Bento Post - the last one of 2011!

I'm WAY behind on my bento pictures.  Since last week my poor spoiled child has been taking Lunchables to school for lunch, since we're out of housing and all of my snazzy bento supplies are in transit to the UK.

Anyways, I thought I'd post a few photos of some of the lunches I missed posting last month when they were relevant...  Ooops!

This one's pretty old but I can't remember posting it before.

Cherries, kiwi, mini salad with cheese stars, mac and cheese and under-the-sea dogs: mini octo and crab.

This was C's lunch on a day when we were out and about running errands.  It's a mini-version of the same lunch A had that day - apples, edamame, ham and cheese wheels, grapes, and a pumpkin candy.

The A version included a cookie.

Simple onigiri, hot dogs, apples, edamame and a pumpkin spice cookie

Bunny love.  ;)

Actually really liked this one - it's an olive spider and ham and cheese sammy rolls that say EEK with carrots, apples, and edamame - in the view below you can see how cute the spider is.  Hehehe

Red-dyed spaghetti (she won't eat spaghetti sauce, but red spaghetti is cool) with grilled chicken and a heart shaped bread, carrots, kiwi-love, cherry tomato and a brownie bite.

Sunbutter and jelly jack-o-lantern on skinny buns bread, mini-weenie, grapes, cheese, kiwi, and carrots.  There is a story behind this lunch.  Ask me some day.

Boo sammy with apples, grapes, carrots and cookie

Mini-mummy pizzas, apples and carrot-o-lanterns

The laziest ghost onigiri ever.  Fortunately my kiddo is pretty indiscriminate about rice.  Plus this one came with sprinkles - which she LOVES.  Also had candy corn, edamame, carrot-o-lantern, and mini dogs.

And that's that.  I may have a few more photos but since we're operating in-transit now, those won't be uploaded at all till we are settled in at our new address.  For the moment, I'm on vacation.  ;)

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Bars

We had a really awesome Halloween.  It was a blast!  We all dressed up and went trick-or-treating and our costumes were quite the hit.  I am so fortunate to have a really cool husband who not only humors my ridiculous requests but also enjoys participating and isn't completely mortified to walk all over the base wearing a snug green jumpsuit.  What a guy!!

When our girls had filled up their question mark blocks, we headed home where I'd left dinner in the oven.  Dinner in a Pumpkin (minus the green onions - due to the typhoon, we're having a green onion shortage at the commissary) was a bigger hit with the adults than the kids, but still a hit regardless.  I threw together dessert in a flash and put it in the oven while we picked through candies, ate dinner out of a pumpkin, and greeted the later batch of trick-or-treaters.

Dessert, though, is what I REALLY want to talk about.  Oh.  My.  Heavenly.

When I found this recipe on GourmetMomOnTheGo.com and tried it out, I knew I had found something special.  I tasted it and the only word that came to mind was, "Magical."  That sounds ridiculous, I know, but try it and you'll understand.  As my tastebuds exploded into sugary, creamy bliss, I recall thinking that this could be SUCH a versatile recipe.  And it was the first recipe that came to mind when I was thinking about desserts for Halloween.

So, I "Autumned" it up a little bit.  And wow, was it GOOD!


Pumpkin Cream Cheese Bars

Ingredients:

• 2 cans Pillsbury Crescent Roll Creations seamless dough
• 2 8-oz packages cream cheese (I use Neufchâtel), softened
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup solid pumpkin puree
• 1 tsp cinnamon (or pumpkin pie spice - I actually use Pampered Chef's "Cinnamon Plus blend" - LOVE that stuff!)

For the topping:

• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350º.  Spray a 13x9" pan with cooking spray, and press one package into the bottom of the pan.
2. With a hand mixer, beat together the cream cheese, 3/4 cup sugar, vanilla, pumpkin, and 1 tsp cinnamon until smooth.  Spread this mixture over the top of the crescent roll dough.
3. Unroll the second can of dough and spread it over the top of the cream cheese mixture.
4. Combine the remaining sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over the top of the crescent dough.
5. Bake, uncovered, for 20 minutes.
6. Allow to cool before cutting and serving - the cream cheese mixture will be ultra melty and gooey and a big mess if you are too impatient like I am!

I shared this post at MySweetCreations for Sweet Sunday.

Frank and Spiders

A's final Halloween bento (I think) today.  I sent her with hot dog spiders, pumpkin seeds, edamame, ghostmallows, a Frankenkiwi (I stole this idea from here - but hers was way cuter!) with apple neck bolts and carrot sticks.

We stayed up late last night putting together Halloween goodies for A's Yochien party (which got moved to Monday, I found out today, due to the typhoon...).

Darn it!  Three days early with the goodies.  Oh well, her sensei still seemed pretty happy about it and I'm thankful to not have to make treats over the weekend.  :)

Nightmare Bento

Since the movie first came out in theaters, The Nightmare Before Christmas has been my all-time favorite movie.  I love Tim Burton, I love Danny Elfman, and I love love LOVE Jack Skellington.


Yesterday, since we were in Typhoon Chaba and not doing much else, I made A a Nightmare Bento, complete with Jack Skellington and Zero.  She loved it and ate every last bit.

C's bento was more snacky and made up of ghostly goodies.

I think we're down to just one final Halloween bento.  Can't believe it's about to pass us by!

Skellie-Men

I have stumbled across so many cute and awesome Halloween goodies this year that I've been overwhelmed and admittedly at times a bit in over my head.  And now we're only four days out from Halloween and trick-or-treating and I am realizing that I haven't even finished up the kids' costumes yet!  Yikes!

But today we caught a little break.  Okinawa is currently under Typhoon Chaba - a category 4 storm which is blowing like crazy and keeping us all indoors.  This has given me some time to hang out with the kids, finish up some of my treat-making (and brainstorm the treat-making yet to come), and make another extra pair of Halloween bentos.

Last night I was up late icing my Skellie-Men cookies.  I am SO thrilled with how they turned out.  When I got the first little man iced I literally squealed and ran to show him to my husband.  Today I have a tray full of Skellie-Men, ghosts, skulls, and Skellie-Bats.  I still have half a batch of dough in the fridge that I'm planning to make pumpkins out of, but we're all about baby steps here.  Plus, I keep adding more projects to my list, so I am kind of having a hard time keeping up with...  myself.

Anyways, these cookies are pretty much the coolest thing I've ever made, I think.  ;)


Skellie-Men Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened dark cocoa powder
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup margarine, softened
• 1 1/4 cups white sugar
• 1 whole egg plus 1 egg yolk

Directions:

1. Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt; set aside.  In a medium bowl, cream together the margarine and sugar until smooth.  Beat in the eggs.  Gradually stir in the sifted ingredients to form a soft dough.  Divide the dough into two pieces, flatten and wrap in plastic wrap.  Refrigerate at least two hours.
2. Preheat oven to 375º F.  On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out to 1/8" thickness.  (I dusted the top of the dough and the rolling pin with cocoa powder before rolling it out.)  Cut into desired shapes with cookie cutters.  (We used a mini gingerbread man, mini bat, mini ghost and mini skull.)  This dough is sticky so be sure to add more flour and/or cocoa powder to the rolling surface as neded.  Place the cookies 1 1/2" apart on cookie sheets.
3. Bake for 8-10 minutes in the preheated oven (for mini cutters, 8 minutes was plenty to produce a crisp cookie).  Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for five minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool completely.
4. Ice as desired.  I used CakeMate's Easy Squeeze bags and tips.

I shared this post at MySweetCreations for Sweet Sunday.

Frankenrice

Today is A's last "full bento" day before Halloween.  On Friday I'll pack her bento but it won't be carb-heavy since she'll have not only bread and milk but also Halloween treats for the Yochien party.  Friday's bento will be small.

I was so excited for this bento, I've been planning it for several days.  I am so happy with how it turned out.

Tamagoyaki Pumpkins

Edamame rice Frankenstein

Bottom tier:  Mini peanut butter cupcake, sliced carrots, roasted spiced pumpkin seeds and grapes.

So, for the tamagoyaki pumpkins, I used this recipe - to which I added some red and yellow food coloring - and before rolling it up, I added a little sprinkle of shredded Colby Jack - just to help it stick and make it a little more orange.  I fastened them in their round-ish shapes with leaf picks and added nori details for their faces.  They share a space with some boiled hot dog mums.

Frankenstein is made of edamame rice - I don't have a mortar and pestle here in Okinawa (though as with most of my kitchen gadgets, I do have a nice one in storage in the states!) so I added a little bit of the water I cooked the beans in and blended them up them in my Magic Bullet before I combined them with the rice.  All of Frank's details are nori, and his neck bolts are a couple of little slices of boiled hot dog.

Swamp Thing

Like I mentioned before...  I am running out of Halloween bento days!  So I fixed the girls a lunch I had been eyeballing for weeks this afternoon:  Swamp Creatures!

These were like beyond a major hit.  It may have been because I used this REALLY delicious macaroni and cheese recipe (because I was out of Kraft Mac-n-Cheese, that is!), or maybe my kids really just enjoyed the cool swamp thing theme.  Either way, success is success.  We enjoyed this.  (Even though they weren't as cute as the originals!

A's "Swamp Thing" bento

C's "Swamp Thing"

Included in these bentos were swamp creatures, grapes, corn, strawberry and mini fruit jelly.

Yummy mummies - part 2

More mummies for lunch.  I brainstorm A's lunches the night before so that I won't have to use my brain too heavily in the wee hours of the morning.  I don't work super well before dawn.

Anyways my brainstorm for today's bento got a little out of control.  I have so few bento days remaining before Halloween but so many yummy ideas I want to try out before it passes!  Poor A has had some intimidating lunches as a result.  Today's had way too much food in it (especially for a rainy day when she wasn't able to run and play outside before she ate...  which also happened to be a "bread and milk" day!), but she did enjoy it anyway.  I have a feeling we'll have a bento picnic this weekend so that I can have another extra bento day.  :)

On the right side of her box, she had hot dog mummies made with half cheese dogs and strips of crescent roll dough.  A's not big on condiments so I just poked "eyes" into the dogs before I baked them.  They didn't turn out super defined but A got the point anyway.  She loves the Monster Halloween Backyardigans, so she knows a "mummy king" when she sees one!  The mummies were propped up on a few roasted chickpeas so as to fill in some of the extra space.

The "clutter side"of her bento contained a mish-mash of Halloween themed treats.  I made mini peanut butter cupcakes last night and iced them with chocolate frosting and a candy corn. There's also a couple of Jacarrot-o-Lanterns, a Boo-berry, some kiwi, ghost marshmallows, grape witches and broomsticks.  Uh, can we say excessive?!  LOL!

Candy Corn

I love fall.  Have I said that before?  It's true.  I really really do.  But fall hits in a really sneaky, roundabout way here in Okinawa.  We get these hot, sunshiney, summery days peppered in with a bunch of gloom and rain.  So the general "feeling" around here changes in a really back-and-forth sort of way.  You never can be sure if it's going to start getting cold, (until about January when you get a whole 5-6 weeks to dust off your sweaters and coats before the heat starts in again!) or if it's just another meteorological tease.

So I'm still not completely sure if any of us are actually sick, but I kept A home from school again today.  M has been working really late hours (like, he doesn't head home till 1:45AM...  And then is expected back at work by 7:30AM), so I've been having some late nights.  A has a dry cough, C has a really runny nose, and I have a sore throat that won't quit.  It's so much fun in my house, let me tell you!

Anyways, I figured I'm running short on Halloween bento days, so took the opportunity to make one for A's lunch today.

A's bento:  Candy corn onigiri, cheese dogs,  boogly-eyed strawberry, candy corn, grapes and flip-sides crackers (underneath the berry and the candy)

C's bento:  Same as A's, but smaller.  :)

I sat A down with her bento and she picked up a candy corn and said, "What's this?"  I hadn't even considered that she'd never eaten candy corn before!  No matter though, she loved them and onigiri is always a hit with her.

As an aside, I was playing in the kitchen last night while I waited to hear an ETA from M.  Can't wait to put a couple of these in A's lunch!

Yummy mummies - part 1

This morning I struggled to get my act together and couldn't get enough coffee to save my soul...  We got out the door late and then on the way to drop A off at school, I bumped a curb and popped a tire.  Now, I don't claim to be the world's greatest driver...  but I'm certainly not the world's worst driver, either, and this was a first for me!  (Uh, the tire popping, not the curb bumping! ;)  hehehe)  I've never had a flat!  Well - I had one once, but it was flat before I got in the car and I didn't get very far from home before I realized I was down one tire.  Close enough, in fact, that I was able to drive the car back home and call the tow truck.

This time, however, I literally popped it at the midway point between home and Yochien.  The tire had a BIG hole - and it was raining and the kids were panicked.  (Uh, me too.)  And I was right on the side of a relatively busy road, partially blocking a side road.  And, just to ice the cake, I forgot my cell phone at home.  FUN times.

I stood beside my car for about two minutes, waiting for a "Y plate" car (in Okinawa all the Americans drive cars with "Y" or "A"  on their license plates - the locals all have kanji characters preceeding their license plate number) and for the first time ever, none passed.  Finally, I saw a familiar car - one of my friends (and also the mother of other children that attend A's Yochien).  She recognized my car and pulled over right away and I called my husband at work with her phone to beg for help.  Somebody really should have taught me at some point how exactly to change a tire!!

My friend dropped A off at school for me and I sat with C in the car for nearly an hour waiting for my husband to arrive.  (His commute sucks.)  Finally the workers at a nearby pallet yard took pity on me and changed the tire for me.  Language barrier hooray, but they were extremely helpful and didn't seem to be too annoyed by my total lack of knowledge about anything car and tire related.  (Spare??  I have NO idea where that is.  Jack??  Uhhhh...  Maybe my car didn't come with one??)  They managed to find and use the donut spare and the jack and then even let me use a cell phone to call husband with an update.  Gomennasai!  Domo arigatou gozaimasu!!  My husband was close by and followed me to the on-base auto shop where I left the car to get fixed up.  (By the way, my donut spare was just about flat too...  No telling when the last time that thing got used was!)

Grrrr...  In the five years I drove stateside, I only had to replace tires on one car one time.  In the two years I have been on Okinawa, I've had to replace SEVEN TIRES on two cars!  And the tires here are horribly overpriced.

Ok.  Enough ranting and venting.  It was definitely a nerve-wracking morning for the kids and me.  At least A will have a fun bento to enjoy at lunch time.

Kiwi, roasted chickpeas, edamame-on-a-stick, corn on the cob and a halved PB snowball

Yummy mummy mini pizzas!  Mmmmm, spooky.

Here's to a better afternoon!  (I'm cautiously optimistic.)

Snack-o-lantern

Found the cute idea to hollow out an orange and turn it into a Jack-o-lantern fruit cup...  And then was feeling uninspired for A's lunch so I went with it.  I was definitely not in the mood to go to the commissary (AGAIN) so her lunch is just a bunch of things we already had.

A's snack-o-lantern, filled with a fruit salad of strawberries, orange, apples, grapes and kiwi
Snacky is propped up on a couple of carrot wedges.

PB Snowball, snack-o-lantern, carrots (underneath), pumpkin chocolate chip cookie,  ham and cheese ghost picks and corn (underneath)

Pumpkin MTM

Since A was home today for the holiday, I did a lunch tin this week.  The theme was pumpkins.  I absolutely love pumpkins and fall is my favorite time of year, so this was fun.

Yay for a monochromatic lunch!  Imagine this tin times two - A had already started eating hers by the time I got a photo.  I made some carrot onigiri (I got that idea from my friend Kristin) pumpkins with a little piece of sausage for the stem.  Then there's a peanut butter snowball and a couple of orange wedges.  In the lower three spaces, there's chicken nuggets, pumpkin shaped cheese cut outs, and a pumpkin chocolate chip cookie (we baked them this morning, they're our favorite!).

Why October Rules

I experimented in the kitchen yesterday and came up with some really awesome lady bugs.  And then I was like...  I can't do LADYBUGS in A's lunch!  It's OCTOBER!

What was I thinking?!

So I changed my plans and gave her a spoooooky lunch.  She was elated this morning when she saw the photos.

I feel like I went a little overboard for a bread and milk day lunch, but I couldn't even control myself.  So, it is what it is.

On the left, A's got chicken nugget tombstones with BBQ sauce "RIP" and edamame.  Mmmm...

On the right, a half a kiwi with an owl pick, a Babybel cheese and olive eyeball - which is sitting on top of some spooky ghost marshmallows, some carrot-o-lanterns and a "boo"-berry white chocolate dipped strawberry ghost - which are sitting on top of a few grapes.