Bento-ing again

I start to put effort to make pretty bentos for QQ again. So inspired by motheringcorner.com, I hope to be able to create presentable meals for my little one. She still prefer to eat only meat, and bread is still her favourite. It is not easy to decorate a nice lunch box without any greens. I hope by making her cute food, she will slowly likes to take more greens from now onwards.

Healthier Choice

When McDonald's introduced this McD Grilled Chicken Foldover, I did not try it out until very recently. That's because it looks very plain and doesn't look so appealing with so many fresh vege. But surprisingly, it really taste fantastic! Must really try this again one day :)

Cute sandwiches

A great way to eat your sandwich creatively. After spreading some butter and jam, we used the cookie cutters to cut our bread out into shapes. Cookies not only is very cheap, you can even get this easily from the sundry shop. In fact, it is a great way to encourage your kid to eat their sandwich too. For alternative, you can even put some ham or cheese in between the sandwiches.

Minced meat for our noodle

My nanny is so kind to offer to cook for us sometimes. Since it wasn’t raining this morning, we took the opportunity to do our marketing and got some raw materials for nanny to cook for us.

This minced meat comes really handy for our lunch. By just boiling some hot noodles, and add some meat, there goes our fast lunch.

Railroad for train

What do you normally do with the craft that your kids produce? Do you chucked them all into a box or just display them on your rack?

In this site, there are great ideas on how to turn our kids' beautiful craft into play. For instant, the match box train can be played on a homemade railroad. Visit the link on ideas how to do the Railroad play tray.

Mouse Nibble Bag

Create your own healthy junk food pack. A better way to get your little one to eat a delicious mix of nutritious nibbles!

You need
• a paper lunch bag
• crayons for colouring / decorating stickers
• scissors
• sticky tape
• healthy nibbles (see below)


Method
1. Cut a brown paper bag in half and make two small bags using the bottom half of the original bag (cut in half) and some sticky tape.
2. Decorate the bags with a theme
3. Fill up the bags with your choice of healthy nibbles

Nibble ideas: Pop corns, mini cookies, dried prunes, dried apricots, marshmellow, banana chips, peanuts, cashews, Japanese rice crackers, sunflower seeds, or anything you can find in your house

Ideas from Kidscraftweekly

Pretty dolly napkins

Materials: Color paper napkins, glue, scissors, paper doilies

Method:
1. Fold the paper napkins into half.
2. Cut out a shape of a little dress or rompers
3. Open them up and glue cut doilies to create collar.


* This will add to a personal touch for your table setting. For variation, you can use pink napkin for baby girl and blue napkin for baby boys.

Sailing muffin

How about doing a craft that is related to kids food? Here is how we did it.

Materials: home baked muffins, teddy bear cookies, food stick, printed out boat template, scrap papers, staple, glue

Method:
1. Fold printed out template. Staple them up into a boat.
2. Glue some colorful scrap papers to the boat.
3. Use the sharp food stick and poke through the scrap, creating a flag.
4. Stand the flag onto the muffin.
5. Decorate the muffin with some teddy cookies :)

Worm Jelly

This is a great menu for kid's party and very simple to do. It can be prepared in advance a night before the party.



Method:
1. Make chocolate jelly in small clear cups.
2. Make sure the surface is rough (so that it looks like soil)
3. You might wanna add some gummy worms while the jelly is still soft
4. Add some more gummy worms on top before jelly is served.

Baking Tool

After spending months on my baking experiment, you will be surprise to find that until today I still do not have the baking utensils, what’s more a good oven. The tools can be very expensive, and since Qiqi’s nanny who is staying just next door have everything, so me and Qiqi usually have our baking projects over there and we enjoy the delicacy with nanny’s family.
Most of people I know here use stove ovens and I still remember once a good friend of mine actually advise on getting a good one. Surprisingly good ovens like Whirlpool Ovens can produce better cake texture as compare to the simple ones.

Tutti Fruity Yogurt

How about a healthy snack for your little one's tea time? Or a trick to get your little one to eat their fruits?

Food you need
1. Fruits your child can eat (apples,orange, grapes, cherry, watermelon)
2. Dried fruits (raisins, apricots)
3. Yogurt cup from supermarket

Method
1. Let your toddlers cut up those fruits into pieces. If your child is too young to handle cutting, u can cut the fruits into little pieces for them
2. Let them choose their own fruits and mix with some yogurt.

Funny Rice Cracker

There's nothing quite so enjoyable as craft that you can eat! Choose food that your little one really likes and make these terrific savoury crispbread faces.

Food
• Big Japanese plain rice crackers
• spreadable cream cheese or jam
• grated carrot
• alfalfa sprouts
• sliced cucumber

Method
1. Spread a layer of cream cheese, or some other spread (like peanut better, vegemite, almond paste, halva) on the rice crackers
2. Then decorate with add hair, eyes, nose, mouth.
3. When you've finished, gobble them up!

Ideas and photos from Kidscraftweekly