First Day of Spring Bento!

First day of Spring and of course it's gray and cloudy outside. So we'll celebrate with a cheerful bento! 

Inside our Yumbox: quartered cheese - tomato - lettuce - avocado toasted sandwiches (skewered because I saw trhe idea in Sarah Michelle Gellar's cookbook "Stirring Up Fun With Food" [I really don't have any affiliation with her or her publisher; I just happened to find a few cute ideas in there]😆), mini peppers stuffed with cottage cheese, sunflower seeds and a bit of granola, cara cara oranges, steamed Okinawan sweet potatoes, corn, radish ladybug, and chocolate raisins.

One nice thing about the cool weather is my sweet violets love it! Mine are the super fragrant pink "Rosina" variety. Happy Spring, friends!

Puppy Pals Mini-Sandwiches Ecolunchboxes Bento

These are the same Kings Hawaiian bread dinner rolls I used for the Hinamatsuri bento. Turns out they fit perfectly inside the Ecolunchboxes Solo Cube container too! Ham and cheese with lettuce sandwiches again for the little girl. This time I decorated the tops with cheese and nori for puppy faces. They are holding hands. Awww! The rest of the box contains: grapes, heart-shaped radishes, Okinawan sweet potato, blueberries, satsuma mandarin, and broccoli. I can get used to making these cute little mini buns bento. So easy and fun!

Mini Pita Bread Pocket Sandwich Bento

These little mini pita breads are just so cute; have you seen them? But they are pretty tough to fill with stuff. I had to make 6 of them for TinySprite here. These are sardine-yogurt-pickle relish-filled (hey! Don't knock it till you've tried it; it's pretty good with hot sauce too). I put tiny lettuces in there for color, and topped off with grape tomatoes and a couple turns of fresh cracked pepper. The other side of this cute orange polka-dot bento box contains blood orange sections and steamed Okinawan sweet potato. I think I got this box at Daiso a long time ago - they came in different shapes, sizes, and colors.

Mummy Musubi and Ghosties Bento

Mummy Musubi Bento, originally uploaded by sherimiya ♥.

We're coming up on the last couple days of Halloween bento, so bear with me and we'll soon be back to normal. But I really wanted to use this mummy idea since string cheese really does look like gauzy mummy wrapping, doesn't it? And since my boy has recently informed me he likes "raw" cheese now, I get to try it! I made a rice ball with black rice and criss-crossed some thin string cheese strips on top. Since the rice was warm, it melted on a little bit and needed no other fastening. Have you ever had rice and cheese? I haven't, but he said he liked it. I made some eyes with pink and purple carrot discs -- nothing could be easier. Voila: mummy.

This was accompanied by a piece of luscious misoyaki butterfish leftover from dinner the night before. I really love this fish; I think it's another one of my top ten foods of all time. I used the recipe here but this time I marinated for over 48 hours, only possible if you can procure a very fresh piece of fish. I got mine from my local farmer's market, and it was delicious. I used to think it was called butterfish due to its buttery texture; it melts in your mouth and has a very silky quality.

TinySprite is a fan of the fish too, but I decided to give her something a little more user-friendly. While her brother can neatly and deftly handle all kinds of food types, she's a little more, um, hands-on -- so the easier the food is to manipulate, the more she can end up actually eating. I made cutout ghost sandwiches with ham and cheese, and stuck some mini chocolate chips as facial features. There's also a persimmon jack-o-lantern along with carrots, broccoli, purple cauliflower, tomatoes, grapes and apples -- just as in her brother's bento. Double bento --> done!