Bento Box Blog

Cootie bento

Here are some “Cooties” to eat for lunch! Cooties (typically in the USA) means bugs, germs or infectious disease microbes, usually yelled out by kids in the playground “He’s got Cooties!!”

In England, where I come from, they generally shout “She’s got Bugs!” or “He’s got Lurgy Bugs!”

I was in a gadget shop the other day looking at Fathers Day Gifts and I saw a Compact Microscope and on the label it said “there are more microscopic organisms in 1 teaspoon of soil than there are people in the world”. So it made me ponder and marvel at the awesomeness of our planet, the universe and the creations in it.

I have recently been watching Prof. Brian Cox (who started his career as a Rock Star in band D’Ream!) on his BBC series The Wonders of the Solar System. I’d highly recommend it – he’s a particle physicist who can explain science in a fascinating and easy to understand way.

Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds is thrilling to watch too. There is a video on youtube showing how to engrave a single strand of hair using an atomic laser.  You might have better luck than me at finding it – the only one I found was unavailable outside of the UK… (copyrights, nuff respect!!)

Here is one that will make you itch!

Back to my bento. My Mama Cootie or Microbe is made from a hard boiled egg cut in half for the head and tail, with processed meat and cheese for the body, and the baby cooties are made from stuffed green olives with cheese and nori seaweed eyes!

This is my homework assignment for week 2 of Bento Summer School! I have joined the KBC Cootie Club too !

Good night, sleep tight! Don’t let the bed bugs bite LOL

Why not send a Bento E-Greeting Card for free!

(edit: this is now on What’s for Lunch Wednesdays too!)

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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Alvin and the Chipmunks bento

I don’t usually enter the online bento competitions, (I’m not a gambling lady LOL!) but I wanted to try to make something for the “Rock My Bento” competition from The Kawaii Bento Club seeing as this one is a voting contest.

I like the  album covers of Alvin and the Chipmunks Original Sound Track and Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Squeakquel!

My kids love these kinds of songs, along with the “Spongebob singing” on Youtube and The Gummi bear songs.  I have to admit they are all quite catchy. I love this one – Chipmunks – FunkyTown

Chipmunks

I used biryani spices in the rice to get a lovely aromatic flavour and just the right colour brown for the chipmunks, and I used cheese to cut out the chipmunks’ clothes. The white bits are boiled egg white and the dark is Nori seaweed. The rest of the bento is made up of chequered cucumber, cherry tomatoes, grapes and a baby apricot. I also used some spinach for the borders. It’s completely edible (or should I say “was completely edible” – my DH enjoyed munching on this one today!).

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Kiwi Fish Bento

Today’s bento is a fancy tailed fish made from a kiwi, with apricot fins and radish gills, in a “tank” of blue cous-cous, and I made the clam shell / oyster shell from a piece of apple.

My Scaredy Cat Challenge is to lose 26lbs and get fitter. This bento contains not a trace of fat! I was absolutely amazed at how much this filled me up – I ate it with the rest of the radishes, the apricot and apple, and some garlic cloves in chilli-oil.  (ok so maybe trace amounts of fat LOL) You can get an idea about how small this bento box is from the size of the kiwi – it’s not a particularly large kiwi!

The lettuce came out looking not too bad, even though it was on its last legs! I can’t tell you how much I am enjoying playing with and eating this curly lettuce and the price of it has gone down now so it would be more than justifiable to buy 2 of them next time!

I know, I know, I need to get some protein – I might have some scrambled egg on 1 slice of toast later, if I have room!

I am wearing my “thin” jeans today! Ok, they are a bit tight still, but I am really pleased because I found an old abandonned “Weight Loss Plan” from August 2009 where I was 186lbs (count ‘em Diane!),  and now I’m 170lbs, so it means I have already lost 16lbs since then! Woopee! I am tempted to add more boxes to my weight loss chart, just so I can cross them off, to spur me on! 16lbs sounds a lot more encouraging than 5lbs! (Is that cheating?!)

I went on my cross trainer again today and burnt another 100 cals, and did 50 sit-ups today and yesterday.

I am eating lots of low fat things as snacks to keep my metabolism up and to prevent my body from going into “starvation mode”  so I’m having popcorn and cereals / cereal bars, yogurts, apple, carrots. I know when I hit my plateau, these will be the last things to go, but I imagine that’s still quite a way off, seeing as I still have 21 more lbs to go before I reach my goal, God Willing! Well there’s no time limit and I don’t want to get unrealistic because I have a trip to England coming up and I know there will be a mandatory Fish and Chips (with mushy peas of course!) washed down with Dandelion and Burdock, and an Indian Takeaway (Chicken Tikka Korma with a Peshwari Naan please!) washed down with Red Bull and Grenadine Syrup… Ah bliss!

But!

This time I don’t have to go overboard – I will still enjoy the food, but maybe just have half-portions instead of the full lot.  Even more calories to be saved!

Another Scaredy Cat Challenge (in other words a big job I have been putting off for far too long) was to get my computer desktop de-cluttered, and my disk de-fragmented using De-Fraggler, run the Disk Cleaner and CCleaner and back up some precious photo files.  So I have been working on that this week (seeing as I have finished watching LOST series 3 now!!) and now it feels like my computer is not as slow as it used to be! Either that or I’m becoming more patient in my old age LOL Who am I kidding?! I am still DYING to see LOST series 4!!!

By the way, The Kawaii Bento Club has got a Summer School Program and a cool Rock Your Bento Contest – Looking forward to seeing everyone’s entries! I have already seen Susan’s KISS bento – it is totally amazing, you have to check this out!

Wishing a great weekend to all my friends, family, bento buddies and FlyLady gal pals! Mwah!

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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3 cool dudes bento

I’ve been really trying to stick to my FlyLady Routines recently and my house is looking better than it has in a long time! I’m doing Room Rescues, Hot Spot Fire Drills, Using a “Do It Now” approach, taking babysteps, beating perfectionism, just “jumping in” and using my FlyLady Timer and Feather Dusters!

My Scaredy Cat Challenge with the Twisters (Twitter Sisters!) is to lose 26 lbs (about 12kg). I have been trying to get into the habit of using the Weight Loss tips listed here, and I’m finding it’s not too hard to stick to! I’ve had a couple of challenges this weekend though, like when DH and DS3 were eating bubbled cheese pretzels, but I managed to keep temptation at bay, whilst focussing on watching Lost Season Two!

Without boring you with the details of what I’ve eaten over the last week, I’ll summarise!

• Instead of eating 2 or sometimes 4 slices of toast (It’s a small loaf!)  I’ve only been having 1, and leaving out the butter and having Marmite instead of jam.
• Brown instead of white bread
• Kid’s sized portions of the  main meal instead of my usual big plate
• Salad without Mayo or dressing
• Tea and coffee without sugar
• Pumpkin seeds  as a snack
• I’ve resisted chocolate bars, pretzels, sweets and biscuits!

And the main achievement is that I have been on my cross trainer for 3 days in a row now, burning 100 cals each time!

To make this bento, I added some curry powder to the rice while it was cooking, to get this sunny yellow colour for my charaben cool dudes.  This is a mini bento (compared to the other bento box), and to give you an idea of the size of the rice balls, they are smaller than a golf ball, more like the size of a table tennis / ping-pong ball.

I have a new method for cutting the carrot flowers, seeing as I don’t yet have the vegetable cutters. I will try to post a tutorial later. And the apple design is new too, which is done using tubes of apple and carving away a cross shape out of the skin. I forgot to mention in my previous bento that I discovered it is possible to use the craft punch on red apple skin too! Check out the red apple skin hearts here.

I used some sliced courgette in this bento, and I only put half a teaspoon of oil into the pan just to finely coat the bottom of it, and then (almost-)dry fried them, til they got this nice charred look! They were really tasty!  The other ingredients in this bento are green and yellow peppers, some sandwich beef, carrot, apple and lettuce. The faces on the rice balls are hand cut from Nori seaweed.

This is the zoomed out pic:

This is a new box that I got from the local supermarket “Penny” for 1 Euro! It holds about 300ml. I’ve read that if you prepare the bento in the “correct or guideline proportions” (some say it’s 4:3:2:1 and others says it’s 3:2:1) then the bento should equate to approximately the same number of calories as the number of mls of water it can hold.

Well I’m no maths whizz but 4 parts of carbs, 3 parts protein, 2 parts veg and 1 part of something else means 10 parts altogether, so that means 40% rice or noodles, 30% meat or fish, 20% veg and 10 percent dessert or pickles.

If, however, the rule is 3:2:1 then that’s only 6 parts, but 3 of those would be the carbs, so that’s 50%, then 33% protein and only 17% veg.  So either I’ve misunderstood what I’ve been reading, or there is some mis-information or contradictory schools of thought on this issue.

I personally usually try to make sure there are plenty of brightly coloured fruits or vegetables in there, and not go too mad with the amount of rice,pasta or bread that I’m putting in. I’ll also usually try to make sure there is some protein, with meat, fish or cheese. I’m a big believer in artistic license so trying to stick to guidelines or rules will usually play havoc with my creativity, so I don’t generally pay much attention to it, to be honest!

While we’re on the subject, I had my first ever negative comment recently!   I’d topped a sandwich with some coloured cheese, and a comment came in that it was a “lazy cop out” and not a real bento. The actual words were: “Using cheese in bentos at all is cheating. It’s a lazy cop-out.”  Of course, I was wounded to the soul when I read that!

I suppose technically none of my bento are “real bento”, if I’m not adhering to the 4:3:2:1 / 3:2:1 law, (or if I am not living in Japan and using only Japanese ingredients if you like a bit of over-zealousness!) but I’ve never heard of cheese being condemned in such a way. Bad cheese! However if you are a hardened bento rebel like me, and you do indeed like to sneak a bit of cheese in your bento making, check out my Cheese Colouring Tutorial!

And talking of comments – I’ve been messing about with the site and you will probably notice the sidebars are looking a little different recently, and the comments section is temporarily not visible due to a “Hide / Show Comments” button that is not configured correctly. I think you can still post comments, if you would like, and they don’t all have to be positive, I was kidding with the sarcasm earlier, honestly, constructive criticism is welcomed! I’ll try to get the comments visibility problem fixed asap! Thanks to everyone who has ever left lovely comments for me, it really is a motivation and inspiration for me to keep trying to come up with new designs / themes or techniques to share!

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

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!

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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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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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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.

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!