The following are the 4 winners for the 2nd Blog Anniversary giveaways. E-mail notification will be sent out shortly for the winners. Please reply back with your complete postal address as soon as possible so I can send the gift to your address very soon.

Thanks a lot for all of you who participated in this giveaways!

1st Winner

Pam, US, scrumptiousbento[at]gmail[dot]com

2nd Winner

Nani, Indonesia, novianti_n[at]yahoo[dot]com

3rd Winner
Mary Chey, Malaysia, marychey[at]streamyx[dot]com[dot]my

4th Winner
Susan, Northern Ireland, susan[at]arkonitebento[dot]net

Congrats to all the winners! Hope the bento stuffs can be useful for your bento making :)

Pekkle is a character from Sanrio. My kids didn't know about this duck maybe because we don't see many of its merchandise sold here. I made it from the egg sheets, food picks, and nori. Today's bento box was too small that after took a picture I had to re-arrange the foods again in a bigger box. I stir fried the veggies (bean sprouts, red paprika, spring onion, onion, carrots) and sauteed tofu egg & prawns. I used 4 mini cups, 2 cups for each food. I just wanted the kids to have some fun in eating their foods. They would be busy digging up the foods from the cups today. In a small box, I cut some blood oranges and oranges for the dessert after lunch. The giveaways will be extended until tonight and I will draw 4 winners then announce it on Saturday, July 30. I'm very happy to see many of you leave your wonderful comments! Really appreciate it and thank you from the bottom of my heart. Reading all of your comments are so rewarding, encouraging me a lot. It's Friday again ... Wish everyone a good weekend! I will be in the queue to get the ticket to watch Harry Potter. Wish me luck :)

Today's bento featured white dogs inspired by Ocha-Ken. I made an Ocha-Ken before here. I made exactly the same bento in the afternoon plus one snack bento for the interview by one of the local tabloids. They thought I was making bento for business such as kid's party catering and bento class ... hahaha ... I really never thought to turn my bento making into business because this is a pure hobby and I'm quite happy with my bento blogging. No pressure :D Inside the white dog bento box : rice balls, cucumber pickle for food divider, cherry tomato, soy sauce chicken, and stir fry enoki mushroom & yellow paprika. Inside the snack bento box : bread stuffed with chicken floss & sesame seeds (shaped into bear), bread rolls with strawberry and blueberry jams, strawberries, melon, blood orange, and orange.

I made a quick bento this morning without any characters in it. Only punched some daikon flowers with the cutter and placed them on the top of the rice. Inside the box I put stir fry chayote & corn, cherry tomato, five spice pork that I cooked in my pressure cooker last night, and salted duck egg. I only needed to stir fry the veggies, reheated the five spice pork, and salted duck egg was boiled last night. So it was pretty quick to put everything inside the box this morning. Kids just got back to the school last week and they already had many home works and projects. Couldn't believe it. Big A is more responsible to do her home work & school projects on her own while Little A always needs to be reminded about his home work & school projects every now and then. So I must check his school agenda everyday after school. And I will need to sit down with him to see whether he needs any helps to do his homework or school project.

Happy Monday all! How was your weekend? I hope everyone had fun and is ready to start the new week. I cooked a lot of Indonesian yellow rice (turmeric rice) last night for the dinner. So this morning, I only needed to reheat everything in this box with the turmeric rice, fried chicken, and Indonesian yellow pickles, except for the cherry tomatoes of course. It saved me a lot of time to prepare this bento with dinner left over. I added a small portion of turmeric rice in a separate small bento box because I know those 2 yellow rice balls won't be enough to fill my kids' tummy. I decorated the rice balls with egg white, nori, and tomato skin so the rice balls look like cats. Chili sauce for the chicken was put separately inside the sauce cup for Big A. While Little A was happy with the tomato sauce only. I'm trying slowly to get Little A to try a mild spicy foods at home. So later, I don't need to cook 2 batches of foods at home - spicy and non-spicy for little A. Big A is already on board for the spicy foods and she loves it so much. As my kids are getting bigger now, I start to think whether the kyaraben bento is still appropriate for them. Or do I need to learn a new style of bento? Still thinking about it.

Today's snack bento was pretty easy to prepare in the morning. I made a small little green boy from quail egg, kamaboko, and food pick. I dyed the quail egg with food coloring by soaking it in the bowl with water + green food coloring. If you want to get the round shapes of the quail egg, you just need to shape it with your hand while the egg was still warm to a bit hot, right after you peeled the skin. Starting next week, I will be back to make regular lunch bento for the kids as they will go back to the normal school hours until 2PM. Big A will stay longer at school every Tuesday and Thursday until 3PM for the Grade 6 enrichment class to prepare them for the National Exam.

Tomorrow as some of you already know is My Bentolicious' 2nd Blog Anniversary. It just does not feel that I have been blogging for 2 years. Time flies so fast. Still I want to thank you my husband and the kids for being so supportive all this time. All of bento friends that have been very supportive too with all of your lovely comments. Thanks for sharing your bento works so we can get inspired by one another. All the blog readers for dropping by and checking my post. I really appreciate it. After 2 years of bento blogging, I have found so many good friends, met up with some of you already and still hope to meet more friends along the way. I am very grateful to be able to join in this bento world with all of you. My husband has been teasing me from time to time. Because he knows that I am easy to get bored doing something. He bet that I would stop bento blogging after 2 years. Hahaha ... don't worry, I'm not ready to retire yet. Hopefully I can still make bento for the kids and share it with all of you in this blog.

To share the love of bento making with all of you, I put 4 giveaways. All you need to do is just give your comment with your name, country, and e-mail address as the following format example :

{comment} ....................................................................... {comment}

Kitty, Indonesia, kitty [at] yahoo dot com
You can put your comment to enter these giveaways until Thursday, July 28. One person one entry. Then after that I will draw for 4 winners and post it in the blog on July, 29.

I shaped 2 bears from white bread and stuffed them with chicken floss inside for today's snack bento. The box was just filled with some fruits (strawberry, golden kiwi, orange) that we had to finish today. We are still in dry season ... it's a hot day today. I drove the kids to school this morning and the sun was so bright making the driving uncomfortable. How about you? Are you enjoying the weather wherever you live right now? Little A is a bit fuzzy when it comes to fruit. He will only eat some of his favorite fruits. I'm trying to buy different fruits every 2 or 3 days just to get him to try other fruits too. As my 2nd Blog Anniversary will be on July, 23 and I don't usually blog on Saturday, so tomorrow I will post the giveaways. All you need to do is just put your comment, any comment is fine then I will draw 2 winners for the giveaways. Until then, stay safe and have a great day all!

I usually posted my bento before picking up the kids from school. But today it was crazy, so many things to do. Today's bento was just as simple as it looked. No cooking required at all this morning. Doughnuts were bought last night and I just put some fruits (strawberry, orange, and longan) in separate box for the kids. My yellow bear was made from left over egg custard filling for my bao. You didn't read wrong. During my bento break, I had taken some baking classes. Learning slowly from knowing nothing about baking and trying to be brave to start baking simple things. Oh well! Bao doesn't require baking only steaming but with still using yeast and other things just like in baking, still I was so nervous. Hopefully later I can bake my own doughnuts. Basically, I just rolled 3 balls from the egg custard filling, ressambled little bear and decorated with white jelly ball & nori. Quick and easy! I will post the custard filling recipe over my other blog My Bloglicious, so you can check it later :)

We have some left over rice from the dinner last night, so I made quick bacon & egg fried rice for bento. I used my small and medium sizes of heart shapes rice mold to shape the fried rice and put cherry tomato to fill in the gap between the two small heart shaped fried rice. In the other round tier, I just put dragon fruit, kiwi, and mangosteen. After took the picture then I realized that I couldn't put mangosteen in the bento box as they turned brown very quick, so I took it out and replaced it with more dragon fruits and kiwis.

Big A loves to read and her hobby actually brings a good impact to Little A. Now both kids love to read and their book collections in the playing room is growing so fast. I have to re-organize the space soon, so we can put more books into the bookshelf. My husband and I set a new rule that starting this new school year, the kids are not allowed to read story book and comics during the weekdays / school days. They only can read them during the weekend and on holiday. We have the reason for doing that. It is simply because we want them to be discipline and to be more responsible for their studies. By the way, I think some of you can guess the books that I put on the background of this photo. Those are Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The story is quite funny. I didn't read the book but we have the DVDs. We watched it for movie night on last Saturday night and had a good laugh. Of course, after watching the movie we told the kids what was good and what was bad, the things they could follow and should not. As parents, I believe that we are responsible to teach and guide our kids about that.

Hello everyone!! Kids are officially back to school today. Big A is in Grade 6 and Little A is in Grade 3 now. This year will be a tough year for Big A as she will have 2 final exams, one from the school and one from the government. It is a regulation here that students from Grade 6 (Primary), Grade 9 (Secondary) and Grade 12 (Tertiary) will have 2 final exams. I'm glad that finally I can get back to bento making after a long break from blogging. This week I will just make snack bento or smaller portion bento for the kids because this week will be an orientation week where all the students will be dismissed before lunch time. So it's good for me for warming up, catching up with other bento makers, stretching up my 'lazy nerves' after on hiatus for more than 1 month. I hope I don't forget about how to make bento for my kids LOL ... *silly me*

Inside the box for today's bento, I only put sandwich with ham & cheese and Indonesian traditional cake made from cassava covered with coconut. Decorated with yellow egg sheet and nori with the Anpanman & Friends food picks. This bento didn't take a long time to prepare. Didn't require any cooking in the morning, so pretty quick to prepare. Egg sheet was very easy to cut. First I cut it as same as the size of the sandwich and then started to trim and make a school bus shapes with my X-Acto knife. The wheels were cut with the round cutter. And upsss ... my kids asked why there was no bus driver (???)