Spaghetti Squash Bento

Spaghetti Squash Bento, a photo by sherimiya ♥ on Flickr.

This quickie bento is an adaptation of one of my basic pasta stand-bys: spaghetti with sauteed onion, zucchini, mushroom and nitrite-free chicken sausage. It still contains all those things but I intended to substitute the whole wheat spaghetti with spaghetti squash. I've never made this squash before; have you? All you do is bake it for awhile, then slice it open lengthwise, scoop out the seeds and then pull out the spaghetti-like strands of flesh. I was skeptical, but that's really how it turned out! I tried it out on the kids, and they seemed to like it just fine. If I had tossed it with tomato sauce or pesto, I bet they'd like it even more. I ended up not completely omitting the pasta, just so that they'd have some comfort food in there too. I filled up two sections of this bento with this one-dish meal, and saved the 3rd for cottage cheese topped with berries and carrots.

Daytrippers Pasta Bento

Daytrippers Pasta Bento, a photo by sherimiya ♥ on Flickr.

Happy Monday! Are your Mondays as disorganized and chaotic as mine? No? Oh. Well, this is why you'll find many of my Monday bento are composed of food that cook easily from ingredients that are already in the pantry and refrigerator (or leftovers from weekend eats), and nearly always have no cute components whatsoever. Sometimes they are literally thrown together so quickly that there's no time (or need) to take a picture. Like today: it's a simple wagon wheel pasta bento tossed with nitrite-free chicken and roasted red pepper sausage and zucchini. Other section contains strawberries, grapes, grapefruit and tiny mandarinquat slices. Everything is packed in my Daytrippers bento box (from Paperchase), which comes with a separate section for the matching fork and spoon under the cute decorated translucent lid. TinySprite has a variable appetite, which grows when the meal includes her favorites. Like this one -- I know she loves this combo and it will disappear in no time, even without the cute parts. And that's a recipe for a successful bento ^_^

Persimmon Jack and Sausage Bento

Persimmon Jack and Sausage Bento, a photo by sherimiya ♥ on Flickr.

Of all my bento boxes, this is the one I get the most email queries about. Unfortunately, it's not available online (as far as I know). I found mine in a dusty corner of a shelf in the housewares aisle of my local Asian grocery, where it probably sat for months. I love the way it looks; the trio of sections is somehow very aesthetically pleasing to me. It's also quite uncommon to find a bento box that includes three subdivisions. The only other one I have is the Lunchbots Trio, which I also love. Anyway, today I've packed chicken sausage with sweet pepper and mushroom stirfry, along with corn, steamed broccoli, carrots, and Okinawan sweet potato star shapes. The fruit section contains grapes, a strawberry, and ... a persimmon jack-o-lantern. Have you started seeing persimmons in your markets? It's not a favorite of mine, sadly. I'd like to enjoy it more, since it's so plentiful this time of year, and since the inlaws have a tree which bears a TON of fruit. Luckily the kids seem to like it though! ^_^

Oh, and I forgot to mention: Foodista.com has selected Happy Little Bento as this week's Bento Blog and Photo of the Week. Thanks a lot Foodista!

Sausage Zucchini Skewers Bento

Sausage Zucchini Skewers Bento, a photo by sherimiya ♥ on Flickr.

My kids got matching bentos, consisting of chicken and spinach nitrite-free sausage and zucchini skewers. I love the way they fit in the long section of my LunchBot Trio. Veggies went in another section: car-shaped Okinawan sweet potato, corn on the cob, broccoli, and orange and purple carrots. Fruit went in the last section: luscious peaches, raspberries, blackberry, and baby sugar plum.

TinySprite's bento had the same ingredients, in a more petite version. Ta-daaa!

Sausage Skewers Bento

Sausage Skewers Bento, a photo by sherimiya ♥ on Flickr.

I sometimes hear from parents who tell me they don't know how to cook, or they don't have time to cook, so there's no way they could make such an elaborate lunch for their kids. Guess what? I'm not a professional chef either. I have two kids at home and I don't have time to spend a lot of time cooking or preparing bento either. If you take a look at my bento posts, you'll see that many of them involve leftovers, or foods that can be prepared and assembled quickly (usually under 30 minutes). You don't have to spend a lot of time to give your kids a healthy homemade lunch; all you need is a little pre-planning. Most kids won't eat an adult-size meal, so a few vegetables, some fruit, a little protein and maybe some rice (or bread or pasta) is all you need to consider.

Take this bento, for example. I made this for my 4 year old to take to preschool. She's had a slightly smaller appetite lately than usual, so this one is a bit smaller than what she typically eats for lunch. The main compartment contains two skewers of pan-fried chicken and sundried tomato sausage rounds alternating with sliced zucchini. She'll love those because they're finger foods, and it's fun to eat off a stick. I always add at least two colors of vegetables -- in this case, steamed broccoli and peapods, as well as raw carrots I've carved into flowers with my paring knife. To finish off, she'll have a sweet ripe strawberry and some blackberries. If she had more time at school (or if she were at home) I might add a half corn on the cob and a musubi (riceball), or she might ask for string cheese or a hard-boiled egg, which are foods that are easily prepared ahead of time. Once you start packing bento, it'll become easier until it's just a part of the usual school routine. You'll feel better knowing your kid is eating a healthy meal, and she'll learn to look forward to lunch. Now that's a worthwhile effort! ^_^

Radish Doggie Bento

Radish Doggie Bento, a photo by sherimiya ♥ on Flickr.

MisterMan gets chicken sausage and baby potatoes, steamed broccoli, peapods and purple carrots, grape tomatoes, strawberry, grapes and cara cara oranges. Cute detail provided by radish slice and nori. Woof! The background I used is the poster I got from The Fillmore after the Paul Simon concert last week. It was a 2 hour show and he (and his band) sounded great. The highlight for me was the title track from Hearts and Bones, my fave album. He also rocked That Was Your Mother, with the zydeco vibe, and got the whole place dancing to that one. And lest you wonder whether his 69-year-old voice might be failing, he pulled off a haunting Sound of Silence, alone with his guitar, in the semi-darkness without a hitch. The Fillmore theatre hands out free apples and specially designed posters for sold-out shows; a nice bonus. I love this one with the art deco-esque feel!

Four-Part Bento

Four-Part Bento, a photo by sherimiya ♥ on Flickr.

Today's bento has rotini pasta with sauteed baby portobellas, chicken sausage and wilted spinach, roasted asparagus, steamed broccoli, carrots, grapes, a mini mandarin, more (yellow and purple) carrots and a strawberry. We got a ton of these mini mandarins from the in-laws' yard, and the kids love them because they're so cute. I don't really like them much because the have seeds and they're kind of hard to peel. I much prefer satsumas, but we have to go through two huge bagsful still. Sigh. Unless I can get them to eat a bunch at breakfast and dinner, you'll be seeing them here a lot. These purple carrots are from L.A. as well, and you can see that the purple color goes almost all the way through the whole carrot, with just a small yellow core. The ones I usually get have just a thin purple skin. These looked nearly black on the outside. Very cool!

Did you notice my cool divided bento box? I found it at Ichiban Kan (I think Daiso carries it too); the brand name is Assist. It's made of hard plastic with two moveable dividers that you can intersect in three different ways -- to create 4 equal sections, 2 big + 2 smaller (which I've done here) or 2 big + 2 tiny. There are raised tracks molded into the box to keep the dividers from moving around too much. The top of this one is light blue, and it has a rubberized gasket seal as well as a rubber vent hole that you have to pull open before you can remove the lid. It seems to be pretty watertight. The one thing I don't like about this box right away is that there aren't any fingergrips to grab onto for opening the box. The lid and box are flush all the way around. I let MisterMan practice opening it before I let him take it to school, to make sure he could handle it. The nice thing about this box, though, is that it comes with an elastic band and a zippered fabric tote to carry it in. There are a few different varieties made by this company. If you live near an Ichiban Kan you might want to check them out. It also feels pretty solid, which is good for a lunchbag-swinging kid!

Chicken Sausage Zucchini Bento

Chicken Sausage Zucchini Bento, originally uploaded by sherimiya ♥.

First bento back after a long President's Day holiday weekend. Ours was kind of tiring: my hubz was working all weekend, MisterMan had a Kung Fu rehearsal and demonstration at City Hall, and I wanted to make a video with the kids since we had such beautiful weather. That may sound unremarkable, but it's a lot more "eventful" when you have no video-editing experience. Let's just say I'm exhausted after the weekend and am actually very happy to see it end for once! This double bento requires no real cooking; just a quick stir fry with sliced sweet chicken sausages, zucchini, mushrooms and kabocha squash. I put a couple of raw carrots in there, a spotted "mushroom" radish, lightly steamed broccoli and an array of fruit: strawberry, oranges and grapes. I finished both bento in half an hour. Woo! The radish was the most time-consuming because I actually couldn't remember how I cut the stem. I ended up whittling it so it had a nice flared edge. But the rest of the food was pretty much just tossed in. This is when the divided boxes really come in handy; you don't have to think about arrangement at all but it still comes out looking nice and neat. I likes that!