Bento Lunches for Monday and Tuesday

I am behind on posting my Bento lunches, I am working on a new blog and will be unveiling it soon!
Evie and Ethan both LOVE Kirby from Nintendo. This was actually extremely easy to make, just make a ham sandwich, cut out with circle cookie cutter, cheese feet, ketchup cheeks, seaweed eyes and mouth, mayo for the whites of the eyes. Easy Peasey! Mad die and I made chocolate chip mini-muffins and that is what is holding his cheese feet up. The kids were delighted with this one!!

Monday was Ethan's first day of school! So I made him a special (time consuming) Bento lunch. I flavored the rice with curry to make it yellow, and cut stripes for the tiger out of seaweed. I used meatballs, cut them and half and then "filled" them with cheese cut with a flower cookie cutter. We had leftover spinach and some chicken breast so I mixed them together with some salt. Then I just surrounded the tiger with veggies. You can see the ice on some if the frozen veg still!


Evie wasn't too keen on the curry rice so I just made a tiny bunny with ketchup cheeks. I made the ham flowers and they were SO easy! I'll have a tutorial on my new site soon! She also didn't want cheese between her meatballs.

Can you tell I was getting tired Sunday night?! Maddie was stuck with a simple Bento. Grapes, chicken strips, and cheese cubes. There are also frosted cookies in the little container.

By the way.....I bought the little square containers in the dollar aisle at Target. The tops don't stay on very well but there were 6 in the pack so I just decorated the tops with puff paint. Cute!
The white bento boxes pictured in the first two pictures came from IKEA. They were like $3 for 3 boxes and the boxes are perfect for Bento. I think part of the fun of Bento is finding cheap things that work well for you.

Bento Lunch Box #12

Ah, leftovers. The bottom of this bento lunch features a bed of brown rice with chicken and garden vegetables on top. Decorated with sesame seeds.

The top of the bento box is the best part! Shortbread cookies with a little box of Nutella, Hello Kitty marshmallow, and blueberries with sugar. I'm not sure why this picture seems grainy to me (no pun intended!). I just can't seem to get the camera focused....

Bento Box Lunch Idea #3

Yummy! Octopus hot dog surrounded by hot dog flowers in a sea of mac & cheese. And they were SO easy to make! Sugared blueberries, cherry tomatoes, fish shaped with a bento egg mold, and some string cheese. Melanie will be so surprised when she finds this in her fridge! Who's the best sister ever?......ME!

Octopus Bento Recipe

* Cut about 2" off each hot dog end (I cut them at a diagonal so they would sit nicely). Then slice 4 to 5 legs. Boil them for 30 seconds and the legs will flare out! I added eyes to the bento hot dogs with nori and cheese. You can use the end of a straw to get little circles.

My First Bento

So I decided about a month ago that I was going to send my children to school with a Bento lunch box. Cute, edible representations of my love for them. The Bento box fever usually hits me about two weeks before school is in and inevitably I run out of time/energy/money and so I have never gotten around to making Bento boxes for the kids' lunches. This year (hooray!) the urge swept over me the first week of summer vacation. After multiple trips to eBay and some great links I found on Google, my Bento accessories, bento boxes, bento egg molds, and bento recipe books started pouring in from Japan and Hong Kong!
Although the kids aren't in school yet, my sister Melanie goes to work as a nurse everyday so she will be my guinea pig for the next two months! Lucky girl......

Bento Box Lunch Idea #1
Purple sushi rolls, mini panda of soy sauce, grape tomatoes from my garden, slices of Roast Beast, boiled egg (shaped like a fish!), cucumber (from my garden!), blueberries with star sprinkles for extra cuteness.