Breakfast Bento
Today’s bento for Ms. Little Bubbles is a bit different. I thought I’d change it up a bit and give her a breakfast bento. (Plus, I thought she would not be happy with the leftovers AGAIN). If you put this bento on a plate, it would be a basic breakfast – waffles with strawberries, syrup and eggs. The syrup is in the blue heart container. Nothing fancy, super fast and hopefully it was good.
Contents: Waffles, strawberries, and a hard boiled egg
My "cheat" Christmas Bento
LOL! So, I’m cheating when it comes to my Christmas bento. This is really a simple sandwich bento with a holiday cookie in it! Oh, and a holiday fabric on the bottom. LOL! But, it’s all out of holiday love. At work we had a holiday cookie exchange and the cookie that I put in Ms. Little Bubbles bento is from that cookie exchange. I usually don’t put cookies in her bentos, but I thought a holiday exception was in order. Plus, I really think this is all she is going to get for a Christmas bento. I know, so sad! The Christmas tree fabric is from a jar of jam that I received from a friend. It looks so good – homemade organic strawberry jam!
BTW, I wanted to thank the bento lovers out there that have added me to their blogs! Very sweet and kind of you. I love you too, and trust me when I say I get so much inspiration from my fellow bento bloggers! You guys are great!
My holiday cookie exchange box. Yummy!
Contents: Sandwiches, holiday cookie, strawberries and kamaboko
Chicken Stew?
Sorry, it’s been a busy week and I haven’t had time to post Ms. Little Bubble’s bentos. This is from Monday. On Sunday I made, what the recipe called, chicken stew in the crockpot. I don’t think it’s stew, but I’m not sure what else to call it. I was a bit disappointed by the chicken as it called for chicken breasts and it was super dry, even after being in the crockpot for six hours. The flavor was good, but soooo dry. That recipe gets a thumbs down for me.
Putting Monday’s bento was pretty simple. I started out with rice, then I made a ditch in the rice to put the chicken and veggies and then I poured gravy over the top. I added strawberries and given I still had a hole, I filled it raisins and a fruit roll up. I considered steaming some carrots and putting it there, but I ran out of time.
Contents: Chicken and veggies, strawberries and a fruit roll up
Petite Sandwiches
After my Christmas tree disaster, I went to an ol’ standby – sandwiches. You always find comfort in what you know. However, this time I thought I’d try my petite sandwich makers that have a press on them. In theory, you should see the cute little animals on the sandwiches, but you couldn’t, so I decided to toast them. But that didn’t help much either. I’m wondering if it’s because I’m not using the right bread. I’m using a wheat bread. Perhaps I should try a fancy square Japanese bread and see if that works??
Finished Sandwiches - Toasted or not-toasted? That is the question.
Contents: Mini sandwiches filled with soy nut butter and jelly, strawberries and edamame/carrots sticks
Simple Leftover Bento
I’m back! Sorry for the week long break. I have been making bentos this week, but I had a disaster of a bento on Monday and just couldn’t bring myself to post it. I tried to make a Christmas bento, and just couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. I ended up deciding to try a colored egg sheet tree. OMG! It was awful. There was too much oil, the pan was not hot enough, my first try ended up with a gloppy mess and my second sheet was too shiny (due to the oil). And then I decided to get all fancy and put sprinkles on it to act as “lights” on the tree. Well… the sprinkles melted once it hit the oil on the tree, and I ended up with black smudges on the tree. Oh, I was so sad. Maybe if I have the courage, I’ll post a small picture of it at the end of this post.
Well… that has nothing to do with the bento picture above. Besides the fact that I decided I need to stick to good ol’ standbys until I can perfect a christmas bento. But I only have another week, so I better get crackin’ on that one.
The above bento is a leftover bento. My motto is that I don’t like to fuss with my bentos, thus the Christmas tree bento is steppin’ out of my element. Today’s bento is made from leftover mac and cheese from California Pizza Kitchen. They already mixed it with edamame, I just added the carrots. You can’t tell, but mixed in with the carrots on the right are sweet potatoes. I had a large gap next to the carrots/sweet potato cup, and quickly searched in my cabinet for something to throw into the other cup. I luckily found snack peas.
Happy Holidays to everyone!
Contents: Mac and cheese with edamame, strawberries, carrots, sweet potatoes and snack peas.
😦 my sad Christmas trees
Tamagoyaki and Nori Rolls with my Baseball Cutie
LOL! It’s late and my sense of humor is a bit off, but I think the baseball “cutie” is cute. But do you get it… it’s a cutie orange. LOL! Okay… I’ll spare you my humor.
I made the tamagoyaki rolls with a tool my hubs got for me. It’s a silicon rectangle that you can put in any pan. It’s suppose to allow you to make tamagoyaki without a special tamagoyaki pan. But I learned that you need a REALLY flat pan. My pan was not completely flat and the eggs leaked out on the sides, and it was hard to continue the tamagoyaki layering process with this “tool”. So, I had to improvise and give Ms. Little Bubbles a tamagoyaki “roll” with nori.
After putting this bento together, I felt (as usual) that something was missing. So I quickly got out my new nori punch and a cute baseball pick hat, and that made the bento complete. I can’t help but smile when I see my baseball cutie. LOL! It makes up for the tamagoyaki mishap.
Contents: Rice with furikake, tamagoyaki, broccoli, carrots, kamaboko, and a cutie
Good ol' Standby Bento in a Hello Kitty Bento Box
This was from Thursday. I didn’t have time to post a picture. 😦 It’s pretty much a good ol’ standby bento in a Hello Kitty bento box. I timed myself on this bento, and it took me 8 minutes. I think I could have done it in 5, but it took me some time to figure out what to do with the apples. LOL. So, you got the apple flowers again. I need to get more inspiration from my recent additions to the bento book collection, but with the holidays here, I seem to be concentrating on gift, cards and Santa pictures.
Not to digress (and not related to bentos) but today we stood in line for an hour to take a picture with Santa. When Ms. Little Bubbles was a baby, we were casually shopping in a mall and saw that Santa was free, so we decided to have her take a picture with him. Then when she was two, I was at the same mall with my friend and we again saw that Santa (the same Santa) was not busy. So, we took her picture with Santa. Well… little did I know that I was going to get sucked into this Santa thing. I now refuse to take Santa pictures at any other place because I want the same Santa in all my pictures. And according to my kids, that’s the REAL Santa and all the other Santas we see at other malls and stores are fake. 🙂 LOL. I usually like to take my Santa pictures before Thanksgiving to avoid the crowds, but life got busy and we didn’t have time. Thus…. today we stood in line for 1 hour!! My goodness. Thankfully, the kids were all happy and smiles when it was their turn. I guess they knew they had to be “good” for Santa. In fact, now that I think about it, all the kids that were waiting in line were amazingly calm and good. It must be the holiday spirit!
Contents: Teriyaki chicken, rice with furikake, carrots, kamaboko broccoli and apples
Portuguese Bean Soup
The universal question for anyone that has hosted Thanksgiving lunch or dinner is “what am I suppose to do with all my Thanksgiving leftovers?” For my family, it is always SOUP. Jook is an after-Thanksgiving staple, and in the last few years we’ve added Portuguese Bean Soup. For those of you who are not familiar with jook, it’s a rice porridge that is made with turkey leftovers.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a sacred family recipe to pull out of our recipe box, so we rely on Google. 🙂 The past few years I’ve used a recipe by The Tasty Island Honolulu Food Blog. It’s not too difficult and makes really good jook. The Portuguese Bean Soup recipe has been a trial and error experiment for my husband and I. But I think we’ve narrowed it down to: 1) don’t overcook the potatoes, and 2) don’t add the macaroni until you are ready to eat it because if you let it sit in the soup, it drinks all your soup and leaves you with a thick mess. 🙂
A Not So Pretty Picture of My Jook Bento
Bunny Egg and Trader Joe's Onigiri
Thanksgiving weekend came and went in a flash. The past few days I made soup bentos with leftover food (I’ll post those tomorrow). I was extremely happy to CLEAN out our refrigerator last night because I swear I couldn’t fit another thing in there. But much to my dismay, I woke up this morning in a panic that I didn’t have anything to make a bento.
All the leftovers were gone and we used most of the staples over the weekend. I sat there for about 15 minutes, waiting for my coffee to kick in, and wondered what I was going to do. No sandwich because I had no cheese and I ran out of soy nut butter. I had no butter, because we used it all during the weekend. I didn’t have rice made and didn’t have time to make rice. Oh my goodness…. what am I going to do? I honestly wondered if I was going to have to run to Togo’s for Ms. Little Bubbles lunch.
Thankfully I found a Trader Joe’s frozen onigiri in the freezer, and saw that I had eggs. So, I hard boiled the eggs, threw them in a mold to at
least make them cute, cut some apples and carrots and called it a morning. Phew… I survived another close call. 🙂 BTW, I steamed the carrots in my cute bear silicon microwave steamer.
The bento box I used is a “new” box. I’ve had it for a year, but never used it before today. It’s a REALLY cool box. It’s called Gel-Cool. You freeze the top the night before and voila… your bento is kept cool for hours.
Contents: Hard boiled egg, Trader Joe’s onigiri, apples and carrots
Gobble Gobble
Okay, here is my second attempt at a turkey. I hope this doesn’t become an obsession. Although, I’m determined to get it right. The example I went off of had another layer of white cheese on the top and yellow feet. Much to my dismay, I ran out of white (swiss) cheese and didn’t know until I went to look for it. And I ran out of time to make the feet. Mr. Sweet Peas woke up early and needed some attention. It’s always hard when he wakes up before I’m ready for him. Those darn garbage trucks. They need to invent silent ones that won’t wake up the kids. 🙂
To ensure that the nori on the eyes stuck to the white kamaboko, I “glued” it with mayonnaise. The mouse eating the strawberry was added at the last minute because I had a naked spot between the apples and cutie and it bugged me. LOL.
Tomorrow is a short day for Ms. Bubbles, so I won’t be making a bento until after Thanksgiving. I wish everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. Be good to each other and have fun shopping!
Contents: Ham and cheese sandwich, apples and a cutie
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