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Roast Pork Bento (318)

My two kids are increasingly hilarious together now that Buddy has really ramped up his speaking and imitation. I love that he’s already picked up that silly Hawaii speech habit of ending sentences with “yeah?”

For example, “Mommy, that bird flies fast, yeah?”

Baby Girl probably likes being able to have conversations with him too, but I found out last night that sometimes she’d just like him to shut up. I talked about her restrictive diet after the last visit to the allergist and now with a whole big list of foods she can’t eat besides nuts, Buddy has taken it upon himself to be her Food Police. He’s always telling us what she can’t have. Last night on the way home, he starts up again.

“Mommy, she cannot have nuts, yeah? Doctor said.”

Baby Girl had had enough and she started railing into him.

“Buddy, you are giving me a headache already. You keep saying again and again, I cannot have nuts. Doctor said. I cannot have nuts. Doctor said. I cannot have nuts. Doctor said. I cannot have nuts. Doctor said. I am so tired of you saying it over and over. You don’t have to say it so many times. I have a headache. Enough is enough!”

What? I mean, clearly some teacher has said this at school, but my jaw dropped open. I’ve obviously miscalculated the age at which children start speaking like they’re adults. I have further evidence of this by Baby Girl having recently taken up telling people that if they do [insert really annoying thing here], then she will be really fricking angry. Oops.

Anyway, on to lunch.

This is a recipe from What Hawaii Likes to Eat, which is a book that I don’t have yet, so I can’t share it with you all today. I’m pretty lame like that, huh? Grandma J made it and it was SUM ONO! (really good).

For today’s lunch I chose my Putifresh banana box and this time put in my  matching chopsticks. This bento contains the last of my February product reviews for From Japan with Love. Keep an eye out for more in March!

This bento took me about 20 minutes to put together, not counting egg boiling time. I had forgotten to do it the night before, so I just washed dishes while it cooked.

To start, I added some hapa rice to the top left corner. Next, I placed pieces of meat that I had broken apart into little chunks to make it easier to eat. You can use any meat here instead of what I used. Teriyaki beef or chicken, miso pork, tonkatsu, bbq meat, etc. Since I’d chosen a yellow box, I needed some green color and so I added three pieces of broccoli. Next the baby carrots went in.

In step five, I added a rabbit egg, dyed lightly pink with food coloring in water, though I didn’t have time to leave it in longer so you can’t really see the color that well. In the last step, I added two animal bubble sauce bottles. You can see in step five that I have two little pieces of carrot on the bottom. This was to hoist up the pink koala bear bottle as it wasn’t displaying nicely. I plopped an ume in front of the green one and then added a couple of pieces of parsley near the pink one. The green bubble has soy sauce for my boiled egg and the pink one has ume dressing for my carrots.

The bubble sauce bottles come in a set of four colors with four different animal tops including a penguin, bear, koala, and frog. The package comes with a little sauce filler that you use to suction up the sauce and then squeeze into the bottle.

Sorry for the crappy photo, but after failing to locate my third arm, I had to ask Mr. Pikko to take this and he was in the bathroom, which has really yellow light. This took a while with the dressing because it has little chunks of ume in it so it got stuck quite a few times. On the other hand, the soy sauce was extremely quick and easy to do.

The sauce bottles were a nice touch, I think I like them better than the usual veggie ones because for one, they’re kind of translucent and with the little animal up top that doesn’t get filled up with sauce, you don’t have to worry about the cute part being discolored like how the little carrot bottles turn brown when you fill them with soy sauce or ketchup. I hate that! These bottles can be purchased through From Japan with Love.

I hope you all have enjoyed the product reviews I’ve done this month. When I first started bentoing I bought a bunch of supplies and I really had no idea how to use them. Hopefully my lunches and tutorials help you to have a better understanding of how to best use them to enhance the look of your bento.

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