Bento Baby

I'm bento crazy. I love them, I love playing with food, I love eating things that aren't normally lunch food and I love all the cute paraphenalia that surrounds Bento.

I'm on a healthy eating kick at the moment and my daughter loves to copy what I do, so I've been making most of her lunch in bento-style too. Her being obsessed with My Neighbour Totoro also helped fuel the fascination as Mai has a bento lunch in the film.

I don't like fish, or sushi, or seaweed..but I like the format, so I've just been playing with the kinds of food we like. It's also a really useful way to use up leftovers, and to persuade little 3 year old girls to eat food they'd normally ignore ;)

Here are some of my recent lunches.






And one especially for Abi - she really likes fishfingers. This was a treat lunch for being such a good girl that morning.

New obsession alert

Well, anyone who reads my blog can see it's often a bit of a photo dump. I love taking photos, and have progressed in the last two years from someone who takes them occasionally to taking random images most days.

Becoming a parent has made imortalising moments important to me, and the creation of this blog has made me want to share my gardening, cooking and other randomness with the world.

After some research into DSLR's, a discussion about how much we really can't afford one and my stubborn pouty face appearing it had been decided that it would be on the list for birthday/christmas/coming into some money soonish. I was discussing the merits of DSLR's with a good friend when she offered me an old SLR that she had bought at a boot sale and never got working. So I got hold of this little beauty.

A Zenit TTL - circa 1960-65.

The first roll of film was eaten due to a dodgy sprocket on the film feed when it came to removing it. The second roll of film suffered some exposure with the same dodgy sprocket when it came to putting the film in. Out of the first 48 images taken, 11 are ok. The mechanism is now sorted, and I think the film should be safe on loading/removal.

I think I'm in love with this camera. The heavy clunkiness of the camera itself is comforting and the slightly grainy viewfinder really forces you to look at your subject. I'd become a very lazy photographer, hardly using the viewfinder and just taking lots of images to get one or two usable ones. Due to not being able to get immediate access to the Zenit images I have to try and do the best I can straight away.

Thank you Em, I adore it. Steve thanks you too for saving us some money this year ;)