes in one of the squares, and filled the remaining square with carrots and cucumber. I decorated the rice with some carrot fans. There was only me eating dinner today seeing as my boy was asleep (he was feeling under the weather) and got fed later and DH and the baby had already eaten.

Here is what the bento box looks like all stacked together:

4 tier bento box

And taken apart:

4 tiers bento box apart

As you can see, the top tier is enough for a meal for 1, so today the other 3 tiers were redundant today, but I have a feeling that when the weather gets nicer, we’ll be able to get a lot more use from the other tiers for picnics / days out.

I also splashed out and bought this:

Silikomart Silicone Chocolate Moulds

I have used them to try them out, but I didn’t have enough chocolate to fill them up (I just had a half packet of dark cooking chocolate in my cupboard!) so I only got half done ones, so next time I try making them, I’ll be sure to let you see what they turn out like. These look promising – professional looking, lovely smooth glossy finish to them, and they pop right out just like ice cubes! You can buy the Silikomart Moulds here.  Next time, I want to use some nice flavoured milk chocolate – Galaxy or Cadbury’s Dairy Milk spring to mind but I’ve no chance of getting my mits on that over here! Will see what I can find!

Also in the pipeline is a tutorial / tips / how to on the cheese colouring. Watch this space! Subscribe! Bookmark! Or do the old school thing and write my blog address on a post-it note and stick it to the wall next to your computer! The Google Reader is pretty good at handling all your favourite blogs and it keeps track of who has updated what, and when you open up Reader, you will see a list similar to your email inbox, so you can go straight to the blogs that have new posts. It saves you from having to manually check each blog to see which ones have been updated. I think it’s brill! To add all your favourite blogs to Reader, just click the orange RSS symbol on your favourite blogs: usually this is near the top of the blog page somewhere. If there is not one, you can also get Google Reader to create the “feed” for you, by clicking Add a Subscription in Reader and then typing in the blog’s “url” or home page address.  Or you can subscribe by email, then you will get an email notifying you when there is a new post. Happy Feed Reading !

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Confetti Bento

Today’s bento is tiny! The loaf of bread was diddy and even more so once I had cut off the crusts! It fits so snugly into this tiny little box! It is a PB&J sandwich with a chequered apple and heart and cheese confetti.

You could surprise your darling with one of these on your Wedding Anniversary, or even make 50 of them for the guests at your wedding as wedding party favours! Just an idea!

I made this mainly to try out my new coloured cheese. I prepared the cheese yesterday by spreading 4 different food colourings on to a sheet of cheese and then putting it back into the packet to let the colours dry off / soak in. So when I came to cut out the shapes today with my pergamano needle pen on the reverse of the cheese, it was so easy! No mess, no drips, no sleeve accidents! This bento took less than 5 mins to make! I will have to do this kind more often! It’s not really a full meal, due to the size, but it should qualify as a snack bento. Snackaben.

Brides to be, don’t attempt colouring the cheese whilst wearing your wedding dress! 

ni hao kai-lan bento

Today’s bento is Ni Hao, Kai-Lan!

This comes on Nick Junior TV every morning and its super jolly music gets me off to a happy start! I love the cute characters in this show: there’s a tiger, a monkey, a koala and a rhinoceros who flies about attached to a balloon. They are the epitome of “kawaii” !

You can read about Ni Hao, Kai-Lan in this Wikipedia entry

And this is what all the characters look like together Ni Hao Kai-Lan

I used a Chicken and Sweetcorn Pancake (“Dropped Scone”) that I made yesterday and wrote about in yesterday’s post

The hair, eyebrows and eyelashes are Nori seaweed, the red flowers are cheese and the eyes are boiled egg white, cheese with brown food colouring, nori and egg white again. At the right hand side is some macaroni with egg mayonaise and decorated with more cheese and carrot flowers of various colours. The cheese that I use is Gouda pre-sliced. It is on a bed of “Feldsalat” which translates to Field Salad or Field Lettuce, and Wikipedia has just informed me that it is also known as Corn salad, Valerianella locusta, Lewiston cornsalad, lamb’s lettuce, mâche, and rapunzel.

I carved the words “Ni Hao Kai-Lan” into an apple wedge using my trusty pergamano needle pen.

Ni Hao, Kai Lan was created by Karen Chau. This is the link to the official website

Pergamano Perforating Tool – Single Needle – PG10241

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Today’s bento is a monster type creature made from a “dressed egg” or “egg mimosa” with green beans for the eyes and legs and arms, and an apple body on a grated carrot background, with chicken fried rice, peas, broccoli, cucumber and garlic on a food pick.

The rice was left over from when I made these chicken skewers earlier this evening. I got the idea for these chicken skewers from justbento.com

curry ketchup chicken skewers

I thought the ones on there looked really tasty and as it happens, I had got my chicken out of the freezer this morning just like the Flylady told me to do, so by the time I got my inspiration for what to do with it, it was pretty simple! I didn’t have any of the ingredients from the recipe apart from the chicken though (LOL), so I used spicy curry ketchup to marinate them in for a couple of hours before dipping them in some sesame seeds and sizzling them on their skewers in the frying pan!

Today I took part in my fellow Flybaby DianeDenmark’s Scaredy Cat Challenge! Weeding the patio! Not something I have ever attempted before, but I thought I would be brave and jump in, especially seeing I was prepared for anything, already being dressed to my lace-up shoes and timer AND already having complete the Weekly Home Blessing! (Go me!) I set my timer for 15 mins, spent 5 mins testing different pieces of cutlery and found out a long handled latte spoon works better than a butter knife for digging out the moss, grass and plantains! When the timer beeped I did another 10 minutes of weeding and then spent the last 5 mins sweeping up. I was really surprised what a difference 30 mins made! Here are the before and after pics!

patio before

patio after

Below are the current Top 25 Bento Boxes!

Moroccan Lamb with Prunes Bento

Usually when my husband cooks, it is so tasty that we end up eating it all straight away with no left overs to spare. However, he purposefully cooked extra this time, seeing as we were cooking for an extra guest and even though this is THE MOST TASTY DISH we have had this year, we were too stuffed full to eat it all up, so I decided to make a bento with the last of it!

I found a recipe which no doubt will taste very similar, but I cannot guarantee that it will taste anywhere near as good as the one my husband made because he doesn’t use a recipe, he does it from memory/instinct/taste! And he uses a secret ingredient (a mixture of special spices) that he got sent in the post from a friend in Iraq! (But I can let you know he put some almonds in it!)

I also was desperate to try out this Japanese Switchback method that I learnt from Graasland which I used on a carrot instead of a cucumber.

The writing on the apple was done with my pergamano perforating needle pen.

Sorry about the lettuce – it is a bit dreary but it is Sunday after all LOL

Swan Lake Bento

Yesterday I got reeled in to the world of Stumbleupon, where I found out how to make a swan from an apple, and cheese crisps! I have been a little waylaid today too, but this time because I have been watching the Gordon Brown gaffe on Youtube, where he called a pensioner a “bigotted woman”.  Cringeworthy stuff.

I just tried making the cheese crisps now, and wanted to post a pic of them, but as tasty as they are just on their own, I thought I would quickly put together a bento so I am not just posting random cool things, and sticking to my bento theme! So using the same method as for the swan apple, I made a swan from a tomato. And she has just swum through a cucumber heart and cocktail hot-dog rabbit archway on the lake to come and nibble the cheese crisps! Sorry about the blurred picture. Truth be told, I think my camera lens has grease on it from these low-carb cheese crisps… You know, I can just feel the weight dropping off me every time I crunch one of these salty, grilled mouthfuls of deliciousness !

Lion and Kawaii Mushroom Bento

I have 3 boxes that I use for Bento making, but 1 is currently with a friend and the other 2 have disappeared. But I found a small container and thought I would give it a try, thinking it would make a cute snack bento. It is only 0.3l ! It just fits in my hand! So I started by lining it with lettuce – I only needed to use a couple of leaves! Then I put a rice onigiri mushroom in, using a tube of apple for the stalk, a ball of tuna mayo for the lion’s head and chicken cocktail sausages for the mane and hearts. I used apple and carrots for decoration. The faces are Nori, cut with my best bento tool, a pergamano needle pen! You can get an idea about the relative size of this bento from the apple!

Butterfly Bento

Today’s Bento is a butterfly! I made this for my nextdoor neighbour, who likes butterflies! She had never seen bento / charaben before and was so excited to find out more about what they are and how to make them. She is a big LOST fan too so I promptly pointed her in the direction of Pikko’s site (Adventures in Bento Making) where all her LOST tribute bentos are and she was LOST for words at the amazingness of the characters and the themes!

This butterfly is cheese with food colouring, and I used a butterfly shaped cookie cutter to cut out the butterfly shape, and cut the body, face and antennae freehand, using sesame seeds for eyes. The brown food colouring was a nightmare really and ended up going all over everything, including the rice onigiri flat disc underneath and I somehow managed to get it on my WHITE zip up top, my hands and my camera phone! (I only ever wear white when I am going to be doing something messy  – usually eating spaghetti bolognaise! – Seriously – I need a bib!) You will see there is some extra cucumber behind his “antlers” which is my cunning way to hide some of the food colouring drips! This was a mistake because I ended up knocking his face off and making a worse mess and had to re cut the antlers again when one of them ripped in half. Underneath the onigiri disc is, guess what? Yes. Tuna mayo! Not that I am becoming predictable or anything LOL !

Oh, by the way, I made this new Bento Digest squidoo page, which is an RSS feed of a selection of Bento Blogs constantly updating to show the last 3  Blog Posts, (Entitled “Bento-Digest”, subtitled “A Collection, Collation and Curation of the Best Bento Blogs”) so in case you haven’t got your own Feed Reader set up, you can just go to this page and keep up to date with what is happening in the online bento community! If you want to set up your own Feed Reader you can just go to Google Reader and log in with your Google account and then press “Add a subscription” then copy the website address and paste into the “Add a subscription” box and then Google will look for the feed for you. Or if the site you are viewing has the orange RSS feed symbol, you can click on that and add it to your favourite feed reader that way. For example if you click here to subscribe to my site, it should ask you if you want it adding to your Google Reader or your iGoogle homepage. Why would you want to do this? In my day, if you liked a person’s website, you would save the webpage in your bookmarks or favourites and then next time you were online, you would go through your list of favourites (if you remembered!) to see if any of the blogs had got new posts on. Well, nowadays, with Google Reader or other Feed Readers and the power of RSS Feeds, all you do is log in and then you will see a list of all your favourite blogs and (similiarly to your email inbox) it will put a number in brackets at the side of each blog to show how many new posts there are. So you don’t need to visit a website and be disappointed to find out they haven’t posted anything new for the last however many days. (Like me today – 4 days have gone by without an update, sorry folks!) If you are interested in finding out how you can keep up to date with all the current online bento news and articles in other ways too, check out How to Make Friends in the Online Bento Community which lists and details a variety of places you can loiter and linger to get the bento low-down !

I went shopping today and got carrots, eggs and lettuce, so I am well stocked now – I have not been able to make much of anything recently due to being low on supplies – we had fishfingers and chips for tea today – not that I am complaining – it’s one of my most favourite meals, just not very healthy!

Well my nextdoor neighbour is going to lend me her LOST dvds, so once I have finished watching Ally McBeal (Yes I am living in the 90’s obviously!) then I can try to do some serious catching up to find out what all the back story is and find out who all these intruiging characters are that Pikko so immaculately immortalises in cheese and seaweed! And dare I say it, get some minutes on my cross trainer to shift some pounds and get me a bit fitter, by God’s Will.

Robot bento

I have always been fond of robots ever since I saw the 80’s movie Short Circuit! You could say this bento includes enough fruit and veg to contain your Johnny 5-a-day!

Here is my entry for the Robot Competition in the Kawaii Bento Club!

You can read all about it on my Robot Bento Squidoo Lens

The Tasty Red Rice Recipe that I use in this bento is also on a Squidoo page

snack bento

New Home bento

Happy New Home bento

My very dear friend is moving house ,thousands of miles away , at the end of this month and today she and her daughter came to visit me, so I made these bentos for us to have for lunch. These are Happy New Home Bentos and although it brings me great sadness that we will not be able to see each other any more for a long time,  it also brings me great joy that she will be starting a new life with new opportunities and great prospects where she’s going.  Although I only made these 2 bentos and a snack one, they were in quite large boxes and we were able to dig in and share them out and they were surprisingly filling. We still had room for a 5 minute chocolate mug cake and icecream afterwards though

We had fun in the kitchen trying out Lia’s egg sheets from her brand new tutorial on Bentolicious.  Funnily enough I have never used my tea strainer for raw egg before and it was a weird experience – I didn’t think it would take so long to go through, but it was worth it because it made a much nicer mixture for pouring into the pan. I had the heat too high – I use an induction hob and it heats up really fast, which is usually a good thing but probably not that great for making egg sheets. The bottom of the egg sheet went a little brown but the top looks useable. I certainly need more practice and I haven’t tried cutting it into shapes yet! I hope to try using it for my next bento, so I will let you know how it goes!

The ingredients in the bentos are tuna, cucumber, apple, rice, cheese, tomato, carrot and boiled egg.

Chicken Salad Bento

Today’s bento is a Chicken Salad. I tried sprinkling chicken seasoning on the chicken while it was in the frying pan, but the spices were all stuck in the bottle so I had to tip it upside side down with the lid off and then a whole chunk came out and covered the meat with a thick layer. Well I like Chicken Seasoning so I didn’t even try to take any out. This was the tastiest chicken ever! Very salty though! I  think I even got a little giddy from the amount of salt there was in it! I had some lovely mixed lettuce leaves which are from a convenience pack, ready cut and washed so I got some interesting colours for the background and because there was plenty of it, I didn’t skimp with the greenery this time! I put a chequered apple and a chequered cucumber chunk in there and some tulip carrots. The Rice Ball is just plain rice with nori stars on it, and the tomatoes have sesame seeds sprinkled on them. I made 3 of these and the kids and I had one each today for lunch. The baby is now able to feed himself pretty much, but the chicken was far too salty for him – he just stuck to the salad and his onigiri.

By the way, I tried cutting the raw chicken breast with an owl shaped metal Cookie Cutter. The cutter just bent and crippled over. So we ended up with just regular straight chicken strips. But they were sooo tasty! Finger licking good! My tongue has gone a bit numb though now from the saltiness. I think we’d better not have any more  salt for 2 weeks!

kawaii mushroom sandwich bento

While I was away in England, I dropped my camera and it broke! so now I only have my camera phone to take pics with! The flash comes on about 20 minutes before it takes the picture so apologies for the photo quality! Today’s bento is a cheese and mayo sandwich on brown bread, with broccoli, tomatoes and deep fried aubergines. This one is for my DH and he likes the aubergines to be nice and blackened… almost burnt but we’ll say caramelized for the sake of argument! I used them as baran between the sandwich and the broccoli, seeing as the flavour of the aubergines will probably be more tasty absorbed into the sandwich than the soggy broccoli juice. I am astounded that I was even able to make a bento today, seeing as my fridge is very bare. Seriously need to go shopping! Looks like we have enough margarine to get us through til winter tho hehe! I also managed to jab one of the food picks down between my nail and my finger, which was sensational! I lost an astonishing amount of blood with that one!

We managed to get back home to Germany before all the UK and German Airports started shutting down due to the Icelandic Volcanic Ash Cloud. We are so blessed to be home and safe. I got back and couldn’t wait to see what I had missed this past week from my bento pals, so I posted my findings here in a Squidoo Lens called  Bento Catch Up which highlights the bento news from 7th -15th April 2010. Check it out because the current bento contests / challenges / giveaways are highlighted in it.

I am always trying to improve my site, so now there are some new tabs on the home page; “Games” which features links to some of the cutest games around and “Harajuku” which is a new promo page for Harajuku Lovers Perfume which I fell in love with while on my trip to England! The Bento Supplies page has also been given a new look to make it easier to navigate and you get to see more products “at a glance” !

I’ll tell you about this Harajuku Lovers Perfume while I am here!

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this and I am IN LOVE with it!

Harajuku Lovers Perfume - Baby

This is the Harajuku Lovers perfume by Gwen Stefani. It smells like parma violets! Up til now Kenzo Flower was my favourite, but now I just think the smell of this is so delicious and the packaging and the bottle just feed my addiction to fatally kawaii gorgeousness!

I bought mine in England on my latest trip there, and looks like I paid more than I should have – I should have bought it online to save money. Though to be honest I would have ended up paying a little bit extra and getting the other one that I love as well which is a coconutty smell; “Music” ! I have to collect these (There are 5 to collect; Baby, Music, G, Love and Lil Angel) because once the perfume is gone, you still get to keep the bottles which are these heart-breakingly cute figurines!

Before I go, I would like to give special thanks to Kuusou from Bento Basket, Jenn from Fluteloop, Mombento, Marisa from All in Good Food, Lia from Bentolicious, Natakiya from Bento Anarchy, Debra from HapaBento and BentoBird for some phenomenal Guest Posts. Your guest posts are welcome any time, and it’s a pleasure to have you featured on my blog. )

Chicken Salad Bento from Bentobird

Hi, I’m Bentobird. I live in the Washington DC area and enjoy making bentos that express the culinary diversity and ever-changing seasonal beauty of the Mid-Atlantic, and sharing them on my blog, bentobird.blogspot.com. Bento is such a delightful to way to participate in the beauty of nature and connect with others through the tapestry of international food traditions!

Jenn’s blog is here bentobird.blogspot.com

Hello Kitty snack bento from Hapa Bento

I am very flatterered that my bento-blog friend and fellow member of the Kawaii Bento Club Asfora asked me to write a guest post for her blog! So here goes…

My name is Debra and I have a bento blog called “hapa bento”. I create fun bento box lunches for my husband, Saba Man and for myself. I try to keep our bentos as healthy and as compasionate as possible. I am a vegetarian while Saba Man is not, so are bentos can get very interesting at times!

This bento I packed this “Hello Kitty” snack bento for myself as a demonstration that you don’t have to do charaben to create a kawaii-cute bento. Using a cute box promotes “squeal appeal” on it’s own!

I love a girly-sweet bento and sometimes there’s no time do charaben. So instead I use a basic flower cutters and pink veggies and fruits, a cute bento box and voila! I have a kawaii bento.

This snack bento contains, corn pudding, sun-dried olives, strawberries, tomatoes, vegan tofurkey sausage, enoki mushrooms, watermelon radish and yellow carrots!

So there you go… a fairly simple way to bring a smile and a twinkle in your eye at during lunch.

Thank you Asfora for inviting me as a guest poster!

Zoo-ward Bound from Bento Anarchy

Zoo-ward Bound Bento

It was spring break.  It was hot.  It was going to be a long, long week with my daughter and I wanted to pack as much fun into each day as I could.   Thus I came up with a different theme and plan for each day.  Monday was music day, Wednesday was flower day, Thursday was dragon day, Friday was games day. But Tuesday was reserved for the Atlanta zoo.  We were meeting up with friends and everything was planned out.  And then reality hit (around 10 pm Monday night) and I remembered that I had to teach a dance class on Tuesday – and that normally A-chan would be eating a bento lunch at school while I taught.  Ooops.  So then the plan changed a little bit.  I would make a bento like normal only she would get to eat it while watching the dance class.  It worked out well!  As soon as class was over we raced to the car and went to the zoo.   In the bento are the animals that we both love:  she loves monkeys, I love elephants and we both are head over heels for the big cats.

Left to right: Cheese cubes on an elephant pick, fried tofu with parsley sprig and monkey pick, black olives and feta with carrot hearts.  Three tiger onigiri, more parsley, carrot letters and an apple bunny.

The only thing that she didn’t eat was the parsley.  I guess that she thinks green things are only for decoration!

Natakiya has her own bento blog here Bento Anarchy

Hi! I’m Lia. I’m a mother of two who lives in Indonesia and I love to make bento for my kids. I always learn something new in bento making, that is probably the reason that makes the process of bento making and bento learning so much fun. I usually prepare the bento in the morning. The cooking itself can be done the night before or from dinner left overs. But all veggies, fruits, and the rice are prepared in the morning.

Animal Friends bento from My Bentolicious

This bento is prepared for a guest post for Bento Box UK. I made 2 animal friends from rice molded by hand. Decorated with nori, crab stick (red part), and pink & white kamaboko. The carrot flowers are made with small flower cutter and a small straw to make the center hole. I am using raw spaghetti sticks to attach the ears and the hearts decoration. That way, you don’t need to worry that the ears and the hearts will fall over. Inside this box : steamed broccoli, flower shapes carrots, baby corns, pork sausages, glass noodle wrapped in thin pork slices, and strawberries.

I’m not a great cook but I always try to put foods that my kids like and decorated in their lunch box so it’s more interesting and fun to bring to school. Although my kids can have their lunch catered for at school, I try as often as I can to prepare their lunch. Hope you can join and share your bento creation with us! Have fun in your bento making

Lia has her own bento blog here on My Bentolicious

Last week I was asked if I would like to be a guest poster for Bento Box UK. Have to say that I was flattered to be asked. Although I have been making bentos for about 3 1/2 years I have only been blogging about them for a little over 6 months. I must say that I was surprised at the depth of the bento blogging community I have found and the wealth of information I have absorbed. I am a very simple bentoist. I do not do charaben bentos very often so the bento you will see today is very simple in presentation but big on flavor.

Mini Turkey Burgers bento by All in Good Food

Today’s bento consists of in the lower part, broccoli and cheddar rice, tamagoyaki with cheese, garlic butter sautéed broccoli and mini turkey burgers. The upper compartment consists of delicious strawberry and banana fans and robin eggs (malt ball candies). This bento was very filling and satisfied my tastes with a variety of flavors.

Thanks to Asfora for allowing me to participate as a guest poster.

From Marisa at All in Good Food

Itadaki masu!