Off to PAX Prime 2010!
September 2, 2010
Posted by AnnaTheRed in Everything else add a comment
I’m off to PAX (Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, WA)!
My boyfriend and I are at the airport right now. As usual, I spent my night before the big event sewing, packing, cleaning, and not sleeping at all. (I did take a nap though) I guess I will never learn…
I was just too excited to sleep!
My cat wasn’t amused by the fact that we wouldn’t be home for the next couple of days.
Where do you think you're going?
I’m taking my netbook, and I’ll try to post some photos on my blog/flickr, but PAX is usually super fun/packed with events/fun/tons of games to play/fun/so many panels to visit (average of 30-40 minutes in a line for a panel!)/oh and did I mention ‘fun’?… so I might pass out as soon as I come back to my hotel room each day.
BUT! I will definitely upload photos on my twitter as much as possible!
You can follow me here -> http://twitter.com/theannathered
non-bento #26: the very hungry caterpillar
August 25, 2010
Posted by AnnaTheRed in bento blog (all), bento blog - american, bento blog - non bento Tags: avocado, sushi, the very hungry caterpillar
6 comments
When I did the Bento Contest for EpiCute and My Food Looks Funny site, I saw some very interesting requests. And one of them was the Very Hungry Caterpillar. I thought it’d be a bit too easy to make a bento of it, so I didn’t pick it. But it turns out my boyfriend loved the book as a child, and that was enough reason for me to make it with food!
The local market I always shop at has a decent fresh fish selection and they also have a little sushi counter where a guy makes sushi and sells them in a package. When I was looking at it, this idea came to my mind.
Non-bento #26: The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Created and eaten on: 8/21/2010
For this, I decided to try using the hangiri (wooden shallow bowl to mix sushi rice in) I got recently. Hangiri literally means “cutting rice.” Because when you mix the rice for sushi, you move the spatula to cut/slice rice sideways rather than “mixing” it. I always wanted to get one of these so I was happy to find this one at Sunrise mart (Japanese supermarket) in NYC. I don’t make sushi that regularly, so this was good enough for me.
It's up to 3 cup of rice, comes with a wooden shallow bowl, two spatulas and two sushi roller. It was $19.99, and you can also buy it from Amazon.com too.
*If you’re serious about making sushi and considering buying a hangiri, make sure you buy the one made with cypress. The one I bought is made with pine, which is a lot cheaper than cypress, but it won’t last as long as the one made with cypress.
The spatulas and sushi roller that came with it were very small. I was wondering why, but then I realized it was for “hand rolls” as you can see in the package. Duh.
On the left: The spatulas and sushi rollers that came with it. On the right: A regular spatula and sushi roller.
I wet the hangiri first, then dumped the freshly cooked rice in it. I cheated and used the sushi rice powder though. (for those who want to make sushi rice from scratch, check out “how to make sushi rice.”)
The rice came out definitely better than the rice mixed in a metal bowl. It’s very easy to mix rice in a shallow big space without crushing rice grains. Also with a regular bowl, even if you wet the bowl, some rice still stick to the bowl. But with the wooden hangiri, the wood absorbs the moisture so the rice won’t stick to it at all.
This really isn’t meant to be a how-to post, but I took some pictures as I made it, so I’m going to post them here.
I put avocado, fake crab meat, and scallion inside this time, but I don’t think there are any rules to what you can put inside. (Sorry for some photos being a bit orangey. We didn’t use the lighting kit we have this time.)
Put sushi rice on the half of seaweed.
Put it upside down on a plastic wrap.
We put avocado, fake crab meat and scallion inside this time.
And roll it!
Take off the plastic cover, and carefully put thinly sliced avocado on top of the roll.
Cover it with a plastic wrap.
And very gently roll it again. (Don't squish the avocado.)
You definitely want to use the sharpest knife you have. I cut it with the plastic cover on so I could hold the roll as I cut it.
After you cut the roll, carefully place them onto a plate just like the Very Hungry Caterpillar.
No special technique involved! Just make a wave with the avocado roll.
And make a small sushi with tuna, make the eyes with egg sheet (see “how to make an egg sheet”) and lettuce, cut seaweed for the mouth, and purple cabbage for antenna. If you don’t have an egg sheet ready, you can also use cheese.
He looks kind of surprised than hungry. Maybe he realized that he's the one that gets eaten this time.
I cut seaweed for his tiny little legs.
This very hungry caterpillar sure makes me hungry.
Even his cute little butt looks tasty.
The avocado we picked was maybe too ripe. Ripe avocado is melty and tasty, but very fragile and starts to change its color rather fast.
I know lemon juice is known to preserve avocado’s color, so maybe I’ll try sprinkle some on avocado next time.
I didn’t really make anything special for this Very Hungry Caterpillar dinner. I just put them in a certain way, and added a couple of things for his face and legs. If you’re feeling super lazy, you can even buy avocado rolls! 
You can use a mini tomato for his face if you aren’t into raw fish. We also made salmon and tuna sushi addition to the Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s amazing how cheap it is to make sushi at home.
Were we still hungry after eating the hungry caterpillar, dozen pieces of salmon sushi and dozen pieces of tuna sushi? NO. We were stuffed. We actually couldn’t finish them all that night and ate them next day. But we know we can always get hungry for the very hungry caterpillar any day. Especially my boyfriend!
As I mentioned in the beginning, there are some very interesting requests on EpiCute and My Food Looks Funny sites. Maybe I might try making them later!
For more pictures of my bento, visit Bento! set and Bento details! set on my flickr page.
Farmers’ Market
August 22, 2010
Posted by AnnaTheRed in Everything else Tags: farmers' market
2 comments
PAX is less than 2 weeks away!
YES! My boyfriend and I are going to PAX Prime in Seattle this year!
We were so extremely amazed, satisfied, and moved by PAX East when we went in March, we decided to go to PAX Prime, non-work related and completely for our pleasure. It’s going to be so much fun!!
I’ve been working on something to bring to PAX! But, I’m not sure if I can finish it, so I’m not going to post it here just yet to save myself from embarrassment… Besides, this is a bento blog, and I feel like I should write something food related for a change. 
My boyfriend and I are a 3 minute walk away from Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. We totally don’t take advantage of living so close to Grand Army Plaza like we should. They have farmers’ market every Saturday morning and you can get so much fresh local produce food there.
We usually sleep in on Saturday morning, but we got up early and went there last Saturday. The food we got there was so good that we decided to go to the farmers’ market again this morning.
I’m not going to lie. I don’t always know what’s in season. If you go to a regular supermarket, you can tell which food’s in season by a slight difference in price. But at a farmers’ market, it’s so clear and easy to know which food’s in season because you just see it EVERYWHERE! It’s perfect for a lazy food lover like me.
Peaches are in season!
We had some and they were absolutely amazingly juicy. You bite into a peach, and it kind of explodes with juiciness and melts away in your mouth. It was sensational.
Sweet corns are in season!
We boiled them, and ate it with a bit of butter and salt. It was very sweet.
Tomatoes are in season!
Unfortunately, we didn’t get any. There were just so many different kinds of tomatoes we’ve never even heard or seen before and we couldn’t pick one! We might look up a good recipes for tomatoes and get them later this week.
Heirloom tomato. It looks so pretty I don't think I can eat it.
Also this is one of my favorite pickles you could get at farmers’ market and also at Whole Foods.
Windy city wasabeans by Rick’s Pick. They’re not as hot as you’d think from the name. They’re crispy and you can’t stop once you start eating it. The Whole Foods at Union Square used to carry them but they didn’t have them the last time I was there. I got this one at the farmers’ market at Grand Army Plaza. They have so many different great pickles and you can get them online too! Go check out their site! (You can also check the list of their retail partners in your area.)
My boyfriend’s been making lunch for both of us recently, and he loves avocado.
Delicious avocado, turkey, lettuce, cheese and mayo sandwich by my boyfriend.
Scrambled egg and avocado on a toast by my boyfriend.
I feel spoiled but he looooves cooking and not lazy like I am. Maybe he’ll start making bento someday…
20 easy bento for kids!
August 10, 2010
Posted by AnnaTheRed in bento blog (all), bento blog - original Tags: 20 easy bento, parenting.com
13 comments
It may not seem to you like I’ve been making any food at all, but this is why!
Click on the image to go to the article on parenting.com!
A friend of a friend of my friend works for parenting.com and asked me if I was interested in making 20 bento for kids. I was hesitant at first because all my bento are for my boyfriend, and I had never made bento for kids… but I do like a challenge so I decided to do it.
The difficult part was I could only use rice for a couple bento. Most ingredients had to be easy to buy at a local supermarket. As you can see, no hot dog was allowed because hot dog is choking hazard and not appropriate for kids. So are whole grapes, whole cherry tomato, popcorn, nuts, raw vegetables, etc… (Read anti-choking guide on each page for more information.) The age target was 3~10, so I made very small bento, middle size bento, and biggish bento.
Click on each image to go to the article of the bento.
Bunny bento
Caterpillar bento
Tic tac toe bento
Jelly flower bento
Pizza bento
Train bento
Lion bento
Nest bento
Cat bento
Sheep bento
Bear bento
Hedgehog bento
Piggy bento
Cake bento
Tiger bento
Cow bento
Giraffe bento
Burger bento
Baseball bento
Panda bento
I also have a couple of how-to’s I did for this project. Click on the bold text to check out the how-to!
How to seal a sandwich – I made a lot of sandwiches for this project. I think sandwiches are easy to prepare for busy parents. Also you can put pretty much ANYTHING in “sealed sandwiches”! You can put hummus (as they suggest in the article), egg salad, small hamburg, even pasta! You can buy various shaped sealed sandwich makers from bento store online, but I used stuff in my kitchen to make it.
How to make a ham flower – Ham and a tiny piece of uncooked pasta (optional) can make a pretty flower!
How to make a jelly sandwich flower – If your kids love jelly sandwiches, try this!
How to make rusks – As I was making sandwiches, I realized that I had a lot of leftover crust. I didn’t want to waste it, so I used it to make a very easy sweet snack for kids. All you need is margarine, sugar and a little bit of cinnamon.
You may notice that I used something that I don’t usually use for for my boyfriend’s bento… silicone baking cups! Small ones are great for holding ketchup, peanut butter, small snacks, etc… and you can use the big ones to cook the food in and put it in a bento box. Omelets are very easy to make with a silicone cup too. You just mix the ingredients and bake it until it’s cooked. I also used silicone cups to hold different kinds of fruit, so that juice from fruits won’t get to other fruit. The best part is it’s reusable!
I have some regrets, and things I could’ve, would’ve, should’ve done differently or better… but it was a lot of fun, and great practice for me. 
All bento listed here are very easy, but some of the bento might take a longer than the others. If you never made a bento like these before, or a bento beginner, I have a couple of advices for you.
- Don’t try to re-make the entire bento. Just make one or two elements from each bento.
- Don’t stress yourself out on details! So what if your bear looks like a cat. The important thing is to make it with love.
- You don’t necessarily have to use the food you (or your kids) don’t like. Bento is like a training for you/your kids to eat small portion of various food, so it should be fun. (If you’re a parent, I’m sure you know how&where to hide the veggie in kids food. )
- Try making them with your kids or friends, and have fun!
I’d like to thank Ganda and Kathleen at Parenting.com for giving me this opportunity!
Go to the main page to check out 20 Easy Bento Lunch Boxes (at Parenting.com)!
For more pictures of my bento, visit Bento! set and Bento details! set on my flickr page.
IKEA hack!
August 9, 2010
Posted by AnnaTheRed in Everything else Tags: IKEA hack
6 comments
Once again, I haven’t been doing much bento making but I have a little surprise for bento loving people tomorrow. But for those who are just bored, read on!
We’ve been trying to “finish” our apartment since we got a little free time now. We moved into our place February 2009. We unpacked, got furniture and our place was 80% done within a week! Then a year and a half passed…
We were using an IKEA TV stand I got for free when I moved into my old apartment. It had four fixed shelves and it’s served its purpose, but if you’re a gamer and like to watch import DVDs like us, you know you need to have a media center that’s almost custom made for your Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, Wii, GameCube (which basically a decoration now), a multi-region DVD player, and all those plastic paraphernalia for the games to fit in it.
The most important thing about getting a TV stand for game consoles is ventilation. Game consoles get really hot!! The PS2 had an infamous problem in which the console would get so hot that if you were using it in a hot room, it’d just shut down. During the Summer my boyfriend used to stick his PS2 into the fridge for a while to cool it down before he could play it.
The second most important thing is accessibility. If you have your Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii hooked up to your computer and TV, you know how messy the space behind the consoles can be. If you have a back panel on the TV stand and a cord or wire gets loose, it’s a pain in the butt to fix.
We didn’t want to spend too much money on the furniture, so we measured almost all TV stands in IKEA to find a good TV stand. But the one we wanted to get was a bit too pricey for IKEA furniture ($250!!), and still not exactly what we wanted. So I searched around IKEAhacker.com and found the perfect solution.
The original hack was a LACK table with L-brackets which holds the middle section of consoles and electronic equipment with copper tape. (See the website for how they did it.) But I found out that the Container Store in NYC will cut their elfa wire rack for free. The elfa shelving system wasn’t exactly the cheapest option, but they are very sturdy, so we decided to splurge ourselves and paid about $11 per rack.
A little bit of drilling and screwing and voila!
For now, I only have the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii and PS2 in this hookup, but I'm going to put my multi-region DVD player and add another rack under the Xbox 360 and put a Wii fit board.
The rack from the side. (I will take care of the cords behind the table...)
I was originally going to use a screw and bolt to secure the wire rack onto the L-brackets, but I ended up using a wire because that's what I had in my toolbox. It works perfectly fine! If you don't move your electronics around too much, even a little twisty will do a good job.
I wanted to have the lower shelf be the same as the top shelf which is supported by L-brackets, but the first time I had the wire rack cut, I made a huge mistake, and it came out too short to use the L-brackets with. T_T “Measure twice cut once” had totally slipped out of my mind. I was a sculpture major in the School of Visual Arts, and I had built staircases, rooms, etc… so I was pretty embarrassed by this. But I didn’t want to waste the wire racks, so I bought 10-inch nuts and hung the shorter rack from the top rack, securing the rod with washers and bolts.
The mistake aside, I do like the industrial look. I might add L-brackets where the bottom rack is, and place wooden or metal rods across it to support the shelf's weight though.
Now, if you’re thinking of doing this, I want you to know one thing…
The legs of LACK table are hollow inside! The leg is made with 1/4 inch thick piece of particle board.
I realized this when I was pre-drilling the holes in the legs, and it was AFTER I already got the wire rack cut. I really wish the original hacker mentioned it in his hack. The wire rack is sturdy but not super light and the Xbox 360 and PS3 are pretty heavy. So I was worried that the screws on L-brackets would come out if I put anything heavy on it. I’m always worried about how much weight a screw/nail can hold, so maybe I’m just paranoid. It’s been a week, it’s not loose and it’s holding up fine. But I won’t recommend putting a bunch of heavy stuff on it. If you have the right tools, you can just cut a lighter wire rack or wood piece for the rack.
Anyway the total cost of this hack is…
TV stand with one rack
IKEA LACK table — $7.99 each
L-brackets — under $2.00 for 4 pieces
elfa wire rack — $11.99 (I had a 16-inch deep, 24-inch wide rack cut to 21 1/2 inch wide for the top rack)
Total — about $22 before tax
TV stand with two racks
IKEA LACK table — $7.99 each
L-brackets — under $2.00 for 4 pieces
elfa wire rack — $11.99 each
10-inch nuts, washers and bolts — about $10
Total — about $32 before tax
Even with the hollow legs, this little table is actually extremely sturdy. We have a 46-inch flat screen TV on it, but it won’t wobble at all. Just make sure you screw the legs onto the table really tight.
Since I’m doing my IKEA-hacked furniture, I’m going to post some pictures of my other hack.
When we moved in, I wanted to a get coffee table that had a lot of storage space. We have at least 2 controllers for each game console, and we wanted to keep them very close to our sofa. So we got this coffee table which has pretty big drawers on the both ends.
RAMVIK Coffee table - before hacking
But the problem was that I didn’t want to put this box-like coffee table directly on the floor. So we got legs from IKEA ($10 for 4 pieces, I used 6 pieces), and screwed them onto the bottom of the coffee table.
Hacked! Now off the floor!
It has a glass top and you could put your favorite photos, prints and such between the table and the glass top. But I wanted to display my boyfriend’s alphabet robot toys he has had since he was little. So I got a bunch of Rubik’s cubes online for very cheap, and put them between the table and the glass top.
They are very cheaply made, and not very good as Rubik's cubes, but they make a great and nerdy glass top riser.
Can you spot a wireless WaveBird? 
I love the drawers on this table. They’re HUGE and hold tons of stuff. The picture is the inside one of the drawers. These are only the half of controllers we have. I keep my boyfriend’s school journal from when he was 5~12 years old at the bottom storage part. It’s so much fun to read and look at his drawings.
The next one isn’t really a hack, but when we moved in, we also got this shoe bench thing from IKEA. I wasn’t crazy about the country look, so I decided to make cushions for it. First I bought foam and blue fabric. I found images of the stars and mushrooms from Super Mario Bros., blew it up, cut felt, sewed it onto the blue fabric. Then I made cushion covers with the fabric.
One side is a Mario mushroom.
The other side is the star.
I put a zipper so I can even wash the cover.
I like mixing them up though.
So yeah, a little tweak here and there can make your boring furniture unique and very practical! Don’t be afraid to modify your furniture, and more great ideas for IKEA hack, check out ikeahacker.com!
For more pictures of my IKEA hack, visit IKEA hacked furniture and other stuff! set on my flickr page.
