Hello Kitty Rice Ball

I love my HK rice ball kit!! It's just so neat! And fun. My daughter likes to play with it in her toy kitchen. In this bento: Hello kitty rice ball with apple bow, heart shaped pb sandwich, flower pb sandwich with pink sprinkles, broccoli, sesame carrots, veggie gyoza, black olives, carrot butterflies, 1 apple slice, hello kitty soy sauce bottle.

A snack bento for a healthy bite on the run: green grapes, apple bunnies and two hello kitty candies.

Xtra Simple Bentos

White rice with green peas and tomato flower, apple bunny, sesame carrots, blueberries, sweet pickle and pretzel sticks.

Apple slices, blueberries, vegetarian dumpling, Jasmine rice, green peas, tomato flower, sesame carrots and cucumber bamboo leaves.

Mucho Yogurt Bento

From left to right: Vegetarian vegetable soup in a microwaveable container, parmesan cheese for the soup in the orange kitty, circular grilled cheese sandwiches with flowers cut from cheese slices on top, apple bunny, a pretzel, baby tomato with an elephant pick, container of yogurt with two tiny apple flowers on top.

The lesson that I learned with this bento was to put a layer of saran wrap over the really, really full yogurt container BEFORE I put it into the bento. Because once it's there it's extremely difficult to get back out without spilling it everywhere!

Sweet Potato Bao Bentos

A three tiered bento box makes for a great way to carry a three person lunch! The top one was my daughter's, the middle mine and the bottom was for my husband. They all contained pretty much the same stuff:

A sweet potato bao (purchased frozen from Super H Mart and steamed in the microwave for 1 minute), steamed broccoli, sesame carrots, onigiri, steamed baby corn, blueberries, tangy corn snacks and little bits of tomato. The onigiri lions in my daughter's bento were very simple to make - just small round balls of rice that I nestled into some carrot peelings and then applied the nori faces onto.

If you've never tried a japanese sweet potato, you don't know what you're missing! They honestly are as sweet as cake. I've only found the actual potatoes at the Farmer's Market in Decatur so far, but these bao are soooo delicious.

Cucumber Heart Faces Bento

You can't really tell from the photo, but the faces are on heart shaped onigiri inside heart shaped cut out cucumber slices. The center hearts of the cucumbers are on the other side of the bento. It worked out well that the mini heart onigiri mold and my mini heart cookie cutter are pretty much the same size and shape!

There are also some baby tomato flowers with green pea centers, soba noodles with garlic sauce, carrot hearts and blueberries.

Peep Bento

This was a bento for my daughter who loves Peep (from Peep and the Big Wide World). Morningstar Farms Chik nuggets, cucumber slices, green peas and corn skewers, cherry tomato, red grapes, rice granola bar thingy, blue colored rice, cheese peep with tomato peel, cheese and nori details. Cucumber grass and chik nugget ground.

The blue rice turned out to be very strong. I couldn't remember how much food coloring to put in the rice and ended up overdoing it a bit, but it sure does stand out! I wish that I had used a sturdier material for Peep's body since the cheese slice kind of wrinkled with the rice and looks funky in the photo. It looked much better in person.

In any case it got quite the reaction from A-chan who just loved it. I'm glad that Peep is such an easy character to make cause he's going to be a popular bento item around here.

Post AWA sublimeness

Okay, so Anime Weekend Atlanta was really awesome. Didn't want to come home - we had so much fun! Thank you so much to everyone who came to the Bento panels!!!! I know that the Practicum was quite chaotic and I apologize, it was a lot more popular than we thought it would be and we definately weren't prepared for that many people. We will try to have it go more smoothly next year and get people some hands-on bento experience. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions, corrections or anything!

This site will be getting an update soon with some new links, including links to Tea Priestess's bento blog. She was the fantastic person who did the Bento Practicum with me and has a ton of bento knowledge and experience. She is also one of the nicest people I've ever met and didn't get upset at me when I was really, really, really late to meet up with her once.

Pics of my family and I at AWA on Sunday (at the bottom of the page, I'm the one with the basket on my head.): http://www.fansview.com/2008/awa/aw21a0019.html