When I came back here from Japan about 2 years ago, I missed a lot of things. While usually I don’t fuss over food, I really miss Japanese healthy meals, products and lunchboxes (bento).

It didn’t took me long to find Asian market in George Street (there are few Asian shops around too), Asian supermarket on the other side of Jervis shopping center and place where to buy sushi rice not so far away from my house at Roy Fox in Donnybrook. I’m getting another 10kg rice pack today. I will use it over few months.

After half year of me being in Dublin, my daughter started school. She needed lunchbox everyday and it made me in real pain. First thing – I couldn’t find any good lunchboxes and second thing Irish don’t eat much hot food during lunch, but mostly sandwiches. I don’t think it’s healthy in any way. It’s hard to understand why main meal is in the evening at 6pm? It’s hard to sleep afterward!

So in search of perfect lunchbox I came across J-List site. I can spend hours on that site just looking at items. We ordered lunchbox with Hello Kitty. It was first late 3 weeks, but after a call they send it in next day. So I would say they don’t have too bad service. I gonna order from this site soon again, so if you want to order something as well, let me know.

Lunchbox is only start of my healthy lunches mission. I found yet another site Just Bento – which is completely great! All those recipes just wait for me to make them and I made few already.

But I still struggle with Irish healthy food policy. If everybody in school takes sandwitches, my kid feels left out as she has something different. So my next order from J-List will be with decorating things. For example, my daughter loves rice balls (onigiri), but I need some decorative set to make it cute. Cutness will win over the non-sandwich food. At least I hope so. Wish me luck with this!

I really wanted to go out today evening, but I wasn’t able to..

So I wanted to eat something sweet, but there was nothing on my sweet shelf. It is very important to never give up when you really want something to light your day.

I took some help from daughter and we cooked butter cookies.

This recipe is very easy. Everyone can make it.

You take 250g white flour and mix it with 100g sugar. Then you add 200g unsalted butter and form a dough. If it is too sticky, add more flour. If you like you can add cocoa or some nuts to it. Decorate cookies with different things such as confetti, food colors, poppy seeds, nuts, cinnamon, sugar etc. My daughter really enjoys decorating them. Put on the pan and in the oven on 200 C for about 10 min.

The best thing about this recipe is – you can eat the dough, because there is no eggs in it

Kids love to play with dough and can do it for hours (of course after that nothing is left to cook).