Daily Bento

For lunch today I packed a heart-shaped chicken sandwich. I just used heart-shaped cutters to cut the bread and then made the sandwich.

Next to the sandwich is a silicone cup full of bite-sized pretzels. Before you drive all over town looking for these pretzels, I need to tell you that these actually came from a bag of Chex mix. Cam won’t eat the cereal part so I pull out the pretzels for her. Then I eat all the cereal and other tasty bits. It’s a win win.

I also packed some raw broccoli with little flower-shaped colby jack cheese pieces and some sliced grapes.

Today I thought I’d mention a little trick that always works well for me. If you are using any sort of cutter to cut shapes out of bread, meat, cheese, and even veggies and your edges aren’t coming out as neat as you’d like, try this: Press your cutter down firmly and rub around in a circular motion at the same time. Doing this on top of a cutting board works best. This will help to trim your edges so they look crisp and clean.

Also, if you’ve been looking for the teeny food cutters that are super popular in bento-blog land, try looking for fondant cutters in a baking or craft supply store. If you’re in the U.S. check out Micheal’s and Joann’s Fabrics. Quite often there will be a 40%-50% coupon in the paper on Sunday. You can usually find a set of fondant cutters for around $3-$4 after coupon.