My Bento Attempts

I stopped making bento ever since Charlotte started with her new school in Jan this year. Since she is attending a full day school and I do not want to make her feel neither she is different/special nor she has a choice when comes to food, she has to have food prepared by the school. I only make bento when we are dining out and the food may not suits her or when we are meeting with friends and we can't make people/food to suit her.

Although I made a lot of investments in bento tools, I'm not as creative and artistic as most bento making mothers out there. I usually just made simple food with those cute cutters and molds I have without taking the extra miles of decorating it. Now that I have more time and able to prepare bento in advance whenever we are having an event I try to make Charlotte's bento a little bit more interesting than before.

I recently follow a very creative, artistic and hard working bento making mother's blog and I looked through her bento archives and picked something simple whenever I need to prepare one. Even that, it always takes me a lot of time doing what she had done for her kids and yet the results were never any close to hers :p

Here are a few I did very recently. One was at the Valentines Day when daddy and I decided to dine at a Korean restaurant. I know nothing at a Korean restaurant is close to Charlotte's taste buds so I had to prepare something that she would enjoy and yet filling. I know she loves to have ham sandwiches, and to make it more interesting I copied the idea this mother used to make 2 simplified happy face ham sandwiches with the soft buns that I bought from a bakery and some dried cranberries.

It is important that I prepare food that Charlotte loves so that I will have a peaceful time enjoying my meal and don't have to worry about her empty tummy issue. She finished the bento just like I expected!

This other one was prepared last weekend when we had a dinner meet-up with some friends. In fact, I did 2 bentos that evening, the other one is filled with small treats and snacks like marshmallows and mini pretzels as I knew we were going to hang out till late night. She saw me when I was preparing it and I had a tough time holding on to her bento until the food was served at the Thai restaurant. You may ask why didn't I give it to her earlier? Well, I need to make sure the timing is right otherwise when my food is served she will be asking to get out from her chair.

It took me quite awhile getting the Hello Kitty face fixed. I finally found a shop selling the kamaboko and many other Japanese specialities in Penang. It is located in Kelawai Road, it's called the Meijiya Mini Market. If you are looking for any of the Japanese ingredient for your cooking, this is the store to look for.