Bento Box Blog

Weepul Bento

I was looking at Bentovention’s site the other day and noticed that her Makkuro Kurosuke (Susuwatari) bento characters reminded me of those Weepul pom-pom stickers that you used to see everywhere in the 80’s.

Weepuls

So I thought I would make my own “Weepul sticker” out of rice and cheese! I coloured the rice purple by mixing red and blue food colouring, made the eyes from some egg white and used a hole punch on the Nori seaweed for the pupils. The cheese letters for “Have a nice lunch” were cut free hand using my pergamano needle pen. You can learn how I do my cheese colouring on my Cheese Food Colouring Bento Tutorial

This was fun and simple to do and although it’s not really a full bento today, it’s still a nice Sandwich Topper decoration to brighten up lunch! I have put this on “What’s for Lunch Wednesday” – Go have a look it’s like a bento party where you can show off your Wednesday Bento!

Did you know? I love puzzles! I love rubiks cubes, logic problems, jigsaws etc. I also love Moroccan Tilework which is called “Zelij” or (Zellij / Zellig / Zellige).  I wanted to try and do some kind of swirly mosaic and was entranced by this “How to draw Zellij” Tutorial

I ended up reading about Wang tiles / Wang Dominoes and aperiodic tiling, Penrose tiles and Quasicrystals…!

To keep things simple, I decided to go with these Penrose Tiles to make a “tile and dart” design, from coloured cheese. It was only to experiment and play really, but I ended up making it into a Bento by adding some of the home made pizza and Ginger and Choc Chip cookies (from my trusty Be-Ro recipe Book!) that I had made previously the same day.

Penrose Tiles bento

Happy Anti-Procrastination Day! Here is the special pen I use to cut my cheese:

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Peacock Bento

We had a fantastic day out at “Wildtierpark Poing” in Munich (a wild animal park) on Wednesday! We were able to stroke some rabbits and guinea pigs, and feed antelope, goats, ponies and donkeys! We also saw some huge bears. There were random peacocks wandering around the picnic area as well as chickens and ducks.

Here is a bento that I made inspired by the beauty of the magnificent bird, the peacock! I also wanted to try out the sealed sandwich idea that Lia from Bentolicious blogged about.

I don’t have a bread mold / sandwich shaper (apart from the toastie maker) but after rummaging through my plastics box which is mostly full of old baby bottles and lids, I thought I would try using a large teat ring and a smaller one, that seemed to nest inside each other quite well. I made some chocolate spread sandwiches from brown bread and pressed the larger ring onto it to get my first circle, then I turned it over and used the smaller ring to seal the sandwich. I was pretty impressed because they came out quite neat and tidy considering the improvised tools for the job!

These are the teat rings from the old baby bottles that I used to make the pressed sandwich with sealed edges.

And then I put coloured cheese peacock decorations on and carved the same design into a red apple. You don’t get a zoomed out photo today seeing as this was only a snack experiment bento and there isn’t really much else in it apart from some cucumber slices, but someone has been messing about with my fridge settings and the cucumber was frozen solid so it does not look how it is meant to, and I don’t have any other salad or fruits to do much bentoing with. But I’m a big believer in making do with what you have got, so here it is!

The rest of the bread offcuts went into a bread and butter pudding, which I am told was delicious, but I didn’t try it seeing as I am trying not to have any empty calories. I have lost 4lbs so far since I started doing my daily exercise and watching my portion sizes, using the weight loss tips on this blog post and I have proudly marked it on my progress chart on my wall! only 22lbs more to go!

I recently placed a couple of orders with Cake Balls UK to have a box of Gluten Free coffee and walnut cake balls and a bag of chocolate and orange cake balls sent to my relatives in the UK as birthday gifts. As agreed the balls were sent out for delivery before the recipient’s birthday and I’m told they are really delicious and came packaged really neatly too. PippaD from A Mother’s Ramblings recommended Cake Balls on her blog and that’s where I got the idea, so thanks Pippa, and thanks Anna from Cake Balls UK for delivering the fantastic birthday gifts! You have my recommendation too!

You can follow Anna from Cake Balls Uk, Pippa from A Mother’s Ramblings and Lia from Bentolicious on Twitter and their Blogs.

I have never placed a bento items order before, I still consider myself a beginner seeing as I only started making bento in January 2010, and I have never bought any “proper” bento tools, preferring to try to make the best use of what I already have such as cookie cutters for shaping rice or cutting cheese or vegetables, craft punches for the nori seaweed and my craft needle pen for cutting the cheese. There are definitely some basic items that I would suggest could be bought as a bento starter bundle if you don’t already have any tools for making your bento. And I am very tempted to order them myself very soon too! The items I think would be the most useful are the nori face punches, the egg moulds, the  onigiri presses, the flower shaped vegetable cutters and the the decorative food picks.

Have fun and happy bento-ing!

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Cupcake bento

It’s not a real cupcake – it’s a slice of apple in the shape of a cupcake with cheese on top!

There is tuna-mayo underneath the cupcake, and to the side are some rice ball mushrooms / toadstools.

I was really scratching around for ingredients today to be honest. The radishes have gone and the black olives had an incident this morning at 8am – they got yanked out of the fridge and ended up all over the kitchen floor (not mentioning any names but watch my eyes! *Looks over at baby*)

So I ended up putting some digestive biscuits in there to fill in some space – they are at the back, which you cannot see in this picture, but you can in the full, zoomed out  photo.

Cupcake bento

Don’t forget to have a look at the Contests page and the Bento Book Shop

I have been collecting Bento tips, tricks and tutorials and have put all the links together on one page, for your easy reference.

In addition, there is now a Bento Articles Page and the Badge is now easier to grab.

Have a great Anti-Procrastination Day!

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Aubergine bento

My DH cooked again. He knows I have 2 favourite dishes of all time (apart from Fish and Chips and Cauliflower Cheese!) ; Iraqi Tapsi and Moroccan Lamb with Prunes. Well, today he made something extraordinary! He made the Iraqi Tapsi with Beef, but it had elements of the flavours of the Moroccan Lamb with Prunes, with a sort of sweet, cinnamonny taste to it, with piquant snatches of hot chili… Totally mouth watering, juicy, aubergines, sumptuously served in a thick, delicious sauce, textured with small bites of tasty beef steak and red onions… What a heavenly meal! And although I tried to be good and only took a very small second helping, I did eat more than my fair share, and as John Cage would say, I will not be disparaged! I realise my efforts to eat low fat, little and often are in vain, but you have to realise a dish like this does NOT come along every day! I am still committed to doing all the other reductions of fat and sugar and portion size, (My Scaredy Cat Challenge!) but it’s the weekend so this can count as the “treat”! And I do not feel guilty – I feel happy! 

And of course the leftovers went in the bento box, along with some rice, black olives, cucumber and cherry tomatoes.

The olives made me think of Spain, and you wouldn’t believe the lettuce I got from the supermarket – It was like bringing home a bunch of flowers! A huge, curly, astonishingly beautiful lettuce! I have never, ever in my life been so drawn to a salad vegetable! And I carefully broke off just 1 leaf of it and held it in my hands and saw …

… a flamenco dancer!!

So I made this:

Flamenco Dancer

With black olives for the hair, a tomato hair flower, cheese arms and face, a cucumber body and of course the lettuce leaf for the dress.

And if you’re looking for a connection between an Iraqi-Moroccan dish and a Spanish Dancer – it’s the word “Flamenco” which is believed to have come from the Arabic word fellahmengu, meaning “fugitive peasant”,  derived from a root meaning “to flee.” The term came into use in the 14th century, and was first applied to the Andalusian Gypsies themselves, who were called either gitanos or flamencos.

You can see the Wikipedia entry about Flamenco here

Ay, ay, ay!

If you are interested in getting into bento making or want to improve or simply try out some new techniques, try this list of tricks, tips and bento tutorials

Bee and Butterfly Bento, with apple flowers topped with cheese

We had tuna, sweetcorn and pasta mayo today for lunch, and I made rather a lot, so I put the leftover into a bento for later or tomorrow. I put some of the macaroni tubes together in a row to make the body of the butterfly and gave it a tuna-mayo ball for a head. It started off Life as a Caterpillar and and then got its wings! That link there is to my new Twitter friend LesleyDH’s blog, which I have been reading recently and has pushed me to commit to using FlyLady babysteps and Jonathan Roche’s No Excuse Work Outs mentality to start getting fitter and healthier!

bee and butterfly bento

So although the wires keep getting ripped off my cross trainer, and I have already used masking tape to repair it 3 times this month, I will yet again repair it so I can go on and burn more calories whilst watching Ally McBeal tonight! Just finished watching season 1, so I can’t wait to get started on season 2.

Even though my efforts are being sabotaged! My DH is a feeder – Last night he brought  me a bowl of ice cream with actual chucks of chocolate on top, and before that he brought me a “bento biscuit selection”, which was some little teddy bear shaped savory biscuits arranged in a little dish, and this morning he made me a fried egg sandwich and then made me a second one with chips in it, even though I begged for only 1 egg. But I am not complaining – it is nice to be waited on sometimes! I have issues with wasting food, and you can’t really save a fried egg for later can you? So down the hatch it went. It was very yummy. I enjoyed it!  So the whole idea about this new attitude is to not get de-motivated by the sabotage. Just carry on, taking it day by day, and continuing with the babysteps and little things that over a long period of time will make a difference. Such as:

1. Drink a glass of water before a meal, to help fill you up
2. Get off the bus one or 2 stops before the usual stop and walking the rest of the way
3. Take the stairs instead of lifts (cannot do this one because of the buggy, oops there I go making excuses LOL)
4. Swap fried foods for grilled or poached
5. Reduce the amount of butter, mayo and cheese
6. Reduce portion sizes
7. Try to eat little and often rather than big meals.
8. Drink water instead of fizzy drinks and reducing the sugar in coffees
9. Use low fat milk in the milky coffees
10. Snack on apples and yogurts carrots and celery  instead of chocolate and crisps
11. Never give up!
12. Always eat breakfast
13. Don’t reduce calories too much incase you go into starvation mode
14. Kick start metabolism by always having a wholesome breakfast with plenty of fiber
15. Eat before you get hungry so you don’t overeat.
16. Drink water to keep the body functioning / metabolising efficiently
17. Have a small treat (not a binge!) every now and again, otherwise you will get bored or de-motivated
18. Aim to lose only 10% of your body weight at a time
19. Elevate heart rate for 30 mins at least 3 times per week
20. Consider it a lifestyle change instead of a diet

These are tips I collected and stored in my memory from various magazines (Rosemary Conley, Weight Watchers, Slimming World) years ago when I went through my Fitness Freak phase. They are very sensible tips and not too extreme, and helped me to lose 30kg (66lbs) over 2 years ALONG WITH going on my cross trainer for 30 mins 3 times per week. So I know it is possible to do. I just have to do it again (I’d be happy to lose half that amount this time!), God Willing!

I think the bento making is already helping me to snack more on healthy things like carrot, apple and salad, and the portion sizes are brilliant and I am not going hungry at all.

Patience, strength, motivation, determination, Can. We. Do. It? Yes! We! Can! )

Here are some of the Top 25 Bento Boxes and Accessories:

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The Weakest Link Bento

I made this bento for my DH who wasn’t home for dinner today. I had done well to remember to get chicken out of the freezer this morning but as 5pm approached, I still had not got a clue what to do with it. Luckily, my good Blogger, Twitter and Flylady friend @dianedenmark jumped to my rescue and suggested making chicken dippers, by cutting the chicken into strips, dipping them in egg and then coating with breadcrumbs, frying then putting them in the oven to finish! It sounded easy and tasty so I gave it a go, and ended up with these savoury treats.  A big thank you for the idea Diane, it was a hit with me and the kids and DH has just come home and seen the dippers and they were well received with flattering comments, so although I’d be happy to take all the credit , I’ll pass some of the Kudos your way too!

This bento contains 2 onigiri pressed rice balls with nori seaweed hearts, some apple and carrot, and chicken dippers with lettuce.

I was going to call this bento “The weakest link” seeing as I made some carrots  all linking together in a chain and it was the first phrase that sprang to mind, but after thinking about it, “Weakest” sounds a bit negative and today has been a really positive and jolly day, weatherwise, moodwise  and mental health wise! I have kept on top of the housework, did some jobs that I’d been procrastinating on, had a lovely play session with the kids outside in the  sunshine, and even managed to do a little bit of weeding. So this bento deserves to have a more positive, powerful, go-getting name, especially seeing as it was Diane’s idea to make the main ingredient of the bento dish! And she is a very “strong link” to the FlyLady world, and to the realm of Motivation and Creativity! Be sure to check out DianeDenmark’s Blog – Each day there is a theme, such as Pampering, Laughter, Recipes, Crafts, Music, you even get a Scaredy-Cat challenge that you can join in with!

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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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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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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

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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.

I'm a little teapot, short and stout!

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

trunki

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,

home made hand made sock bunny

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”!

Close up teapot and cup

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!

Bento Lunch Box 0.95lt Green

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Bento Lunch Box 0.95lt Pink

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Bento Lunch Box 0.95lt Blue

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manga anime bento

I’ve been a fan of the manga / anime style for a few years. I learnt how to draw a basic manga face from a “How to Draw Manga” book, a few years ago. I haven’t drawn or sketched in a long time, but I decided to see if I could refresh my memory and make a Manga style cartoon character out of cheese for my bento.

So I had some fun this afternoon, with my parchment pergamano perforating pen, and of course lashings of food colouring. I made a caulifower in cheese sauce to sit at the right hand side in a scooped out green pepper (not having any lettuce again, and having run out of broccoli… sigh! ) Then there was not much room for much fruit, just a few apple segments.

Today nothing went right really, because the dishwasher wouldn’t work – Put it on last night but it just sat there defiantly refusing to wash the pots, so this morning I had to either wash everything by hand (not my style!) or wait for it to get fixed…so the pots are still waiting to be rescued from their filthy state, and I have to keep going in there to get a spoon or plate or whatever to wash it by hand… I suppose I will have to eventually get the whole lot out and do it. Can’t someone else do it?!

And then my camera kept taking fuzzy/blurry pics… yeah I know a bad workman blames his tools…but I can’t understand why I have been able to get crisp photos in the past and now I can’t. Winge over! I must remember to be grateful that I have the priviledge of hot running water, a luxury that I often take for granted. In some countries, they have to wash their pots using water pumped from a well, if they even have access to water that is. It makes you wonder doesn’t it? Maybe I WILL go and wash those pots now and stop being so ungrateful!

Compiling Techniques: 2 (How to Draw Manga)

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Draw Your Own Manga: All the Basics

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ET Bento

Today’s bento, also in the category of Sci Fi / Aliens / Paranormal is ET! He is made from cheese and placed on nori on top of a  pressed rice disc. This is on top of tuna and sweetcorn mayonnaise. I used a long piece of cucumber as a baran divider, which is topped with egg white dots.

The other side contains some marbled rice balls as planets which I made by adding a drop of food colouring to the white rice before molding then into shape in cling film.  There are some carrot space ships on the food pick and a cucumber fan, a boiled egg and some lettuce as further decoration. The ET sign/logo is cheese on red pepper.

I have a new way to cut cheese! I used a parchmenting perforating needle pen, from the days when I used to do Pergamano! I actually was never much good at doing the pergamano but the perforating pen had been knocking around in various pencil case and is one of the things I am forever confiscating from my toddler who likes to climb up and get into my craft supplies! So now this item will go into my bento tools! It works like a dream for doing finely cut letters / shapes! Thanks to Pikko from Adventures in Bentomaking who showed how to cut cheese precisely with a toothpick – this is a version of this, just with a finer cutting point. Pikko also gave me the idea to be able to cut the nori very finely with micro-tip scissors or her latest LOST bento.

I am jealous of people who already own the Nori punches, as I am forever wanting to cut tiny dots for the pupils of eyes etc, but now I have found that by using this perforating needle pen carefully, I can also cut out a circle from nori! So until I get round to ordering the nori face punches, I will be content to use this new Pikko cheese cutting method adapted for nori too!

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Alien bento

Today’s bento is part of the Aliens / UFOs / paranormal / Sc-Fi theme. It contains a “Grey” alien made from pressed rice (not grey as in the colour, rather “Grey” as in the type of alien) a rice kawaii mushroom, a carrot and egg kawaii mushroom on a circle of pressed rice and nori, a Surimi fishstick on a food pick, a rice “baran” border with nori stars, an egg and nori “planet” and a spiral cut mini orange with some morello cherries and banana in the fruit section. I also used some pieces of red pepper for added colour and decoration. Underneath the carrot mushroom on the Onigiri circle is egg mayo with carrot mixed in, which is a new discovery – I made this the other day with some other left over bento food, and it was totally delicious. The carrot gives a wonderful crunch to the creamy egg.

This took ages to make (about 1 hour 45) but that includes a kitchen clean up too.

I can’t wait to share this with my toddler at lunch time tomorrow!

Spring alien bento

One of my baby’s toys has a little dinosaur hatching out of an egg, and it gave me an idea to make a little creature hatching out of an egg. Well it is the first day of Spring today after all! It ended up looking like an alien so I decided to make the scenery a bit like an alien planet!

The alien is a couple of cherry tomatoes with a nori face, and he is sitting in a hollowed out boiled egg.  The Antennae or feelers are food picks which actually go right through his head and body to keep the 2 secured together. I used an icing piping bag to get the rice into the cone shape – I have run out of cling film (saran wrap) so I had to find an alternative way of shaping the rice into a compressed shape! I thought it would look good as part of the alien planet scenery. I wish now that I had thought to put some little spots on it to make it a bit more kawaii and decorative! I think I will try doing that another day, as I really like this shape – seems quite unusual.  The ground is grated cheese with blue food colouring and the rest is banana, baby orange, more tomatoes and cucumber.

I managed to get some height with the cucumbers at the right hand side by cutting a line along the radius of each cucumber circle then folding them round into a cone shape and securing it on a food pick. I did this with 3 of them.

I am going to start putting a watermark or id on my images like a lot of other Bento-ists are doing. Does anyone have any tips for doing this? The way I found is by using Irfanview, clicking on Batch, then Advanced, Add Overlay Text, then Settings. (You can download Irfanview for free from here.)

I really love the way the watermark has been done on this Giraffe bento by Bentolicious. I haven’t figured out how she did this yet, but I am guessing it was done with something more sophisticated that Microsoft Paint which is what I used to put my title on! If you are reading, Lia, how did you do it?!

Reading this article on Biggie’s site, Lunchinabox.net entitled “Know your worth” prompted me to get my images watermarked, as this article points out the risks of your images being used without giving you credit for it. An interesting read which also discusses what to do if you are approached by someone who wants to use your recipes or photos to compile a book, without being sold short. So special thanks to Biggie for sharing this important info.

Have a great weekend Folks!

Edit: This bento has been entered into the Spring 2010 bento contest on justbento.com

The Spring 2010 Bento Contest is sponsored jointly by FrenchBento, JustBento and the supplier of the great prizes, Bento&co – who have just launched the English version of their site!

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care bear bento

I’m picking up the 80’s cartoon character theme again, but tying it in with St Patrick’s Day, with a Good Luck Care Bear!

Care Bears were among my favourite cartoons/toys as a kid, along with My Little Pony. I used to have a ceramic pomander of Cheer Bear (the one with the rainbow on his tummy) on my dressing table. I wonder what ever happened to him. I can almost remember the exact smell of the Pot Pourri inside!

Good Luck Bear has a Shamrock on his tummy and seeing as I didn’t get to do any shamrocks yesterday because I was rushing around and ran out of time, I thought it would be a good one to do. It was especially nice this evening to have a stress free creative evening playing with the food and cutters.

I had some green rice left over from yesterday so I used that as a background for the Care Bear and bordered it with spinach. The Care Bear is made out of Cucumber. Special thanks to Bentolicious for showing us we can use cucumber skin effectively to make shapes as seen on this very cute froggies bento as I hadn’t considered using cucumber in this way before!

His tummy, muzzle and eyes are egg white with nori detail.  The rest of the bento is made up of Surimi crabsticks, fashioned into a chequerboard style, pasta and sweetcorn, egg, carrots, cucumber. To finish, pineapple on food picks and apple flowers.

I used this image here on stampaffair.com

From Wikipedia: “Care Bears are a set of characters created by American Greetings in 1981 for use on greeting cards. The original artwork for the cards was painted by artist Elena Kucharik. The Care Bears appeared in their own television series from 1985 to 1988, in addition to three feature films: The Care Bears Movie (1985), Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation (1986), and The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland (1987).” See the full wikipedia entry here

I remember going to see “The Care Bears Movie”! I must have been about 5 or 6 years old! Now I really am showing my age LOL

The Care Bears Movie [DVD] [1985]

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danger mouse bento

Continuing the 80’s cartoon characters theme, today’s bento is Danger Mouse!

He is made from pressed rice with meat ears, a cheese eye and a nori seaweed patch. His nose is a Morello cherry. The Danger Mouse logo is cheese on an oval of pressed rice and the gaps are filled in with grapes, broccoli, Surimi pressed fish “crabsticks”, tomatoes, carrot, apple and Wasabi crispy peanuts.

I tried getting the ears and nose of Danger Mouse to fasten on to the head with cocktail sticks but it broke the rice up too much, so i ended up propping the rice balls up on the backgrounds and gap fillers. I would have ideally liked the nose to be higher up, closer to the eyes.

My toddler and I ate this bento straight away! This was the only photo I could get without my little boy’s eager little hands in the pic!

To see original pics of Danger Mouse and find out who he is if you don’t already know see Wikipedia

Do you like bento making? Want to have a go? Why not give it a try and make your own 80’s cartoon character bento! Let me know, I’d love to see some others!

he-man and battle cat bento

We’ve been discussing 80’s cartoon characters a lot on Buzz, and I got persuaded to do a He-Man Bento! The original He-Man by Mattel looked a bit too difficult to make into a bento but I found this caricature version called a “Mugg” of He-Man created by Rocky Davies, the illustrator and designer, on his website http://nerdorks.blogspot.com/2008/10/ive-been-muggedmighty-muggs.html And this is the image I used as inspiration from the RockyDavies.com website http://www.rockydavies.com/Muggs/Muggs-He-Man.jpg

He has got loads of other awesome characters that he has turned into Muggs, check them out!

My He-Man bento turned out to look like an angry Dora the Explorer in some kind of RPG game, but it was fun to do, though I made it this morning after very few hours of sleep and I’m not a morning person so I let a bad mood get a bit in the way of my creativity when it came to putting the final decorations and touches on, and just ended up putting some carrots round to fill in some of the gaps. Could have done more but realised I had already spent far too long on it really and was getting frustrated especially when I chopped the carrot and a big chunk landed on Battle Cat, sending Nori flying everywhere and bashing his nose out of joint. I made a sword out of carrot too but I ate it because I couldn’t find room to put it in, and it looked more like a dagger than a sword. He-man is made out of cheese, sandwich beef and hard-boiled egg with Nori Seaweed detail and Battle Cat is just made out of cheese and Nori and lots of food colouring!

Anyway I decided in the end the carrots look like the magic powers swirling round when he is changing from Adam into He-Man, so I’ve left it at that.

There is some confusion surrounding who originally created / designed He-Man and the masters of the Universe. See the Wikipedia info here. Roger Sweet was a lead designer at Mattel, who is believed to have orginally designed He-Man.

My own work in this bento is just the cooking of the rice and the cutting of the cheese, meat, carrots and seaweed, and purely for fun! No copyright infringement is intended in any way.

He-Man and The Masters of the Universe Complete Season One Boxset [1983] [DVD]

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Easter egg and kawaii mushroom bento

Well this has got to be the bento that has taken the longest – over 1 hour – and I haven’t cleaned up the kitchen yet! I got so engrossed in what I was doing. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to make but I had to go to the supermarket to get some bread and milk because the shops are all shut here on Sundays. And I really wanted to get some greenery. They didn’t have any cucumbers or lettuce so I got spinach and grapes! I started moulding the rice in the cling film and started making a rectangle but I spotted some of the “Bunte Eier” that I’d also bought (store bought pre-boiled eggs, brightly coloured) and I suddenly decided to make an easter egg shape.  I put thin Nori Seaweed strips round and put little butterflies on for decoration using a craft punch. I put some Surimi crabsticks together and tied them in a bundle with the Nori. I put some more of the Surimi onto a food pick and I made a radish into a kawaii mushroom by digging out a hole for an apple tube to go in. Then I put some carrot “sweets/cracker/bows” on for decoration. At the right hand side is a mushroom made of rice and again using a tube of apple for the core, some juicy green grapes and a food pick with 4 “Sauerkirschen” (Morello Cherries) to finish.

I just had an awesome time making this! It’s pretty cool how you can eat the scraps as you go along and not have to worry about the calories! )