Last week, it had rained a lot and strangely this week the weather becomes very hot. I cannot tell now whether we are in the rainy season or dry season. I think the weather just went crazy lately. Today's bento for the kids was made pretty quick. I used deco furi to color the rice, but you can use tomato sauce if you don't have deco furi. I used carrot, nori, jelly ball, and egg white plus food pick to make the other parts. I can say that the characters were made less than 15 minutes. No request from the kids for a specific characters this time, so I chose the simple one to do. Hope this can still bring a smile to their faces.

I received a few emails from working moms, saying that they were interested to make charaben bento for their kids but did not have much time to do it because they had to go to the office in the morning. So this bento probably will be a good example with a simple and a quick to-do character. You don't need to spend hours to prepare this bento for sure.

Inside the box : rice, veggies rolled with thin slices beef and cooked with teriyaki sauce, tamagoyaki, and mini tofu puffs topped with fried chili and shallot.

Hi all! How are you?

I hope you all are doing great and healthy this week. I had a bento break last week because the kids were taking lunches from school catering. Little A joins 2 extra curricular activities on Tuesday and Wednesday after school time this semester. This is good because usually the school finishes at 2PM and he has to wait for Big A until 3PM. With the extra curricular, he will also finish at 3PM. As usual, I left him to choose the activities that he wanted to join. Last semester he chose chess and this time he chose Chinese language and drawing. I was a bit surprise when he chose Chinese language as I knew that was not his favorite subject at school. As for drawing, I think he always got inspired by his sister. If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram (both using @bentolicious IDs) then you will know that Big A loves to draw Manga. I posted some of her works on Instagram that usually I linked to my Twitter.

Another new update, some of you probably already knew about it. I started to write bento articles with step-by-step pictorial for My Paper, Singapore. The article is published every Friday and I will write for 8 issues. The first bento article was out last Friday. If you want to check out the online version then you can click on here. Unfortunately, the article is on Chinese. I would to thank Maureen, Miss Tam Chiak for the opportunity. I hope the article will be helpful for the bento beginners and more and more people will get into the bento making. I love to do it to take a small part to spread the bento love hehehe :)

Inside the box : veggies fried rice, fried middle wings, chili sauce (inside the Hello Kitty container), cherry tomatoes, pandan pudding with strawberry.

I played with my cutters collection once again to create today's sleepy friends bento. It was fun to make these sleepy fellows because I didn't need to use X-Acto knife to cut out the shapes that I wanted. Plus in a busy week like this, I'm really not into the mood of making something with a lot of details for my kids' bento. Added the lace baran and Korilakkuma picks, it is just the easiest way to do. BTW, I love those silicone lace baran. I haven't used those for a while. They are totally safe to use for your bento.

Kids have been busy too since last week with their school project, homework and everything. Especially Big A. She even has to join the trial-out national exams every Saturday at school from 8-11AM. It started 2 weeks ago and will continue until the end of April. This is something that we can't avoid because the trial out is compulsory for all students in Grade 6. And I couldn't believe that the teachers kept giving different projects for them to do in groups or individual. Oh yeah! I'm the one who are pulling my hair right now and I don't even go to school anymore *faint*. I hope Big A doesn't get stress out too much. I'm worried, she has been unorganized lately. Too many things to do in so little times, that what I feel.

Inside the box : rice, braised five spice chicken & egg, cherry tomato, and stir fry veggies & enoki mushroom.

I found this UFO shape cutter from my tiny cutters collection last night. I didn't have any idea to use this cutter last night until this morning when I finished cooking. Suddenly I remembered the leaf picks that I have and the idea to make this pink plants just came like that in my head. I dyed hard boiled egg and cut it with the UFO shapes cutter, added eyes and swirl mouth, put the leaf picks on the top. Whoalah ... easy right? I also made some tiny flowers but the pink color is too soft. I hope you can still see them in between the pink plants. If you see the green swirl in my tamagoyaki, that was because I put scallions. So no special trick needed. It was just a coincidence when I cut it, came out like that :) 

Inside the box : rice, tamagoyaki, braised chicken in coconut milk, stir fry chayote with red chili and wood ear mushroom.

Some new bento books have been published. I haven't got the copy yet because they are not available yet at Kinokuniya bookstore here. But I have put those bento books in my wish list. I put the links here, so if you are interested you can order them. They are in Japanese though.

(1) Maki Ogawa | Check it here and here.
(2) Akinoichigo | Check it here.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY EVERYONE!

This morning started with a huge disappointment for my kids. They planned to bring some homemade chocolates with cute shapes to share with their classmates. I melted the chocolate last night and filled it into some cute chocolate molds. Turned out that I bought wrong chocolates type and a disaster happened this morning when I tried to get them out from the mold. They were too soft, so no way I could get them out without ruining the shapes. The only thing that I could do was to pop them in the fridge after the kids left for school. Anyway, I promised the kids to make something else for sharing this week. If they still want to bring chocolates then I will have to run to the baking supplies store tomorrow and get the right chocolates.

For today's bento, I made Tenorikuma - one of the Sanrio characters. Actually, Tenorikuma is a group of racoons who run a coffee shop called Tenorikuma. They are so small, only 4cm height so they can fit in your palm. The one that I made called Latte. He is the unique one with red heart on his left ear. We don't have many merchandises for this character here. In fact, I haven't found any of Tenorikuma's merchandise from any stores that I usually visit. I saw this character from the Sanrio site and thought this would be fun to make for the kids' bento.

Hope you all have a great way to celebrate Valentine's Day! As for me, I will always celebrate love everyday in my life :)

Inside the box : rice, beef stuffed with veggies - cooked with bulgogi sauce, cherry tomatoes, quail eggs cooked with Indonesian yellow spices, and stir fry Chinese cabbage & mushroom.