Happy Bento! Lunches On the Go Book Giveaway

Today I'm happy to be sharing a bento from a new cookbook, Happy Bento! Lunches On The Go, by Anna Adden - and giving a copy away too!

There are a lot of bento ideas packed into this little book! And when I say little, I'm only referring to it's bento box sized dimensions of 15cm square... it's filled with 50 fun bento recipes covering themes for every season, holiday, special school days, & more.

Happy Bento! : Lunches On The Go is more of a how-to book than a traditional cookbook. It also features a guide to bento supplies, packing tips, & lists places to shop for bento gear. The author has spent several years building her own bento gear stash and shows how she organizes it all. The bento recipes are sorted into chapters according to theme. Each recipe lists the supplies needed, ingredients, & directions, however food amounts are not specified, so nutritional content is not given.

Bento makers who wish to replicate the bentos within will benefit from having a fairly extensive collection of bento tools and accessories, as most of them call for specific cutters and/or decorations to complete the theme... but those just looking for ideas and who don't mind deviating from the author's designs will find plenty to inspire them!  Anna demonstrates a variety of different techniques accompanied by detailed directions:

My girls & I chose to make the Spring bento.  The specialty tools needed for it were flower egg molds & a flower stem bento pick, which we have - and we even have a bento box the same size & shape as the one in the book!

I had never made carrot curls! Anna's step by step instructions were clear though & it was easy! I love how they look as flowers.

We made a few changes to the bento ingredients - no beans because my picky sproutlets said no way, grapes instead of blueberries, and watermelon instead of cantaloupe, because that's what we had in the fridge.  It's all good. Here's my Spring bento next to the Happy Bento one :)

I learned something while colouring the tulip egg - always mix the food dye before placing the egg in the water! I started out all right, mixing a drop of red & yellow to make an orange tulip, then adding the egg to the dye water - but then I decided to add another drop of red to make it a darker orange, and you can see streaks where the dye swirled in the water :)

Ah well, if you've ever been to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival (near where I live) you know that there actually are variegated tulips in just those colours :) Oh, and at my sproutlet's request, I coloured the center of my flower with food markers rather than exposing the yolk as in the example in the book. My girls were very happy with the Spring bento they got to share :

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Enter my Happy Bento! Giveaway:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The winner will be drawn & announced August 22nd. Check back here, follow me on Facebook, or check your email to see if you've won - the winner will have 48 hours to respond & claim their prize before I draw again!

Don't want to wait or take your chances? Happy Bento! : Lunches on the Go is available at Amazon.com & book sellers everywhere.

Disclosure: Other than a complimentary copy of the book to review, I received no compensation for this post. This post does contain affiliate links to products I used.  

Spring Blossoms for Birdie

Birdie got a pretty Spring bento lunch today:

She has a blossom egg (made with the flower egg mold I posted about here) , Spring Ritz crackers, cheese blossoms, and honeydew melon grass. It's not a whole lot of food but remember, she's only a preschooler :)

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 Today is a great day for Birdie & me - she slept all through the night, in her own bed! Yay! You may be thinking, so what, isn't she like 5, what's the big deal? Yes, she is 5, but it's a big deal for us, as she's been waking me up every night since her Dad deployed and I'm tired! But not last night, hooray!

I added a Lunchbox Love note to tell her how proud I am of her :)

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Some stuff I used to make this lunch:

Spring Is Here!

Here's a Happy Spring bento full of blossoms & bugs! A ladybug egg, Spring Ritz crackers,  tomato,  Babybel cheese, raspberries in a dragonfly silicone cup, & Yoplait Go-Gurt, packed in EasyLunchboxes, with Lunchbox Love.

Aren't these flower & critter Spring egg molds cute? 

They come in sets of two - bunny & ladybug, & tulip & blossom.

 

I'm not super keen on how my eggs turned out though, so have sent my set on to a bento blogger friend.  I think the ladybug would have come out nicer if the egg was a little bigger - it didn't fill the mold enough to imprint much detail.

Lunch is cute anyways :)

I sort of made the dragonfly cup...

I cut it from a silicone cake mold pan like this one:

The molds come in many colours - mine was purple. Purple & yellow are such Spring-y colours - like the crocuses & daffodils on our lawn :)

Happy Spring!

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Some stuff I used to make this lunch:

Egg Mold Egg-stravanganza! Featuring new CuteZcute Animal Palz!

Preschooler Birdie is loving hard-cooked eggs lately, and since she's pretty anti - meat these days, I've been making sure to include a protein-rich "eggie" in every lunch, & keep some ready-made to offer as quick healthy snacks. I use egg molds to make them fun shapes!

Egg molds are pretty easy to use: 

1. Hard-cook your eggs. I bring mine to a boil in salted water, then turn off the burner, put the lid on the pot, and let sit for 15 minutes.
2.  Peel while still warm. I peel mine under running water, I find it helps the the shell come off more easily.
3. Pop the warm egg into a mold. Sometimes you may need to do a little squishing, sometimes it may close easily - it's trial & error :)
4. Chill in the fridge, in the molds. I put mine in a bowl of ice water as soon as they're in the mold, to completely stop the cooking process so the yolks don't get a grayish ring, and speed up the cooling, in case I want to make more than one of the same shape. 
5. Once cooled, pop them out of the mold! Easy-peasy. Well, okay, they don't always come out perfect; I've made plenty of messy ones. Birdie doesn't care, and if it's really bad, egg salad is good too :)

I've learned that larger eggs work best, but since they vary in size, so do my results :) If the egg is too big for the mold, I'll trim a bit off the pointier end, or if it's on the small side, add a bit of paper towel underneath it to fill the gap. Or I don't worry about it - the sproutlets aren't harsh critics, and sometimes the results can be fun anyways!  I discovered by trial & error that a smaller egg in the star mold makes a blossom shape!

I hard-cook 4-6 eggs at a time and immediately mold them so I have a bunch in the fridge to choose from when I pack lunch in the morning, or for her to choose a snack after preschool.  Birdie can't read the words imprinted on the cubed eggs but she likes the square shape, and they are handy for when a monkey or a car won't fit my theme ;)

Sometimes I mangle the eggs while peeling them. If they are too messed up, they become a snack for me, or egg salad for the hubby. But if they're just gouged a bit, I pop them in a mold anyways, see what happens - they often come out cute anyhow. Like the lamb in the yellow cup below. That egg was a mess. But it came out of the mold looking all right!

As you can see, I've got a lot of different egg molds to choose from:

• Star & Heart
• Rabbit & Bear
• Fish & Car
• Egg & Bon Appetit Squares
• Hello Kitty
• Panda, Monkey, Lamb, & Bat

My newest egg mold, & my new favourite bento tool, is the CuteZcute Animal Palz that I used to make the panda, monkey, & lamb. It also makes an adorable bat! It's not only an egg mold, it's also a pocket sandwich press! So versatile, & simple to use, I love it. See how cute:

 

And the bat! Eek! I love the bat ♥ 

The CuteZcute Animal Palz set comes with all the pieces shown below. You can flip the base piece over if you don't want the CuteZcute name imprinted on your egg, then you have a flat surface on which you could even use food markers to draw your own creature or character!

 

Egg molds are not limited to eggs, either. Most of the egg molds shown can also be used to mold cute sandwich balls or rice balls (onigiri). And the monbento square molds double as treat boxes :)

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More egg molds added to my collection!

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The giveaway has ended.

I'm so excited about this new CuteZcute Animal Palz set that I want to share it with everyone! And BentoUSA has generously offered to help me out by allowing me to give away a set to one lucky reader ♥ 

And, 3 more lucky second chance winners will each get a set of either the heart & star, bear & rabbit, or fish & car egg molds!  It's an egg mold giveaway egg-stravaganza!

Thank you BentoUSA for sponsoring this giveaway & CuteZcute for an awesome product!