Bento Box Blog

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.

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

This bento is a Guest Post from Mombento on Livejournal.

I wanted to do another spring themed bento, because the weather is so very lovely here in the Netherlands at the moment. It’s a dinner bento because tomorrow me and my little girl go to a birthday party in the afternoon and I probably won’t have too much time to cook. So this bento is for my five year old and she’ll be having it for tea.

I made some lovely vegetable and tofu curry, which tastes great but didn’t look pretty enough for bento. So I put it under a thin layer of jasmine rice. I lined the box with lettuce, carrots and radishes. The happy bee is made of two coloured egg sheets and nori. The nori was so hard to put on the egg. For some reason it kept curling up… I made eggs with flower shaped yolks with my favourite kitchen tool: the “dreamland egg shaper”. This is a shaper that can turn the yolk of hard boiled eggs into the shape of diamonds, hearts, flowers and stars. I love it. But: cleaning the thing is a lot of work. A LOT of work.

My husband doesn’t understand that I spend over an hour boiling eggs. He certainly has a point there but……..well bento-ing isn’t about time saving, is it?

Mombento has  her own blog on Livejournal – please click here to go there!

Today is my last full day at home before I whisk my kids off to England for a week to see their grandparents!

Of course I can’t wait to be there, but the journey is usually a nightmare. This time however, I am looking forward to seeing how the Trunki works out for us.

The Trunki is this fantastic Ride on/pull along Suitcase for toddlers and small kids. (3 different colours available here)  And it has these horns that they grab on to for handles and push it along with their feet. The strap

comes off and you can pull them on it too, or you can pick it up and wear it like a satchel, or they can! This is suitable in size for hand-luggage too, so the lucky kid (in my case my 2.5 year old! The one I always refer to a toddler who is fast becoming a boy, sniff sniff, I can’t call him my toddler any longer really. In fact my baby is not really a baby any more – he’s already 13 months now so really he should be the one I refer to as the toddler!) gets to keep all his toys, games,

colouring in book and comfort bunny for the whole journey!

Well anyway, sorry about that confusing side note interrupting there! Back to the bento blog!

Recently we have been watching some fun YouTube music videos for kids and this one caught my eye as something cute and cheerful that could be “bentofied”!

The children’s nursery rhyme goes like this:

I’m a little teapot, short and stout

Here’s my handle, here’s my spout!

When I see the tea-cups,

Hear me shout -

“Tip me over and pour me out!”

I made the teapot out of a big onigiri pressed rice ball, and the spout, handle and lid from cheese. I forgot to put the lid on, but if I’d put it on it probably would have fallen off anyway, because (and I should know this by now!) trying to get things to stick on the curved surface of the 3d rice ball is often disastrous for me! It is much easier to make the ball then flatten it down so you have a nice flat surface or “canvas” to work on. Well anyway I managed to get the spout and mouth to stick on with a bit of mayonnaise “glue”!

The cup is a strawberry hollowed out and filled with yogurt, which kinda makes me feel all gooey inside!In fact it makes me want to make a whole tea set from strawberries, cherries and other sweet kawaii fruits!

This really did not take long to do, despite trying to cut cheese while suffering a bout of the hiccups! I made the little strawberry cup while the rice was cooking, and prepared the tuna fish and mayo, and lined the bento box with salad, all while the rice was cooking. I am using another new type of lettuce today – this kind had black tinged leaves… what do you think to it? I have never seen this kind before!

Seeing as I will not be around to make bento, I am so excited to announce that have invited some of my fellow bento friends from the online bento making community to make a Guest Post here every so often while I am gone. So please don’t forget to come back (subscribe now before you forget!) and please welcome the mystery Guests of Honour on the Bento Box Blog page! Watch this Space!

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