Bent on Bento

My son Ethan is an extremely picky eater.  He doesn’t like meat, vegetables, fruits…he only likes rice with soy sauce or gravy.  I have had to sneak in pieces of meat just to make him eat some, but most of the time, he would insist on inspecting the food before putting it in his mouth.

It is my fervent hope that creating nice-to-look-at bentos for his meals would entice him to try new foods, and hopefully make him eat more nutritiously.

So yesterday evening, I decided to make him a nice bento dinner.  I frankly don’t have any tools to create cutesy shapes for kids so I had to create something from what little items I had.  So I whipped up this simple car bento (made from steamed rice) in about 30 minutes (took a little bit longer because I had to mould the car into shape without the use of a car mould!).  The wheels of the car are decorated with cheese slices and boiled carrot slices, whilst the windows are made from steamed minced pork and egg, which my Mom made.

I added some grapes with food picks to make it interesting, and I put some soy sauce in a mini bottle so my boy could have some fun pouring it over his rice. 

I used a Donald Duck bento box and Ethan was just so excited when he saw it!  He wanted to open it right away!

The first thing he did was to put one grape in his mouth!  But he did not eat it though – he merely played with it…

However, he enjoyed pouring the sauce on his rice, and although he still picked out the meat and did not touch the cheese and carrots, he at least finished most of the rice.  He was very distracted by the Donald Duck box though…do you think I should use something less distracting the next time?

Toddlers & Kids carrots, cheese, grapes, pork, rice

I decided to be creative and came up with homemade cheeseburgers over the weekend. I loosely followed Chef Michael Smith’s recipe for Cheddar Cheese Burgers, and with 1lb of organic beef, I managed to make 6 not-too-large burger patties.

We had burgers for our meals on Sunday, and today, hubby had a Cheeseburger bento for lunch.  In the morning, I put a little bit of butter in the sesame seed buns, took the burger patty from the fridge, and placed it in between the buns.  Then I microwaved them for about 16 seconds.  Next, I placed a slice of cheese, a slice of tomato, some lettuce leaves and some mayo in betwee.  I secured the cheeseburger with a foodpick, added a packet of tomato ketchup and there…I had lunch prepared!

Instead of fries, I threw in some Ranch-flavored chips, and I also added some grapes for dessert. 

I asked my hubby if he wanted a double cheeseburger (2 meat patties), but he said I could have the other one, so I had the same thing for my lunch today 🙂

Making burgers at home might seem like a great idea, but it isn’t completely so.  I didn’t use a grill, so I panfried the burger patties, which resulted in my whole stove and kitchen becoming rather oily.  And I certainly didn’t like that.  The next time I make burger patties, I’d bring them to a barbecue for outdoor grilling instead!

Adults beef, burger, cheese