Bundle of Bentos

Our external hard drive where we store our photos, music and videos filled up completely so I was unable to upload bento pictures from the past week and a half.  M did some transferring, so now we're back in business and I have a bunch of lunches to share.

Hello Kitty and friends onigiri with ham, carrots and apples.

Corn-doggies with attitude, carrot flowers, banana, baby corn and jelly.

Edamame, baby corn, rice, flower hamburger and bananas.

Macaroni Grill leftovers (by request!):  Broccoli, grilled chicken, pasta and a jelly.

Typical Monday hodge-podge disaster lunch - Anpanman sweet potato rounds, Hello Kitty mini dogs, jelly, baby corn, edamame, kiwi, oatmeal chocolate chip cookie and baby carrots.

Wise sammies - Carrots, ham and cheese owls and veggie crackers (underneath).  She had a sidecar box full of apples with this one.

The boy owl

The girl owl

Packed up nice and cozy in a window-box.  :)

Fun-fun-fun!  This catches me up for the moment.  Thank goodness my computer is functional again!

Bento Friday :)

Yeah!  I always feel so accomplished when I manage to crank out a bento for my kids.  Especially when I do it without us having any other plans to go anywhere or do anything.  Today was one of those days.  I should really make an effort to make them a bento lunch at least every Friday - we'll see how that goes.

The table is set! :)

A's lunch

Corn, grape tomato, cheese "candy", hot dog flowers, strawberries, fruit jelly, and teddy onigiri

C's lunch

She had the same.  :)

On the side, for dessert, each girl had a matching container with Chex "Muddy Buddies" in it - a favorite snack around here.  If you haven't had these you are definitely missing out.  :)  They each had a cup of chocolate soy milk, too.  Yum!

photo credit: http://thegalwaygirl.com/

Muddy Buddies:

9 cups Chex cereal (rice, corn, wheat, or a combination - all work fine)
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup peanut butter (I use Simply Jif creamy)
1/4 cup margarine
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1. Measure cereal into a large bowl with a lid.
2. Put chocolate chips, peanut butter, and margarine into a 1-quart microwavable bowl.  Microwave this on high for one minute, then stir.  Microwave on high for another 30 seconds, or until mixture can be stirred smooth.  Add in the vanilla and stir to combine.
3. Pour the chocolate mixture over the cereal and fold together to coat the cereal.
4. Measure powdered sugar on top of the coated cereal, then put the lid on your bowl (seal it carefully otherwise you'll have a powdered sugar explosion), and let your kids shake it like crazy till the powdered sugar has completely coated the cereal.
5. Enjoy with caution - this stuff's dangerous.

The Hungry Little Bento... and other stories.

I have been trying to get back into my bento groove, honest I have!  It has not been working out though.  With my kids both home all day and no car while my husband is at work, there isn't enough structure to my days most of the time.  So we usually end up doing something super simple for lunch.  Plus, of course, I've been caught up thinking about the upcoming move and I spend a lot of my spare time these days researching our next adventure.  (Well, when I'm not reading, that is.)

A couldn't stop asking me about WHEN we were heading to Germany, so I made her a paper chain.  This was it a couple of weeks ago - it's even shorter now.  The anticipation is certainly building!  I've been house-hunting, outing-planning, and travel-arranging from afar.  I still don't have specific dates yet but with conditions in our apartment building becoming ever-worse, I have to hold on to something.  So I've been occupying myself with the fact that there IS, in fact, an end in sight.

I did go bento shopping last week for the first time in a long time (the ¥/$ rate these days is REALLY not in our favor, unfortunately!  I've been trying to limit my out-in-town excursions as a result) so I was inspired.  I made the girls teddy bear bentos for lunch the next day, and that went over really well.  Poor photo quality, when I made these my camera's memory card was full so I had to take iPod photos.

A's lunch

C's lunch

These were really simple - a quick little salad with olives and heart shaped carrot slices, slider patties with hot dog, pepperoni and nori details to make them "beary" cute, a couple of fresh strawberries, a fruit jelly, and some pink star puffs.  My kids were really excited to have a bento for lunch so I think it could have been liver and onions and they'd have eaten it.

Then we had a sushi party.  Be jealous.  This was fantastic and I think we're planning to do these sushi nights at least twice a month from now on.

But what I am most excited to post is a bento I made with my friend the other night for her son's lunch.  We were experimenting with hot dog "sculptures" and I had the bright idea to do a hot dog caterpillar.  And then it came to me - her son's most favorite book in the world is Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  He talks about this book like crazy and it was the first book he read aloud to his class.  Whenever he comes over, he volunteers to read it to my girls.  It's adorable.  So why not make a Very Hungry bento lunch?  Hello inspiration!!

So my friend and I put together his lunch box and had a freaking blast doing it.  It was the most fun bento-ing I think I've ever had.  And the finished product was nothing short of awesome!

The very hungry hot dog caterpillar with spaghetti antennae and legs was sooo hungry on his bed of rice that he ate through two slices of pepperoni, one slice of "swiss cheese", and one (soy sauce filled) apple.

This side of the box is a little bit of a jumble, but he had a salad, two pickles, two strawberries (both snacked on by the caterpillar), a leaf with a caterpillar egg, and a butterfly.

This lunch was a total hit with him.  He was quite excited about it.

Of course we had to make my friend's daughter a super girly fun lunch too, so we did that - it's not nearly as awesome as the caterpillar lunch but it's still pretty cute.

She got a Hello Kitty onigiri with hot dogs, a salad and some grapes.  All decked out with hearts and cuteness.  :) You can't ever go wrong with Hello Kitty rice balls.  And when you have a Hello Kitty onigiri mold, it couldn't be easier!  Seriously, this is like a favorite tool.

So there is an update on the food happenings here.  Nobody has starved just yet.  ;)  OH!  And as a side note, did anybody happen to watch the Season finale of House?  I was a little miffed with it.  And VERY miffed to learn that Lisa Edelstein will not be returning for season 8.  I can understand the series ending after next year, but I can't imagine a whole season without Dr. Cuddy.  Hmpf!

Oh well.  I still think that Hugh Laurie is like the coolest guy ever, so I'll just try my hardest to savor the fact that there is going to be a season 8 at all.  And in the meanwhile I can just busy myself with Army Wives, Modern Family, 30 Rock, and the fact that hopefully soon Dexter season 5 should be coming available on iTunes.  See?  I do have things to keep me occupied.

Baby Bentos

It has been chaotic around here lately and something tells me I shouldn't count on it easing up any time soon.  After a lot of consideration and a personal battle, we pulled A out of Yochien a couple of weeks before the end of her school year.  We were going to take her out at the end of the Japanese school year anyway, but A was having some issues with a classmate and I couldn't justify keeping her enrolled for two extra weeks and making her be miserable for the sake of proving a point she is probably too young to understand.  My other option was to resolve the issue, but for just two weeks I couldn't see the purpose in having my friend translate my concerns and make a commotion with A's lovely teachers.  Plus, pulling her two weeks early saved me a full month's worth of tuition.  I have still been trying to make bento for the kids once a week, but I've had my hands full with them.  I'm trying to keep A busy and work with her on preschool concepts so that she is up to speed when we move and she begins kindergarten.  I really need to develop some sort of a curriculum to follow so that we at least have a schedule.  She's doing quite well adding with manipulatives, writing all of her letters and numbers, patterns, colors, shapes, and working in beginning phonics.  Most all of she is beyond thrilled to be preparing to move to Germany and start kindergarten.  She talks about both of those daily!

I made the kids bento last week but didn't get to snap a photo in time before they both devoured their lunches.  I do, however, have a couple of pictures of lunches I made for C last month while A was still in school.  Pardon the poor quality - these were taken with my iPod.

This bento C ate when my friend babysat her one afternoon.  It has a couple mini wedges of cheese pizza, some grape tomatoes, edamame picks, a chocolate chip cookie, some banana pieces and a few red grapes.

This bento was C's mini-version of the lunch A took to school that day - rotini pasta with garlic, basil, olive oil and parmesan cheese, deli sliced ham, edamame and half of a mikan.

The girls are very much enjoying being able to play together and for the most part I'm pretty happy with our decision to keep them home - they are keeping me on my toes, but I like the idea of A getting to have one last extended summer at home before she starts "real" school.  If I get some really awesome ideas for preschool curriculum activities, maybe I'll include those here too.  I'm about halfway through book number six of the reading challenge, so with any luck another book review will be coming soon too.

Katatsumuri

Packed A a snail's lunch yesterday.  She informed me several months ago (while making her hands into a snail shape) that "snail" in Japanese is "katatsumuri"!  This is one of her favorite Japanese words for some reason.  She loved this lunch and the box came home empty (except for the curly lettuce which she informed me she didn't want to eat.  Goofy kid.

A's snails are made of Pizza Pinwheels and cheese dogs with the faces cut in before cooking using the blunt end of a cocktail pick for the eyes and a cool curved exacto-knife style tool I got from the Daiso.  They're held together at the base with cocktail picks (not pictured).  The girl snail is wearing a bow pick and the boy (who she informed me must be daddy because he is "the only boy") has a couple of antennae that I jimmied up from a couple of flag picks (just cut the flags off of them and voila!)

Also included in her snail lunch was a mikan, some lightly boiled broccoli florets, edamame picks, a few carrot flowers and an apple jelly.

School's In!

A went back to school yesterday from her winter break.  I packed her a bento since it was a Tuesday.  Excited to get back into my groove.  :)

I like this snowman more than I liked the one I made a month ago.  Isn't he kawaii?  A insisted that she have hot dogs spelling out her name, the way I did with "SNOW" last time.  Unfortunately her name is a little too long to have fit them in there in a cuter way, and the bits with hearts on them (which she also insisted on) had to go underneath.  The alpha-dogs are resting on top of a half of a mikon and three lightly steamed broccoli florets.

Here is her onigiri!  He's adorned with nori details, bone picks, and a scrap of deli ham for his scarf.  His earmuffs are made of nori and M&Ms - which I fastened to his head with a bit of dry spaghetti.  His head is propped up on a couple of baby carrots.

A completely loved this lunch - I think she was so elated to get back to her school day routine and have a bento again (I didn't make enough during the winter break because we didn't really go out anywhere - Okinawa has been having a colder winter this year than we expected) that she could hardly contain herself, to be honest.  She ate all of it (! - seemed like a ton of food to me!) and raved about it afterwards.  I loved it too, to be honest.  It was fun to be back in my kitchen playing with all my cool gadgets!

This Week in Bento...

Meatball/Onigiri Santa

The Christmas season is in full swing in Okinawa - whatever that means.  This morning our temperatures were in the low 60s and I was FREEZING in my sweater!  That's how you know you've arrived in Okinawa - you start responding ridiculously to the weather.  60-65º weather should not make me shiver! I'm from a significantly colder climate than this.  Ridiculous.

Anyways, last week my husband had Friday off and with all the commotion, I didn't get A up for school.  So I made her bento for her to eat at home for lunch.  She had a meatball santa onigiri with a strawberry/mini-marshmallow hat, steamed broccoli and a reindeer marshmallow Peep.  Santa's details are nori and ketchup.  It's fortunate that she wound up eating this lunch at home because the lid wouldn't fit over Santa's hat.  I went a little bit overboard, apparently.

Santa and his elf onigiri

This is today's bento.  It's a Santa onigiri and an elf onigiri with hot dog "snowflakes", steamed broccoli, holiday marshmallows, cheese, and diced fruit.  I got the inspiration for Santa from Sonoma Bento (hers is WAY cuter!!) but I used a fruit roll up for his hat.  Looking at her bento makes me realize I should have made his cheese hat pom pom a lot bigger.  Oh well.  Santa's elf is wearing a smooth egg sheet hat (my first attempt at this technique!) and both onigiri are filled with minced teriyaki chicken.

Frosty the Snowlunch

Excuse the photos for the lame lighting.  The light over my dining room table burnt out and there is almost no natural lighting early in the morning when I bento.  This lunch had to get photographed in a less preferable spot.

It's frosty!

I'm pretty pleased with this but I admit it's probably because I'm anal and ridiculous and I love that I have a purpose to bento again (Christmas).  Plus, he's kind of cute, and my husband helped me make the scarf which just completely makes me happy.  He's so awesome sometimes! hehehe

Onigiri snowman with hot dog arms, apple peel scarf, nori coal lumps, carrot nose and Reese's PB cup hat.

Hotdog "SNOW" with hearts, diced apple, Co-Jack snowflake, and edamame

This was fun.  :)  I don't even care that he's not perfect (I REALLY wanted to use a crab stick for his scarf but since I'm still on the tail end of this cold I didn't get out to the Japanese grocery store to buy any) or that he should have been in a box that wasn't white.  Snow in Okinawa is wishful thinking, at best, but it's fun to be doing themed boxes again.  :)

Fried Rice Bento

This bento is from...  like...  two weeks ago.  I know, I know.  I'm wayyy behind over here!  We had a camping trip the weekend before last and everybody got sick.  I think A actually brought the cootie home the week before that and we just made it worse with the weekend away.  Regardless, it did not make for a good time for me the week of Thanksgiving.  I managed to get all of my Thanksgiving cooking done (on time!) and it was a success but I was completely burned out and A missed a lot of school.  At any rate, this is the one bento that I missed out on documenting in between...  Uh...  Whatever I posted last and today.

Babybel cheese with a butterfly cut-out, edamame, diced fruit, spiced pretzels, hot dog mums, and fried rice (with egg, veggies, green onions and sesame seeds)...

This panda pick...  I loved him!  Somebody stole him from her bento though and he didn't come back home.  :(

This box was a hit and she was so excited to inform me that she'd eaten the whole thing.  Well, except for the cheese, which she shared with her friend.  :)

I haven't done Muffin Tin Monday or anything fun with the kids (aside from Thanksgiving and Christmas decorating) in what seems like forever!  Finally, though, I feel like I am on the upswing with this cold.  Thank goodness.  Being sick is the worst!

I'm out of my bento funk now, too, (I think...  I hope!!) since I can start making Christmas bentos.  I made the first one of the year today and it was pretty fun.  I'll post it tomorrow.