Bento Corner

Glasses Bento

It's completely appropriate for this bento to be shot as blurry as it is given that the dog is wearing pink glasses. I have no idea what was going on while taking this photo. I'm obviously no photographer but after 10 attempts at trying to take a non-blurry photo, I just gave up.

I actually no longer make all contents of bento the morning of. Like the dog face with glasses in this bento was made the night before. This would take way too long to construct in the morning. So I just make the face, assembled with nori and all and put it on a plate in the fridge over night. Then the following morning, I just place it in the bento -- so easy this way!

Contents of today's bento was left over from dinner the night before. Both my kids filled up on spinach/broccoli soup that I gave them at 3 pm along with curry and bread, etc. So by the time I served dinner, I was the only one eating it -- though my son took a few bites while yelling at my daughter to sit down and eat dinner too.

Anyway, spaghetti with meatballs in the center and corn under the ham flowers were from last night. There's also sliced zucchini with mayo placed at the bottom. To the right is a shrimp mayo dumpling and croquette of meat, potatoes, and cheese.

The zuchini is organic at 280 yen -- that's $2.80 US, per zuchini! Even conventional zucchini would be half that price, but that's still $1.40 US per zucchini. I think in the US you could buy a pound for this price, no?

Snow Mama and Baby Bento

Above bento includes: tuna sandwiches (big Snow Mama) and cream cheese and jam (little snowman), cooked carrots, asparagus rolled in ham, and shrimp mayo dumpling (frozen item), and tangerine for dessert (not pictured).

It's been so cold these past few weeks and over the weekend there was an advisory of the possibility of snow in Tokyo which is totally uncommon. Though I have experienced snow on the outskirts of Tokyo and once when I was a child it happened in Yokohama. So there are cases of this happening but it's just very, very rare. (ETA, it did start snowing on Wednesday, 1/23 in Tokyo -- pics to be added shortly).

All this cold weather has lead to my kids playing indoors which leads to interesting play at our household. Like today, I hear screaming and fighting in the other room:

me: Hey, guys! Can we stop fighting! We need to be quiet and we need to be sharing!

son: Moh-kee not sharin'.

me: Son, if you cannot share with sister you may have to sit in the corner (for time out).

son: No! Moh-kee not sharin' dis!!

me: Daughter, can you share with brother?

daughter: No, mom! We are not fighting! My (stuffed) monkey is not sharing with (brother's) pink pony!

me: *trying to maintain composure* Son, do you think pink pony needs to sit in the corner?

son: No! (clutches pink pony) Moh-kee sittin' in the corner!

me: Daughter, does monkey need to sit in the corner?

daugher: No...

me: Then pinky and monkey have to share if they don't want to sit in the corner.

pinky and monkey: Okaaayyy...

Kids are so funny aren't they? Or maybe just my kids are "special"??

I made the above bento this morning and while I was taking pictures my son started asking where his snowman was. Then I explained we didn't need bento today but my daughter interrupted me and said she would give my son the smaller snowman. And so the actual bento my daughter took looked like this:

Sometimes my kids are OK...even if monkey and pinky didn't get along today...

Mouse Bento

Last night I thought about making pancake sandwiches for bento next day. This was a grand idea, as the girl loves pancakes, but I needed to make them before heading to bed which was not such a great idea since I was so tired last night. So I scratched that idea and just decided to use mini-corndogs from the freezer and went to bed.

But for some reason I got up this morning, feeling energized (in rare form!) and made the banana pancakes this morning despite my tiredness last night. While kids ate fresh pancakes I made the mouse with a pancake sandwich face (cream cheese and blueberry jam spread), cut the corn dog in half to make the ears (notice part of blueberry jam on the edge of the left ear), secured nori parts with cream cheese and voila!

Ketchup in the red apple container with broccoli and extra corn dogs on the side. My daughter looked at the ketchup container and said she would rather have more broccoli than wasting her time trying to open the red container.

Ask and ye shall receive (so long as it's not too time consuming nor expensive):

Plain Bento

The upper kinder class had an open observation day where parents were invited to play New Year's Day games with the kids. New Year's games include spinning a top by wrapping a small rope around the bottom of the top and then throwing the string to get the top to spin (it's pretty tricky this way!), flying a kite, karuta, hanetsuki, sugoroku,and making a taketombo. Since this was an all day event for both kids and their parents, I made a plain bento for the girl since I didn't want to be embarrassed by being "that parent who makes cute lunches for her child".

Plain bento includes one onigiri with seaweed wakame mix and the other is umeboshi. There's also tamagoyaki with imitation crab, broccoli and wakame salad, and mini-katsu on a stick.

My son and I also enjoyed bento too:

Our bento is basically the same contents but we had the wakame onigiri and onigiri mixed with hijiki and added takuan (pickled daikon).