Bentoism

Packing lunches and love

Bentoist

Due to work and study, I am on hiatus until mid-2011. In the meantime, it's mostly take-outs and frozen lunches for me.

Gilaswan

I'm a FTWM to a little princess and wife to a wonderful man who absolutely loves my bentos! I bento primarily for him and when my princess eventually starts school, I'll bento for her too. Why do I do it? Just because it says, "I love you."

Therapy in cooking?

Frankly, I haven't the faintest idea what's got into me. For the last two days, when I should have been reading and catching up on homework, I have been cooking, and cooking, and cooking.

There is comfort to be found in the cramp, narrow piece of haven I call a kitchen. On an impulse, I grabbed broccolini, mushrooms and fresh squid instead of frozen lunches and cold cuts at the supermarket.

When I got home, I put on the music, shoved all study materials on my kitchen table onto a shelf somewhere and proceeded to cook my heart out. Without a real plan in mind, I surrendered myself to the familiar comforting motions of cooking.

First on the menu was steamed squid stuffed with ground pork, then the idea of deep-fried curry-spiced calamari followed along with pea sprouts with garlic, and herbal chicken soup. To others, these would probably be simple home-cooked dishes, yet for me, with the wonderful time-out from studying and working, it felt like a feast to the soul.

Even tonight, despite common sense telling me I'm probably behind on my assignments this week, I could not resist cooking up a three-course meal of brocollini, more deep-fried curry-spiced calamari and mapo tofu. And there are even enough left over for tomorrow's bento.

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Hello Kitty Sealed Sandwich

It's the school holidays again!

This morning, we took LV to the Botanic Gardens for a runabout with her granduncle and grandaunt. Packed a sandwich for her to take along in case breakfast turned out to not agree with her (she's getting more discerning in her tastes and seems to be going through a bread-only or rice-only phase).


Just last week, we took LV down to Chinatown. I was in search of buttons and ribbons for a craft project and could not find any. Instead, we ended up at Kai Kai Gifts and much as I said I had nothing to get, I ended up buying this Hello Kitty sandwich sealer and another similar one, but of a car. The sealer comes in 4 parts actually - a sealer base and top, a cutter, and this stencil you see here which fits over everything. It's pictured here after I was done sprinkling Milo powder over it.


And here is the final product! It's filled with egg mayonnaise, and LV enjoyed it very much. She's seems to enjoy having her "Kitty Sandwich" at mealtimes and rather looks forward to the treat. It so happened I had a matching Hello Kitty die-cut bento box and the sandwich fit really nicely into it, so everything just came together so prettily, I felt I had to share it!

Friends reading this in Singapore may wish to note though, that I used Japanese-sized bread slices for this sandwich. Regular bread loaf slices (a la Gardenia or Sunshine bread) here measure only 10x10cm. This sandwich sealer (as with other similar square sealers you may see online) is made for the Japanese (and I suspect also US) standard, which measures about 12x12cm per slice. I got my loaf from Provence, a Japanese bakery in Singapore. Their 8-slice loaf costs SGD$2.40. I think. Or could be SGD$2.80. Thereabouts.

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