Basil Daisies Spaghetti Bento

Last week, Mr. Pikko asked if I’d read Buddy’s class recap. I hadn’t, so he informed me that they had all been asked to come up with ‘O’ words and then the teacher wrote them on the whiteboard. He goes over and sees words like ‘on’ and ‘one’ and then next to Buddy’s name is an extremely long word. The best he could make of it was ‘optometrician’. After I’d gotten over laughing at the thought that my husband thought this was a word (he says in his defense he knew, but thought Buddy didn’t), he told me that he eventually asked what that word was.

“Octomus Prim”

Which, in four year-old boy terms, is Optimus Prime. If you’re not up to date with your boy toys, he is the leader of the Autobots in Transformers. It cracked me up that he made his teacher write some strange version of what he thinks his name is on the whiteboard. That being said, I ain’t making no Transformers bentos anytime soon. I mean, have you seen what they look like? 🙁

Here is a spaghetti bento that I made earlier this week with some leftover spaghetti. Since I like to top my spaghetti with cheese slices, I used two different ones to make a couple of daisies. I added four fresh basil leaves underneath for some added flavor and to make my flowers look prettier.

For quite a while now, I’ve been making fresh garlic bread instead of using frozen bread. I find that it cooks 5x faster than frozen bread and I feel better about using fresher ingredients. I used to go online and look for recipes, but after a while I realized that it was so easy to do that I could just make it without any references.

I don’t have any process photos, but like I said, it’s simple.

Fresh Garlic Bread

Ingredients:

• 1 loaf French bread
• 1 handful parsley leaves
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1/2 stick butter
• 1 tbsp olive oil

Tools:

• bread knife
• fork
• bowl
• aluminum foil
• cookie sheet
• oven mitt

1. First, put the butter in a bowl to let it soften. Add the olive oil now if you like.
2. Slice the bread at a thickness you desire and lay them out on aluminum foil on the cookie sheet. Usually I only use half the roll for our family of four and there’s just about enough room on the sheet.
3. Finely mince the garlic and the parsley and add to the butter.
4. Using a fork, mash the butter and mix with the other ingredients. Spread on top of the bread. Make more if needed.
5. Set your oven to broil on high, making sure the rack is at the top, bringing the bread close to the coils.
6. Place the sheet of bread in and stand there and watch it. The butter mixture will begin to bubble and the edges will begin to brown. Be ready to take the sheet out fast! The bread will be toasted and done in about 1-3 minutes.

Notes: My oven doesn’t really cook the whole sheet of bread evenly, so I tend to bring the rack out, remove the cooked ones, and then put the tray back in to cook some more. Also, I pick the parsley fresh from the garden, making it even better!

And there you have it. Yummy, fresh, and fast garlic bread. It probably takes me about 10 minutes total to do everything from start to finish, but considering it takes 18 minutes to bake a loaf of Mama Sita’s frozen garlic bread, well, I’ll take this.