Despicable Me Minions Bento Box

The best part of Despicable Me? Definitely the minions.

And as I was googling around to find out some more about them, I found out that...

...there's going to a Minions film! 

Coming in summer 2015.

Exciting!

For those of you who have read my blog for a while, you may know that I used to love making bento boxes (you can see some on the right). For those of you that are new (hello!), they are a popular Japanese lunch box, and often parents prepare children's ones with rice shaped like cartoon characters, with vegetables and fruit to decorate.

Olympics Sports Bento Box

On Saturday I went to see the (amazing) rhythmic gymnastics final, and whilst it did inspire me to dance and twirl, I didn't get much further than going into the splits before almost pulling a muscle. 

Graduation Bento Box

As graduation season rolls around (and is over for some), I thought I'd try to make that newly graduated 'Hello World!' feeling last that little bit longer, with a graduation related bento box =)

Doraemon Bento

I'm doing a post today because I've handed in my dissertation!

Hurrah! Let's celebrate!!!!

.........

.........

Okay celebrating done I never want to talk about my dissertation again four exams left am freaking out so moving on who wants cake? :D

Actually, better still, who wants to photos of a bento version of Doraemon? I do I do!

Panda Bento

Meet Pandi :)

Pandi was a present to me when I was 7, and as all imaginative 7 year olds are I gave him a very creative name, obviously =p Pandi has been with me through thick and thin, through when I was 10 years old and playing dens behind the sofa to coming to New York with me and being a lucky charm for my exams. So I'm dedicating this post to you Pandi! (You talk to your pet dog. I talk to my teddy bear. Same thing really, except mine doesn't come and sniff my bum. I think of that as a good thing :)

From baker to banker: I have a job!

A real job starting when I graduate next summer! A real, I have to move out and iron and hoover and pay taxes and worry about my pension kind of job, in which I have to try and use my "economic" knowledge (ha!) and do clever things (uuhhhh) kind of job! This is scary stuff. 

Like, responsibility? Woah.

So I shall try and pass on my *ahem* interview wisdom...

(skip straight to the next photo for just the bento making part)

p.s. I just showed this post to my dad in which he said 'they look kinda like monkeys'.
They are penguins. PENGUINS.

Bento Box: Walrus(es Law)

The title of this post is dedicated to all those Economists out there... you know who you are!

(It's something called Walras' Law, which says that excess supply in one market must be matched by excess demand in another so it balances out. Kind of like Ying-Yang. Kind of not.)

And to any budding Economists out there (you know who you are!) I challenge you to make this bento box before you apply for an Economics degree, see how dedicated you are ;)

Bento box: Froggy faces

It's Kermit The Frog! Or as my friend said when I asked him what he thought I had made this time, 'oh, that's obvious, it's Kermit The Toad'.

It's like that time when my other friend was reading the paper and asked 'what's a Wayne Rooney?'.

I love my friends :D

Bento box: Little Elves

This is my first post using a CasaBento bento box. It's adorable. Soooo adorable. Look!

Loook! :D

(It's the Little Kokeshi Hanako Bento Box in case you're interested).

Bento box: the Easter rice bunny and a hatching chick

Happy Easter everyone! I hope you are all prepared for the next week or so of bank holiday breaks, ice cream eating, and the inevitable sunburn.

Unless... you are like me and go to an Oxbridge university which does not recognise such a thing as a 'bank holiday', but you can still do number 2 and 3 :)

(in the library.)

I was originally going to make an Easter basket cake, as it would be quite interesting to try and weave a basket out of icing and see how that went, but then I saw Cooking-Gallery's blog, fell in love with the cutest bento boxes, and forgot all about cake.

From China With Love: Rice.

22/12/2020

So originally I said I was going to leave out the boring part where ‘we eat lots of rice’, but my friend wanted a post on it, in which I replied that I had already done one, but he was persistent, so I took up the challenge and wrote…an ODE TO RICE! Oh yes, you’d better believe it.


Ode To Rice
by Xinmei Wang, age nine…teen.

Oh rice, oh rice, why are you so nice?
You fill me with carbs but I guess that’s the price.
”I just made some rice dumpling, would you like to try it?
Oh, I’m sorry, you’re on a gluten free diet”.

It’s rice, it’s always rice! Can even make it into drinks,
Let it ferment, it’s alcohol in two winks.
Be careful not to boil too much, remember 8 cups is a lot,
It would be heart breaking just to see all of this rice rot :(

And rice, and rice, my bowl is full of you,
Wouldn’t have it any other other way, and that is the truth.
So dedicated am I, that I eat you with chopsticks,
Hope you appreciate that, I can’t use them for…toffee. (I know, let down, sorry)

Dear rice, dear rice, you’re so easy to make,
But saying that, you’re quite versatile to bake.
I can cook you in the oven and I can cook you on the hob,
I can even cook you in the microwave slot!

My rice, your rice, his rice, her rice,
That old lady who works at the checkout’s rice!
We all eat rice! We all love rice!
And now I’m at the end of the poem, if I say rice one more time I think I might die.

Authentic Chinese ‘sao mai’ – gluntinous (sticky) rice wrapped in wonton skin type things and steamed. Nothing like the Hong Kong version of ‘siew mai’, which doesn’t even have rice in it! :O

Lesson learned today: You can love the afore mentioned foodstuff, then write a poem on it and lose all craving to ever eat it again (note to self: never, EVER, write a poem on desserts).

Copyright Pudding Pie Lane 2011 at puddingpielane.blogspot.com

Birthday card recipe no. 8: Vik’s Cooking 101

This is obviously THE recipe of the cookbook. I mean, without it, I wouldn’t have been able to make Ayo’s Rice For All, Kcy’s Nasi Goreng (blog post to come), Jen and Luca’s spaghetti OR Florence and Britt’s amazing tomato pastaaaaa. And what would you have done without these amazing recipes to drool over and follow? Starve, probably.

I mean, Vik’s cooking class probably wasn’t the most challenging of the recipes (making it a. easy to photograph and b. easy to make. Oh and c. easy to snack on along the way – crackers=yum).

Birthday card recipe no. 6: Ayo’s Rice For All

There is a story behind this recipe (well…’recipe’ is a stretch). Our rations included three one kilo bags of rice, and we chief rationers calculated that to be 8 cups of rice for a meal, and overall we’d be able to have 4 of those meals. However, we didn’t really specify how big those cups were. I presumed we’d just use the cups we brought with us. Problem was that everyone’s cups ranged from small tea-sized-cups to massive travel mugs. Ayo’s cup happened to fall into the latter.

Surely a recipe that doesn’t even fill the whole page can’t take that long to make, photograph and blog?? Read on…