Regular Show Benson Bento!

My 12 year old, Beanstalk, loves Cartoon Network's Regular Show, so when my fellow bento lunch maker & friend Lauri suggested making Regular Show bentos for the birthday of her friend who voices Rigby the Raccoon on the show, I immediately thought of my gumball machine Lunch Punch sandwich cutter to make Benson, the Park Manager :)

Benson is a peanut butter sandwich, with details made of cherry fruit leather, mozzarella string cheese, & sugar sprinkles. His name is spelled with alphabet bento picks stuck in the remainder of the mozzarella cheese stick I used for his details. On the side is a checkered Granny Smith apple and some seedless red grapes - which kind of look like Benson's gumballs, I think! 

Happy Birthday William Salyers, voice of Rigby!

Benson says you'd better enjoy this bento, or you're fired!

Linked to:

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Stuff used to make this lunch:

C'est monbento!

Look, a new bento box! And it's French, ooh la la :)

Monbento sent me one of their MB Original Bento boxes - it's so nice! 

I packed a pretty garden salad, a square hard-cooked egg, and leftover lasagna embellished with cheese words I cut out with my alphabet bento cutters. The lasagna was frozen so it kept the salad chilled :)

The two-tiered MB Original bento box consists of two stackable 7" x 3.5" bento boxes with sealing vented intermediary lids, a removable divider, a top lid that leaves enough space for utensils, and a wide elastic bento strap: 

Things I like:

• The lids to the monbento's tiers fit together really easily and securely, they don't need the bento strap to keep them on, and do not leak. The two tiers do need the included elastic strap to keep them together but are perfectly functional individually. 
• It's has a real feeling of quality to it, very solid. I don't see the monbento warping, denting, or cracking easily.
• It's stain resistant! My tomato sauce washed right off, even after it was reheated in the microwave !
• It's microwaveable, with neato steam vents that let you keep the inner lid on while heating, to prevent spatter. No mess!

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The monbento line also includes matching cutlery & spill-proof sauce cups:

And this is fantastic... monbento has a Customize Your MB Original option! Look, I made one to match Bent On Better Lunches:

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It's hip to be square!

I made the square egg shown below using monbento's fun square egg mold. Simply pop in a warm shelled hard-cooked egg, snap the lid closed, and let cool. Each set includes one embossed with the word egg, the other with BON APPETIT. As egg sizes differ, it won't always make a perfect square, but close enough :) I've also used my square egg mold as a treat box in a bento!

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Some other stuff used to make this lunch:

Meatless Monday Made By Mia Bella

With less than a month until she goes back to school, Mia Bella declared she needed to get practicing making lunch for herself.  At first she wanted to make a High School Musical bento, but decided spelling it out would be too many picks in one lunch, so she went with a theme of music & love instead ♥

Bella made a compact disc peanut butter sandwich stamped with musical notes & double hearts, embellished her tomatoes with heart, star, & musical note bento picks, and spelled "MUSIC" in her cantaloupe.

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It's Bento For Kidlet's first Meatless Monday of the new school year! Bella's musical love bento is indeed meatless, so we're linking up to that, and since she packed it herself, we're also linking it to the Bento Kids Linky Party :)

 

Stuff Bella used to make her lunch:

Shark Week! in yubo lunch box :)

Hooray, it be Shark Week! The sproutlets are loving all the shark specials on Discovery Channel this week. And I had grand plans to make shark-themed lunches all week... but don't hold your breath waiting for that to actually happen - especially since I already missed yesterday ;) I did make shark sandwiches for lunch today though! Pictured is 6 year old Sprout's, in her yubo lunchbox:

Sprout's peanut butter sandwich shark looks ready to jump out of a jumbo silicone cup.  Strawberries & carrots fill the rest of the large yubo container. The small containers above hold berry blue gelatin topped with a gummy shark, and greek yogurt tinted blue and topped with shark sprinkles. I bought extra yubo containers so I could pre-fill a bunch and store them in the fridge, ready to grab & go, and I chilled the whole batch of gelatin right in those.

I used a couple of the shark sprinkles to make the shark's eyes,  and cut the mouth out with a tiny triangle cutter, over & over. The open-mouthed shark sandwich design came from this Jaws Bento by Sakurako Kitsa. 

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Basically Yummy Real Life Lunches

Guess what? I'm a real mom. I don't have an assistant, a nanny, or a fancy kitchen. (I wish!) My kids are real, and sometimes a real pain ;) I get what real life is. I get that not everyone has the time, the skill, the creativity, or the desire to pack artistic bentos. I sometimes lack some or all of those things myself! (It's true.) I'm no supermom - I'm just a regular, real mom, who sometimes takes the time to pack super lunches and blog them :)
But not always!

I also pack plenty of plain, basic lunches, that I don't bother or have time to photograph, and my sproutlets are just as happy eating them. Or not! Making lunch cute does not guarantee it will get eaten! But it's fun - most of the time. On the days that it's not, I'm glad I have cute bento lunchboxes. Somehow they can make regular food look appealing just by their design!

My 6 year old, Sprout, chose what went into the Yumbox lunch above. We ate lunch at home so I just used the inner tray. It took minutes to make, including the time it took to sprinkle & swirl a little coloured sugar on the greek yogurt, at her request. The sproutlets often ask if their lunch has a theme, and if I say no, they like to come up with one themselves if they get a chance to see it. 

Sprout dubbed this one "Summer Yummer" and happily ate it all :)

Something I like about our Yumbox is the properly portioned sections that make remembering to include all the food groups really easy. And Sprout is learning how to pack a healthy lunch when she helps choose what goes into them! She named this bento "I Heart My Lunch".

I'd call this lunch pretty basic too... unless you count that one little heart pick & the heart-shaped granola bar as artistic... and I don't ;)  To be honest,  it's heart-shaped because when Bella didn't finish her Clif bar a couple of days earlier I didn't want the rest to go to waste, so I pressed the uneaten bit into a cookie cutter and saved it :) Lunch recycling!

Yumbox is currently sold out, but will be back in stock very soon, so you can still add it to your Amazon Wish List! We've got the Pomme Green and since it's one of Birdie's favourites I'm sure we'll be adding the Framboise Pink too :