Bento Thursday - Ohanami

Right now is my favorite season in Japan - the cherry blossoms, sakura, are out! During cherry blossom time, we often have Ohanami, picnics under the flowering trees. One of the room mothers for K's kindergarten suggested we get together for Ohanami on Monday. I asked K what kind of bento he wanted - Dr. Yellow, naturally. This time, to mix it up a bit, I boiled an egg, took out the yolk, mashed it up and mixed it into his rice to make it yellow. I love how it turned out. Then I added the standard nori windows and stripes. He also requested cucumbers, carrots, green peppers and teriyaki chicken. I got it all ready, showed it to him and he was bummed that the stripes on Dr. Yellow weren't blue like they are supposed to be. I have never done them blue. I ended up getting out my food markers and drawing blue stripes on it. He was so pleased.

My bento was the same as K's, except for the onigiri. I wanted a sesame onigiri, so I made it into a bear. 

Since I was making bentos for K and I, I figured I might as well make one for Y. I left out the cucumbers from his and instead added cheesy salmon and tomatoes. Also, no onigiri - just rice with furikake.

K had such a fun time with his school friends. Only about 10 of them showed up, but a few of them were his best friends. In the morning it was a tad chilly, but it ended up getting quite hot.

Unfortunately, we had to leave a bit early. T was getting restless, we had to get to the bank by 3, and I wanted to pick up Y's birthday present. K was cool with leaving, but asked if we could go back one day.

Just before T was born, I had this huge urge to take K out and do as many fun things with him as possible, while it was just the two of us. Now that we leave in less than a month (probably), I am feeling the same way. During the time we have left, I want to do as many fun things in Japan as possible. So this morning, I made K and I some sandwiches, cut up some carrots and apples, and packed a lunch for T. We stopped by the convini to pick up some treats for after lunch, then we popped on the train, and headed back to the park we went to on Monday. We got there just after 11 and the place was packed. Luckily we found a nice spot in the shade. T tried to eat everything he saw.

K stuck to his sandwich, carrots and apples.

After lunch, we took a walk around. K played at one of the playgrounds, but then he spotted the gigantic bouncy castle. He always asks to play in it, but we always have some excuse. Not today! In the spirit of making his last month in Japan epic, I bought him a ticket. He was on cloud 9. Kids go in for 15 minute shifts. He made the most of his time in there - climbing the walls, running and jumping off of the tubes, going down the slides, and jumping as high as he could propel his little body. He came out glowing (maybe from sweat, but likely from the amazing 15 minutes he spent in there).

He was really hot at that point, so I suggested we get some ice cream - also, to be honest, I can't go to this park during cherry blossom season and not get a cherry blossom ice cream. Ugh. It's amazing.

K took ages to eat his ice cream. Usually I would try to hurry him up, but why? I had to get home to make dinner, but tonight was mostly left overs anyway. K took so long eating it that T fell asleep.

As we were walking to the station, K looked up and said, "Look, mama! We are in a tunnel of sakura!" We were. And it was beautiful.

K had such a fun day and I am so happy. Yesterday we walked out to the gardening store near our house and K fed the fish. Tomorrow his friend from school is coming over. He has been asking to go to a professional soccer game, and I think there is one this weekend. I am debating taking him. It starts at 4, so it will mess up T's bedtime, but part of me wants to just not worry about that and take them anyway. Afterall, I want K to have wonderful memories of Japan. I know we will be back, but not for a few years.

Turtle Fail

Last week I got a crazy cold that had me in bed each night with the boys - at 7pm. This week I am feeling much better, but I am still quite exhausted and also trying to catch up on everything I didn't do last week. I'm not sure if I have mentioned it on the blog, but we are going to be moving to the US for a few years. Y put in for a transfer and got it! We will probably head out in May, which gives us a bit of time to go through our entire place, throw stuff out, and organize for the move. As a result, I probably won't be doing too much for the blog in the coming weeks. The good news is that I have a lot of projects that I have done and just not yet blogged about. So, hopefully I can stay up on posting twice a week, but I might slide every once in a while.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, K's school took a field trip to the aquarium. K was very excited about this! They got to take an onigiri for lunch and some snack. I asked K if he wanted to go to the grocery store to pick something out, but he requested that I make bread that looks like a fish. Hmmmm...I had no idea if this was something he had seen before or had just come up with, but my breadmaker book has a recipe for sweet turtle breads (カメロンパン - kame melon pan）. I decided this would be the easiest route. I started with the dough in the breadmaker. Once the dough was ready, I divided it into quarters and then chopped the tops off of each triangle.

I divided the top half into five little balls and put them on a lined cookie sheet.

I streched the balls so that they slightly resembled a head, a tail, arms and legs. Then I rolled the top and put the turtle's back on the body parts.

The next step was to make the top cookie part of the bread. I mixed butter and sugar with some egg.

Then added flour and mixed until it looked like batter. Kind of.

I divided that into quarters, rolled each quarter out, and put a shell on the turtle.

Then I scored the cookie so it would look more like a shell. This was not in the instructions in the book - I just thought it would look cute. This could be the start of where everything went awry.

I let them rest so they could rise and when I checked back on them I was so sad. They turned into little blobs. Not the cute little turtles I was hoping for.

From the side they don't look too bad, but this was prior to baking, mind you.

When they were baked, they didn't look like turtles at all. Luckily I made them on a Tuesday night and the field trip wasn't until Thursday. We still had time to go buy something else for K to take. In the morning I showed him the blobs and told him that it was no problem if he wanted to go to the grocery store to get something else to take. He looked me in the eye and with the sweetest little voice said, "But mama, I love them." My heart exploded. I didn't know if he was just saying that to be nice to me, but Y told me that K told him how excited he was about his kame melon pan that mama made. I love him.

The final obstacle was to find something to put the turtle in so that K could throw it in his backpack without crumbling it. I found this bento box at the 100 yen store and it was the biggest one I could find. I had to squish the turtle in there, but he fit and K took him on the field trip. He only had a few bites of the turtle, but that was just fine by me.

 

 

Bento Thursday - Just a Triangle

It was bento day again today - wahoo!! K requested the same lunch as last week, but instead of carrots he wanted green peppers. I asked him if he wanted me to make him an animal for his onigiri. Apparently remembering the bear/cat disaster of last week, he looked at me and said, "uhhh, no mama. I'll just have a triangle." Has he lost confidence in my onigiri-making skills!!?? Oh no!!! At first I was a little sad, but then I realized that really, a triangle is way easier and takes about 30 seconds to make - good news because that's about 1 extra minute I get to spend in bed before waking up to deal with lunches.

Y's lunch consisted of carrots with tofu, green peppers with sesame seeds, cucumbers with furikake, green peppers cooked in dashi (fish stock), ground beef, potato and cabbage croquette, and white rice. Yum yum!!

Bento Thursday - It's a bear, not a cat

It's been a while since I've done a bento post. To be honest, it's been a while since I've made a bento. There were a few here and there - all before the holidays - but they weren't all that interesting so it would have been more of a look-at-what-my-kid-had-for-lunch post. Kind of boring, in my opinion. Today, however, was a bento day. Last night I asked K what he wanted in his bento and he requested "an onigiri with sesame seeds, carrots, cucumbers, fried chicken and M&Ms." Luckily I had all of those items on hand - wahoo!! To add a little bit of interest to the bento, I cut the carrots into stars and tried to make the onigiri into a little black and white cat face. I also added in strawberries because six M&Ms for dessert just sounded sad to me.

K got home from school today and was all proud of himself since he ate his entire bento. "Great job, babe! Did you like your cat onigiri?" "Yeah, but Mama, that was a bear, not a cat." Looks like I need to brush up on my animal onigiri making skills.

Y also got a bento today. It's been probably two months since I last made one for him, whoops!! He ended up with rice with salmon furikake, fried chicken, herbed carrots and beans, and broccoli and sausage with parmesan cheese.

One of my friends in the neighborhood recently had a baby, so another friend and I went over to see her and meet her new baby girl. We decided to make our own bentos and take them over so we could all have lunch together with minimum hassle - today was bento day for their older kids as well. My bento contained fried chicken, strawberries, cucumber with furikake, herbed carrots and beans, and (becuase I ran out of white rice making the other bentos) a sekihan (mochi rice with black bean) onigiri. Yum!!

Bento Thursday - The Mother of All Bentos

Every fall, it seems that each school in Japan holds an Undokai (Sports Festival). It is something the kids spend weeks preparing for and if you are like me, the moms spend days working on the bento for. I suppose it really is just like any other bento, except it is for the whole family to enjoy. I ended up making way too much, but just as well.

K's Undokai was meant to be held on a Saturday last month. The whole week, the forcast predicted rain the afternoon. Since this is a morning thing and the school hadn't made any announcements, I figured it should be fine. I started making bits of the bento on Thursday night. I believe I started with the carrots and broccoli, but I don't quite remember. Friday night I did a bit more, and Saturday morning all I had left to do was cut up an apple, make some onigiris, fry up some shrimp and put it all into the bento boxes.

Because T's sleep is weird and he can wake up in any sort of mood, I set my alarm for 5 on Saturday morning. When I woke up it was just barely drizzling, but we were still three hours away from game time. I figured it might stop and the weather at the Undokai would be just glorious. I got the whole bento ready and was packing up the stroller, when Y checked his mail - Undokai cancelled. Are you kidding me!?!! Not to let an entire bento go to waste, we had an indoor picnic on the living room floor.

The Undokai was rescheduled for the following Saturday. Again, starting on Thursday night, I did the veggies. On Friday, K came home from school with a note saying that instead of Saturday (as it was still meant to be raining), the Undokai would be on Sunday. I put off the rest of the prep until Saturday night. Sunday morning rolled around and I did the exact same bento as I had done the previous week - dude, I was all out of ideas.

The big box contained onigiri and proteins. K got a plain onigiri in the shape of a bear. Y got two salmon furikake pig onigiris and I got an umeboshi heart onigiri.

I made fried chicken, Japanese-style omelet, and fried shrimp.

The next layers were the fruit and veggies - apples, grapes, broccoli, carrots and cucumbers. I cut the carrots into bears, flowers and hearts and also decorated with little ham flowers and banners.

The Undokai day was really nice. It was quite chilly in the morning, but as soon as the sun came out, it was nice and warm.

K's class did a few songs and a race - they are two and three years old, it was adorable. In the end, each kid was given a medal from their teacher.

 

The little dude was stoked. Adorable.

 

Bento Thursday - Dinosaur!!

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, K is having a difficult time with kindergarten. While he actually loves kindergarten, his teachers and friends, he hates leaving me. Ugh. It's so hard - for both of us. I hate to see him cry and he hates getting on the bus. Anyway, he went again today. He cried. A lot. The silver lining was that it's bento day today!

He requested a dinosaur bento. He wanted a dinosaur ham and cheese sandwich, eggs, broccoli, carrots and cucumbers. All of my dinosaur cookie cutters were too big to fit into his bento box, so T-Rex's tail got snipped a bit. I thought it would be cute to make the eggs into a sun and the broccoli to look like trees. Using a straw, I cut some cooked carrots and strategically put them in the leaves to look like fruit. It was cuter in my mind, but K seemed to like it regardless. The cucumber was just cut into rounds and the carrots into hearts. Although I usually do fruit for dessert, today K got a cookie.

While I didn't go into specifics yesterday, K's been vomitting on the bus. I think it's probably from a combination of both crying and stress. Regardless, I feel awful that the teacher is cleaning up his vomit. Gross. Once he gets to school, someone puts K in the shower, cleans him up, and washes his uniform (and often shoes). To me, this seems all above and beyond what is expected from a teacher.

This morning, I tried to give the cookies to the teacher who rode the bus, but she wouldn't accept them. She and the bus driver said that this was all just part of their job. I still felt awful though. So this morning, right around lunch time, Y (who had the day off, hence no bento) and I took the cookies to the school. When we were there I saw one of K's teachers who said that he was all excited about his dinosaur bento and showed it to her. I guess making all these crazy bentos is worth it if it makes him so happy. He's off to school again tomorrow. Fingers crossed his breakfast stays in his little tummy.

Bento Thursday - Rockets & Stars

K had school today and as it is Thursday, it was also bento day. He decided yesterday that he wanted a rocket ham and cheese sandwich, carrots, cucumbers and apples. I wanted to cut the veggies into stars, but there was no way I was going to do that by hand again. So, we headed to the 100 yen store and found a small star cookie cutter. Perfect!

T woke up at 4 this morning, which was awesome. Y and I tried and tried to get him to go back to sleep, but it was a lost cause. At 5:50 I admitted defeat and took him to the living room while I got to work on the bento. Since I had so much extra time after making the rocket sandwich and the star carrots and cucumbers, I figured I would cut the apples into stars as well. I have a feeling this cookie cutter is going to get a lot of use - look at those stars!! So cute! Out of the other two rocket bentos, this one is my favorite.

 

Although T was up at 4, which means I have been up since 4, and K was at school I was really hoping for a nap, but alas I had to head to the unemployment office. I am due some unemployment insurance, but I have to go there twice a month for four months. Aye yai! This also means that Y has to take the morning off of work to watch T (and sometimes K) while I go to meetings. He has to be at his office by 1 or it is counted as a vacation day. My meeting ended at 11:30, which gave Y enough time to meet me, walk to the station together, hop on the train, eat his bento and head into the office. It was a busy, busy day and I am beat (and a tad under the weather to boot!). Anyway, Y's bento consisted of rice, teriyaki yellowtail, carrots with sesame (I snuck in a few of the extra stars from K's bento), beef and nagaimo (some kind of potato), spinach with ponzu, and cucumbers with furikake. 

Bento Thursday - Halloween Edition

It was bento day for K today again. Earlier in the week I asked him what bento he wanted and he decided on a Shinkansen bento. Again. But! Yesterday he came from home school and was super jazzed that they were having a Halloween party today. I asked if instead of a Shinkansen bento he would want a Halloween bento and so the ideas started coming. Aside from an onigiri, he wanted asparagus, broccoli, carrots, and nashi. I also threw in some roasted chicken breast.

For the onigiri I started with a ghost cookie cutter and ran it under water so the rice wouldn't stick to it. Then I put it in the bento box and pushed rice into it, then slid the cutter out. I did the face with nori.

Then I put in the greens and chicken where they would fit.

And topped it off with carrots cut to look like Jack-o-lanterns. I LOVE them.

Y's bento was pretty standard - rice with furikake, roasted root veggies, a boiled egg, spinach with tofu, chicken "burgers" with ginger and komatsuna. After finishing K's bento, I still had one Jack-o-lantern left, which I totally could have put into Y's bento. But, I ate it before thinking of that. Sorry babe. Instead I put in heart cut-out carrots that were left over from bento preparation for K's undoukai (Sports Festival) this weekend. The undokai bento is the mother of all bentos and I am stoked for it!!

K got home from school today and as expected he was super excited about the Halloween party. They made black cat costumes, i.e. little ears, and went trick-or-treating, or as K says, "tow rick o tow ree tow," the Japanese version. So cute!

Then he drew a face on two pumpkins and took that around trick-or-treating.

It was full of snacks that the teacher said they could eat at home. He was so happy, which is great because this morning he definitely did not want to go to school. When he came home, however, he declared that "school is fantastic!" That made my day.

Bento Thursday - Dr. Yellow...again

This month, K's school schedule has been a bit mixed up and he only went to school one day last week, same for next week. Today, however, was a school day and bento day at that! He decided that he wanted a cheeseburger and an onigiri. I asked him what veggies and he said, "Whatever. Anything that will fit is fine." I went with what we had in the fridge - broccoli and carrots, and apple for dessert. After looking at my bento books for onigiri ideas, he told me that he wanted a Shinkansen onigiri; mind you there is no Shinkansen onigiri in the book. There was not one other onigiri idea that he liked. Seriously, this kid likes his Shinkansens. He told me he wanted Dr. Yellow again, but the past few times I used egg he didn't eat it (even though I know he likes eggs). I told him that I would only make him a Dr. Yellow bento if he promised to eat the egg. He did! He was so proud of himself and that he ate his WHOLE bento that as soon as we walked in the house, he ripped open his backpack and took out his empty bento box. He's adorable.

 

Since I was making a cheeseburger for K, I decided to just make a few more for Y. He also got some leftover veggies - asparagus and burdock/carrot stir fry. I also cut two sausages in half on an angle and stuck them together with toothpicks to make little hearts. Awwww...