Minecraft Christmas

I'm going to be honest with you.  It's a difficult proposition to take a pretty picture of a pig.  Especially a Minecraft pig which is blocky and awkward and has eyes pointing in opposite directions.  But the strawberries in this picture are beautiful which totally makes up for the pig.  As you might be guessing, my daughter is in love with Minecraft.  One might even say that she is obsessed.  So I'm trying to accommodate this new found love with some charabens to match, which ought to be fairly easy considering that they are all square shapes.  I'm finding it to not be quite as easy as I'd thought!

In the bento:  Sushi rice, strawberries, asian pear, carrot flowers, soy-turkey flower, and cucumber slices.

The pig was made of pink colored egg sheet, soy turkey, nori and raw turnip slices.  His santa hat was made from half of a strawberry and a raw turnip.

Ladybug Bento

Gah, where did the summer go?  It went by in a blur of travel, classes and craziness.  Neither of us are ready for summer to be over and I'm enjoying looking through the summer camp bentos to help hold onto summer as long as possible.

This ladybug bento was another of those summer camp lunches.  I don't use the bright yellow Pikachu box much these days since A-chan is not as interested in Pokemon, but I do love how it makes the red of the food pop out.

In the bento: Chilled zaru soba noodles, cherry tomato ladybug, carrot flowers with pear peel leaves in the large tier.  The smaller tier holds pear slices, a strawberry, blueberries, half an apricot, steamed broccoli and Shoyu tofu on picks.  Not shown: a container of sauce for the noodles.

The ladybug has a blueberry head which is attached to the cherry tomato half with a fried spaghetti noodle.  Her eyes are cut from pear with nori details and her antennae are uncooked soba noodles.  I adore how the center of the blueberry looked like a nose!  Nori was applied to the tomato with a bit of water to help the pieces stick.

A Birthday Bento

Tomorrow is my little girl's Eighth birthday.   The first week of her life was in the hospital and the second week was in a hotel because I couldn't climb the stairs to get into our house because I had a broken ankle and a c-section!  She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.  She still is and I am so very lucky to have her in my life.

Today was pizza day at school so I made her a fruit bento to go with it.  It needed to be simple because I had a huge job ahead of me in order to make her class cupcakes.  Apparently she'd been telling everyone at school that her cupcakes would be 'amazing', lol.  I hope that they lived up to the expectations!

In the bento: Orange slices, kiwi slices, an apple circle with a wobbly 8 cut out, pear chunks and blackberries.

Here is a shot of the school cupcakes.  They were red velvet cupcakes inside jack o'lanterns carved from oranges with almond-butter frosting and chocolate stems.  I made a huge mess of the kitchen making all 36 of them!  The extra special bonus was the 3 liters of fresh squeezed orange juice that came from making the lanterns.

The idea for these came from something I'd seen when trying to find heart healthy Halloween foods for  the Cardiac Rehab program that I'm volunteering for this semester.  The original was a jack'o'lantern fruit cup.  My decision to change it into cupcakes might have inadvertently created the messiest cupcakes known to humanity.

Dressed Up Sammies

One of the most fun ways to eat carrots is slurping up carrot ribbons.  They are still a bit crisp but also long and curly.  I use the carrot peeler that my Mom had in her kitchen when I was growing up.  Every time I do, I give a little sigh of thanks that she gave it to me.  It's one of my all time favorite kitchen tools and if it were ever lost I would be desolate.

In the bento: Carrot ribbons in a silicone container, steamed broccoli, half a cherry tomato, corn on the cob, grapes and pear slices are in one tier. The top tier has two soy turkey and cheese sammies and the other half of the cherry tomato.

The sammies are pretty basic but a provolone cheese flower and green onion wrapping makes them dressy and elegant.  The green onions were plopped into boiling water for 3 minutes, drained and dried before being cut in two lengthwise and knotted around the sandwiches.  The boiling made them pliable and shiny at the same time!

A Heart-full bento

This bento turned out to have a theme, though I didn't know it until I was taking the picture.  Hmm.  I guess it's almost Valentine's Day!  Oh boy, we get to make chocolates!  A-chan is already gushing about the chocolate making tradition and has started counting down the days.  I was informed this morning at breakfast that there are only 19 days til Valentine's.

In the bento: A heart shaped container filled with chickpeas and feta, steamed broccoli, baby carrots, two bamboo picks with veggie hot dog slices and provolone cheese hearts, a lemon slice, two potato and cheese pierogies, pear slices, blueberries and a tiny tomato on a heart pick.

I find it difficult to make the heart shaped container fit into my bentos so it usually sits unused in my bento gear box.  However, this bento was designed around it!  It was the first thing to go in and I worked everything else around it.

Favorite Things

There are very few bentos where I don't use a container of some kind.  They are so useful! I love them for fruit, stirfry and cheese.  Today I used my absolute favorite container to pack black eyed peas.  The peas are a bit juicy and this container with its lid is perfect for things that might lead to a sloppy messy bento disaster otherwise.

In the bento: The smaller tier holds plain spaghetti noodles, a tomato flower and pear leaf.  The larger tier contains the panda with black eyed peas, Morningstar Farms chik nuggets, carrot flowers, steamed broccoli, orange slices and panda picks with blueberries.

Not shown are a small bottle full of grated Parmesan cheese, a container of ketchup and a soy sauce bottle.

Here is my new fun thing!  I'm calling it the Bento Treasures link-up.  I want to know what container is your favorite.  Link -up to a picture of a bento with your favorite container in use.  It can be one of your bentos, it can be one of my bentos.  It can be someone else's bento (as long as there is proper attribution, of course).  If you don't make bentos or don't own any containers yet, show me a container that you'd like to have.   I'll have a new theme for the next four weeks.  Let's find out more about our bento obsession!  

Just a little flower

Coffee is one of the most wonderful things that has ever existed.  It is purely by the power of coffee that I managed to pull myself together to make a bento today.  Have I mentioned before that this is one of my favorite bento boxes?  I'm sure it's not a big surprise since I seem to use it a lot!  I love the half-size container and the fact that the lid has a little extra vertical room for decorations.

In the bento: Rice with a carrot and pea flower, corn kernals on picks, steamed broccoli, sauteed tofu, a baby carrot, pear slices and nectarine slices.

Originally the little elephant pick was stuck into the top piece of tofu.  However, it looked too much like the elephant was being sucked into a tar pit or something and I couldn't stand it.  So I moved it and tried to disguise the original placement with black sesame seeds.

Curry is Yummy!

Coming home from a trip to find that I had large amounts of Japanese curry already made and waiting in the freezer brought forth feelings akin to winning the lottery.  This stuff is a perfect foil to the rainy, dreary weather that is plaguing us this week.  Add to that the fact that it freezes well and was awesomely easy to reheat and you know why I'm in love with this dish!

In the bento: Japanese curry and rice, chunks of pear in a container, baby corn spears and a cherry tomato.

The curry contains onion, carrot, potato and tofu.  There is a small layer of rice underneath the curry sauce in addition to the sidewall of rice to keep the curry contained.  A carrot flower with black sesame seeds and snap pea leaves gives the curry a little pizzazz.  I am always amazed at what the black sesame seeds do to carrots - the orange color suddenly pops!  The panda pick just adds a tiny bit of cuteness :)

Here is a link to my Japanese Curry recipe.  It's very simple and totally incredible.  (I think everyone should try it!)

Onigiri Kitties

Snow in Georgia.  In November?  Nah!  They forecast snow for our area today but it hasn't materialized.  I think they were joking.  And I'm blaming the fact that I couldn't get a decent picture of this bento on the fact that there was no snow.  If there had been snow I would have gotten a perfectly lit, completely focused picture.  I'm sure of it.

In the bento: Two orange kitty onigiri, steamed broccoli, Morningstar Farms chik nuggests, black olives, a Forelle pear, small provolone and sugar dot flowers and a small clump of grapes.

I put the onigiri in paper cups for prettiness.  That technique shows up myriad times in bento books so I decided to give it a try.  I like the end effect!  The kitty faces are made with provolone cheese and nori, both of which are glued together and to the onigiri by small amounts of mayo.  The ears were cut from a carrot slice - you can see the rounded bottoms from the curve of the carrot.  To hold the ears in place I used small pieces of spaghetti noodles stuck first into the carrot and then poked into the rice.

Luckily this Tare Panda box has an extra bit of vertical space for the pear and grapes!

It's All About the Pear

Sure, there are other fruits in the bento.  But it's all about the pear.  As A-chan got out of bed this morning her first question was, "Is there a tiny pear in my bento?"  Obviously the orange slices, cherries and apple bunny are just there to make the pear look pretty!

Pears aren't as photogenic once they have been cored so I waited to do that until after taking the picture.  Coring ensures that there are no classroom casualties when A-chan runs into a seed and tries to spit it out at the speed of light.

Even though there is no school next week I'm still planning some excuses to make bentos.  I have some wild ideas for a Fernbank Museum visiting bento!

Inari and a Pear

Yesterday's lunch had a Pikachu inside it so I decided to turn things around and pack today's lunch inside a Pikachu.  We don't use the Pikachu bento box very often because it is awkward for A-chan to open and close.  There isn't anything very messy in there today so I've got my fingers crossed that it will be okay.

In the bento: A container of sesame carrots and baby corn, steamed broccoli, Rome apple slices, inari zushi with furikake, a tiny pear and a few teeny carrot flowers.

After seeing the tiny pear in a beautiful bento on Ohayo Bento's blog, I had my eye out for some at our local grocery store.  This weekend we managed to nab some and A-chan has been gobbling them up.  Yesterday's pear was forgotten since it wasn't in her bento and she had to eat it for snack at home.  Today's pear had to go inside the box!  One great advantage of the Pikachu bento is that the top tier has a lot of room for vertical food.  Once the pretty picture had been taken I removed the core of the pear so that A-chan wouldn't have to worry about the seeds.