Monday morning is always a challenge to get up early. The kids will always say... "still sleepy Mommy" ... but too bad they have to get up after the alarm clock rang at 6AM. We had a bad traffic jam this morning from home but luckily that my house isn't too far from the toll gate, so we made it around 20 minutes to school. And it took me about 30 minutes on the way back home. Sleepy bento is the theme for today's bento. Hope kids will not fall asleep in the class :D I bought the tiny jelly balls at the supermarket yesterday, perfect for the nose. Inside the box : 'sleepy' rice balls (seasoned with light soy sauce), pan fried tempeh, chicken honey mustard (leftover from dinner), sauteed brussel sprouts and chicken ham, and grape tomatoes.

Hope everyone will have a great start for this week! Can't believe that we will soon enter September, and like end of the year in the corner? Time flies very quick ... *sigh*

So happy that this month I got the BOMB (Back to School theme). Thanks for Debra to arrange this fun event, BOMB every month for us to participate! Stay tuned on her blog, Hapa Bento for the next BOMB theme.

This bento only needs 15 minutes to arrange plus I still can managed to get the cute characters for today's bento. I used my Chip and Dale cookies cutter and round rice burger mold. It was no way to put cookies on the top of the rice, so what I did was cutting the potato with Chip and Dale cutters and then fried them. After that, when the potato was still hot, I pressed the top with the Chip and Dale stamps. Tada ... quick and easy.

Inside the upper tier : fried potato on the top of the steam rice.
Inside the bottom tier : prawns cooked with tomato & garlic sauce, Chinese cabbage & onion stir fry, and fried prawn shumai.

Today's bento was a very quick one. I made my own mameshiba ... kind of different from the original one except for the face. The original mameshiba will have different ears from the one I made. If you are not familiar with mameshiba then you can take a look the video from 'Mameshiba World'. They all so cute and my kids loved to watch it when I showed it to them. I got the video link from Love For Dinner when I posted about Akinoichigo's bento books.

Babirang is rice seasoning from Korea. It's similar to furikake. I put the picture of the pack just in case if you are wondering what is it look like. Babirang comes in many variety of flavors. Each big pack will have 3 small individual packs for easy use and storage.

Inside the first round box : yellow pan fried chicken with babirang on the top of steam rice. Inside the second round box : steam carrot seasoned with chicken powder, Chinese spinach with corns, and shrimp wonton.

Put this bento to 'What's For Lunch' every Wednesday from Shannon's blog.

Hope everyone had a great weekend and ready to start the new week! Today's bento didn't require a lot of efforts, I just made the 2 pigs from rice onigiri and put them inside silicone cups. The ears were made from fish ball, eyes were from nori and fish ball. I run out the pink kamaboko so I decided to use pink dyed hard boiled egg. Soaked the egg too long while I cooked the veggie and chicken ... made the pink nose too pink :p Oh well! No time to redo it. I used small heart cutter and small straw to make the nose. I saw this from one of my Japanese bento book, pig's nose from upside down heart shapes.

Inside the green box : kumquats, cherry tomatoes, sauteed baby kail-an/Chinese kale with oyster sauce, fried egg, and pan fried chicken.

I made fried rice for today's bento. Egg, cabbage, pok choy, breakfast sausage, and smoked ham were thinly sliced and put inside the fried rice. Decorated the fried rice with flower picks and girl with uniform from yellow and white egg sheets, crab stick, nori, and chicken ham. Green peas were used for the border.

Almost forgot, I've done some short article for The Urban Mama website in Indonesia. This is a great website and every moms can join to discuss everything at the forum including bento. Hope can spread the bento love from this short article. Thanks a lot for TUM to put my short article. And big thanks for Jie too for featuring me on his great blog in cool section called 'Initial 5'. (Note : both of the webs are written in Indonesian language).

Although my kids were back to school since July but I will put this bento to join
this month BOMB - Back To School Bento.

You can check it from Debra's blog, Hapa Bento.

Yesterday, I received 'The Just Bento Cookbook' by Makiko Itoh. I ordered it from Bento&Co. and I love the book. The cookbook contains 25 attractive bento menus and more than 150 recipes. Easy to read in English, very practical guides with notes, tips and timeline included for the recipe. The other things that you can find in this book are very interesting sections on bento making equipment, staples to make and stock, speed and safety tips, planning chart and a glossary. Bento doesn't necessary have to be cute but healthy and balanced bento is important. You will get the whole idea if you get your copy of this great book. This book will be a very valuable resource for my learning in bento making. So much information about bento inside that will be too good too pass. This book is worth to be added to my book collections. So hope you can get your copy too and enjoy your bento making.

This week is really a lazy bento week. I don’t feel like to cook and don't have much inspiration for bento. I even don't feel like to take picture for it. So today's bento came out a bit off ... My bad!

I made 2 girls from rice balls and egg sheet for the hair with flower from kamaboko. I run out the crab stick, so I used carrot for the 'orange' cheek. Because today is a special lazy day, I didn't make this bento before the kids went to school but afterwards. And I drove to school to drop the bento around 11PM before lunch time. I ended sitting at the Starbucks near school to draft this post. I will have to wait until 1.45PM to pick up the kids again from the school. My 3G network didn't work properly on my iPad, so I think I will play some games or read while waiting to kill my time hehehe :p

Inside the dark pink box : rice balls.

Inside the light pink box : fried chickens, sauteed asparagus, and fruits cocktail.

Don't forget to join WHAT'S FOR LUNCH every Wednesday!
Put your blog link now and share with others.

Today's bento is for my girl. I made 2 little leaf worms from yellow egg sheet. If last time I used my dry yellow somen for the whiskers, today I used dry pink ume somen. For the head of the leaf worm and its body, I used dry spaghetti to connect them. You can probably notice a small dot just underneath the lips of the leaf worms. I cooked the prawns with egg and bitter melon this morning and try to put a little bit of bitter melon in this bento. I don't think my girl will eat it but just hope she will. To reduce the bitterness, I soaked the slices of bitter melon with salt for couple of minutes and then rinse it. I love to cook the dark green bitter melon rather than the light green bitter melon. The dark green bitter melon was less bitter than the light green one. I remembered when I had a trip to Taiwan, bitter melon juice was quite popular there and the bitter melon used there was a bit different from what we have for cooking. Their bitter melon was white...and the juice was very yummy.

In the square pink box : onigiri with shiso leaf, decorated with leaf worm from yellow egg sheet, nori, and red part of crab stick.

In the oval pink box : fish balls, chicken with oyster sauce, prawns cooked with egg and bitter mellon, slices of hard boiled egg, kumquats, and strawberries.

Hi everyone! How are you? I have been left this blog untouched for about a week. Sorry for that ... but now I'm back to post again. I have been busy with my son at home from last Monday. After 4 days fever, now he is okay but still needs a lot of rest. He will go back to school on Thursday. Two blood tests done for him came out nothing worrying except his haemoglobine and leucocyte dropped. We are still waiting for the other blood test called Gall Culture. This blood test result takes about 1 week. So we will able to have the blood test result this Thursday and consult with the doctor if there is anything wrong (hope and pray nothing serious). That is why I didn't send him to school for a week. He has been diagnosed by doctor to have bronchitis. So he has to have inhalation 3 times a day with a lot of medicines to eat. Luckily, we have a nebulizer at home so we can conduct the inhalation by ourselves without going back and forward to the hospital.

Last Saturday, I thought he was better so I took both of the kids to watch The Last Airbender. What happened was that he threw up just before we got in to the studio. So my hubby took him home. Poor boy! He only eat porridge until last Sunday ... and I got bored cooking porridge everyday. On Monday, I tried to give him rice and poured soup over the rice. I still put him into the food diet, not to spices, no fry foods or too oily foods. Drink a lot of water ... just made me crazy to have to tell him drinking his water every 15-20 minutes. I feel like a broken tape LOL :D

So today, I managed to make bento for my girl. Please use your imagination to imagine that those 2 animals are the moles :p They were cut by hand using my X-acto knive. The whiskers were from dry somen. I think dry somen is perfect because it is thinner than dry spaghetti.

Inside the red round box (1st tier) : rice at the bottom, pork mince cooked with sweet soy sauce and onion, crab stick flowers, and chopped cucumber.

Inside the pink round box (2nd tier) : oranges, strawberries, green tomatoes, and stir fry carrot & cabbage with scrambled egg.

My boy is staying at home today because he has high fever and is coughing. He told us last night during dinner time that he couldn't finish his dinner because he didn't feel well. But we thought he just pulled a trick for not finishing his dinner. The fever went up last night and I asked my husband to move him to our bedroom so I could keep checking his temperature. The weather has been really bad last week, very hot and dry. Sometimes the weather changed very quick from very hot in the morning and raining in the afternoon. I made the appointment with his doctor this afternoon, hope the fever will go down today.

I didn't have any plan in my head to make bento for my girl, but then in the morning I figured it out to just quickly decorated 2 quail eggs for her bento. In the other box : grape tomatoes, jelly in the silicone cups, acar (Indonesian's cucumber pickles), yellow tofu, and 3 chicken meat balls mixed with carrots and corns.

The winners for 1st Blog Anniversary Giveaways are :

Congrats to Tona Mama to win the Bento Book!

Congrats to Yenny to win the Hello Kitty Bento Set!

The winners will be contacted by e-mail soon, so please check on your email later!