Beef Cutlet Bento (228)

Yesterday while eating breakfast, Baby Girl suddenly turned to me and exclaimed in utter amazement, “MOMMY! My hair is still cut!!!” I told her haircuts don’t go away and she looked up at me in wonder at my vast knowledge of the staying power of haircuts. I need to get me more of these looks, they do wonders for my parental self esteem.

Today was party day for Baby Girl, so I decided to make use of those Hello Kitty cookie cutters I mentioned the other day. One of the less frequent but equally annoying things I do is buy pretty cookbooks which I rarely use. I looove cookbooks but when it comes to what’s for dinner, I usually find myself on Google or All Recipes or Cooks.com or something. This time however, I decided to pull out my copy of The All-American Cookie Book. There’s a whole section dedicated to sugar cookies and I picked the one that looked the simplest, which turned out to be something called the “Watkins Sugar Cookies” recipe.

I bought this book several years ago (okay, maybe 5+ years ago) and I think this is only the second time I’ve used it. The dough didn’t taste that great, but the cookies were awesome! Definitely a keeper! Here are the cookies cut up:

They didn’t turn out that great baked as the faces were harder to see. My friend Erika suggested that it’s probably because I didn’t chill the cookies before baking. I did this only for the last batch, which would explain why those looked the best! That and I think I baked them a lil’ bit longer.

Mr. Pikko made some comment about the boys in her class having to eat Hello Kitty cookies, but he seemed to have no problem eating them himself. Thankfully, he knows better than to go hog wild on kid cookies, so he only ate two and he made puppy dog faces to get them both. He fell asleep before I finished baking the scraps. “You snooze, you lose” applied quite literally here, hahaha!

Today I ate beef cutlet for lunch. I cut the piece into small bite size slices then layered it on top of the rice. To add some life to it, I added little food dividers and then a carrot bottle. There actually isn’t anything in that sauce bottle and this is because I hate the way these carrot bottles look with soy sauce in them. They get all dark and brown, so I just put it in there for fun. In the cupcake cup I put corn and shelled edamame. For fruits I brought blueberries and cherries.

A few weeks ago I got an offer for some free sparkling water from Hansen’s Natural. I said ok and thought I’d get a few cans in the mail but instead I got this gigantor box of 24 cans of soda! LOL! They had some really interesting flavors (read more about it here) and I ended up trying all but the dragonfruit, mostly cause I had dragonfruit once and I felt as though I was eating dedrobiums. Anyway, my family not being real big soda drinkers with the kids all being so young and us having a sudden plethora of flavors to try, I brought this in to work. We all tasted whilst trying our best to ignore the taste of free (we didn’t want that biasing our opinions). Comments I got:

J: I preferred the sugar free simply due to the fact that it was zero calories. The regular 90 calorie drink just wasn’t worth it for me. For 50 more calories, I could’ve just had my Coca Cola Classic. The drink is a little sweet but I liked the carbonation as it made the drink last a little longer.

D: It was tasty but a little too much carbonation for me.

C: The diet drinks were light, refreshing, and tasted better then other diet drinks.I would prefer this to other diet drinks if they were of similiar size and cost.I don’t know how much they cost but they are smaller.

P: I liked the blueberry pomegranate (sugar free) one and I’d buy it.

While no one did cartwheels while drinking it, it was all gone within a couple of days. For myself, I liked the idea of having a healthier orange soda. I rarely drink soda, but when I do I usually prefer orange, grape, or strawberry now. Coke and Pepsi just make me feel horrible, probably due to the odd fact that I do not know how to burp. All burps I’ve ever made have been involuntary. I did not like the sugar-free ones at all, but I can’t stand ANY diet soda. My favorite of the 3 I tried was the cranberry-grapefruit. Anyway, many thanks to Hansen’s for the drinks. My office was tickled pink at trying out new products.

We’re having a baby shower here next week Thursday and I asked Baby Girl if she wanted in to come in to work with me to attend. She’s like, “No… I don’t want to take a bath at your workplace, Mommy.” LOLOL