During this time of year usually I would like to spend a few days in Jakarta because this is the best time living in Jakarta, with so many people leaving town the traffic is very quite, but still it’s very crowded if we go to malls or restaurants during dining hour. But since I rarely enjoy having restaurant meals these days, I just cook for myself and my family at home although I have to admit that while I enjoy cooking, I don’t like cleaning the dishes, so I just cook some simple menu to avoid washing too many dishes.

After spending a few days at home we usually go to visit my parents house in Bandung, it’s only 2 hours drive from home. Usually the house will be very crowded since all my brother and sister and my nieces are there, Jojo usually is having a very good time there playing with his relatives. As for me, I still have to cook; while at home I only need to cook for 3 persons, there I need to feed a dozen. Base on last year experience, now I need to bring all my knives, cookwares, and all of my kitchen spices so I can cook properly.

As for kyaraben for this post, I made this on the same day I made Pororo and friends. While I wanted to celebrate our 500 kyaraben deliveries that day, I also want to use all the food we made to create a new bento set for our customers. The ‘nasi tumpeng’ or yellow coconut rice is a very popular dishes among Indonesian and I always wanted to make a bento menu based on Indonesian food, so it’s a good combination, I can achieve both on the same day.

As for the character, I choose Snow White, my last Disney princess. I’ve done Belle, Jasmine, Ariel, Aurora, Cinderella, and now it’s complete. It’s funny that Snow White is my last princess since she’s the first princess (and the earliest animated movie) from Disney. I studied a lot of Snow White when I was still in the college and I still amaze at how smooth the animation was when it produced as early as 1937. I still see some very crude and bad animation on some of new cartoon shows and even movie that were produced in last 5 years so I think Snow White is one of the great achievement in animation history until today.

One of the reason I didn’t make Snow White before is because I always reluctant to make a black pasta sheet since I’m afraid that it will look scary. I tried using squid ink for the natural black color but it has very awful smell that can reduce or get rid of the appetite so I won’t use that again. This time I used black food coloring for the pasta sheet and it turned out quite okay, I like the overall result but still I will consult with my client if black pasta need to be used.

So that’s all for today’s post. Selamat Idul Fitri, mohon maaf lahir dan batin ^_^

So I had a request for both Mickey and Minnie bento last week. It’s a good time since I also wanted to do Mickey and Minnie kyaraben for a while and now I’ve got an opportunity to do it.

Those Mickey and Minnie were made with the cookie cutter with additional thickness. Mickey’s and Minnie’s ears were cut with the same cutter also from chocolate flavored pasta sheet. The red flower was cut with my vegetable/ham cutter from a red pasta sheet. And the facial details were from nori, I cut them with a specially designed Mickey and Minnie nori cutter, very easy but still taking time to put them on one by one.

For the bento filling, I added slices of chicken katsu, corn, broccoli chunk, cheery tomato, chicken sausage, and fried noodle with chicken, egg, beef meatball, and carrot.

And as we’ve still got some spaghetti and the bolognese sauce from the order, I decided to make a different character for my record. After some thought I decided to make another one of those princess since lots of people asking me about that so I intended to make them all as soon as possible.

This time was Cinderella’s turn. While the Cinderella story already being told from hundreds of year ago and made into opera, theater, ballet, and movies, I think the most popular is the Disney’s version where I based mine. I couldn’t remember when was the last time I saw Cinderella, but the story is so classic that I’m pretty sure almost anyone know it. We even had this Indonesian version of Cinderella live action movie made in seventies, although I forgot the whole plot (but I’m sure it’s the same since it’s a Disney’s rip-off) and only remember the actress who play Cinderella.

Compared with the other princesses, Cinderella looks older than the others, but maybe it’s because the hair style. The pasta cut is like the usual princess cut; base, upper dress part, hair, face, lips, eyes, eyebrows, and nose line.

For the bento itself, we’ve got spaghetti, ragu bolognese served with shredded cheese and chopped parsley, chicken sausage with omelet shaped like flower, corn, broccoli chunk, cherry tomato, strawberry, and orange slice. I like this bigger container that it can store more foods. And I don’t know why the spaghetti looked very cluttered in the picture while it looked quite okay in real. I also added a slipper and the pumpkin coach pasta from our pasta collection to matched Cinderella theme for this kyaraben.

Personally I don’t know much about Ultraman, even I know the character since a long time ago, I watched some of episodes when I was little but I don’t have a lot memories of them. From my search, I found out that Ultraman made his debut in 1967 and still around until today. After much searching I found a perfect picture for Ultraman kyaraben. I photoshoped it a bit to make the picture doable for cutting.

Although the picture looks simple, but those little parts were very hard to cut, the right knuckle and the mouth also quite hard to cut. But the overall result was good and I like it, looks retro in style and the pose has a very dynamic feel to it. I just hope that the children will love it.

I managed to take the picture for all the Ultraman kyaraben I’ve made that day. The overall line up is quite nice, the consistency for each pasta cut is also good that they don’t look differ from each other much.

I used the usual mymealbox bento filling, chicken nuggets with beef sausages, corn, broccoli chunk, orange slice, and strawberry jelly.

I picked Pororo and friends for the theme because Pororo is Jojo’s favorite TV shows right now. But I also like them all, they’re very cheerful, cute and colorful characters.For those of you who doesn’t know Pororo the Little Penguin, it’s a computer generated cartoon series from Korea. The series revolves around the adventures of Pororo and his friends who live in the snowy village of Porong Porong Forest, who often encounter challenges and learn practical and moral lessons in each episode.

For the preparation, I made all the colored pasta a day before, total of 12 (twelve) different colors; white, fuschia, dark brown, yellow, red, black, light brown, blue, orange, gold, green, and pink. And for the whole cutting process was quite long, I’ve spent about more than 2 hours to finish all six characters.

As for the whole plating, I really wanted to serve this in a big bento box like the one the Japanese moms use for picnic bento but since I don’t have any I just used a big plate. Since this is for celebration, we make ‘nasi tumpeng’ with all its condiments. In Indonesia (specially in Java), we serve ‘nasi tumpeng’ to celebrate a special occasion such as birthday, inauguration, graduation, and all other happy moments. The rice should be served in a big cone shape, that’s why it’s called ‘tumpeng’.

‘Tumpeng’ comes from the ancient tradition of Indonesian people that honors the mountain as the dwelling place of ancestral spirits (ancestors) and gods. The cone shaped rice is meant to imitate the sacred mountain. The celebration is a form of gratitude and thanks to the Almighty for the abundant harvest and other blessings. Because it contained values of gratitude and celebration, we often served ‘tumpeng’ for any kind of celebration.

I served the yellow rice flat in bento style for simplicity so I could nicely put the Pororo and friends (without any intention to diminish the value of ‘tumpeng’ itself). The menu is a standard ‘tumpeng’ style, yellow rice cooked with coconut milk, fried chickens, potato cake (perkedel kentang), caramelized tempeh, spicy eggs, and slices of (Japanese) cucumber. The cherry tomatoes and strawberries are not the usual condiments for ‘tumpeng’, I just used them to add some colors since most of the food were brown and yellow. Usually there are other condiments but since there’s only four of us (five including Jojo, our driver didn’t come that day) we could not eat that much.

With this post I also would like to thanks our customers who entrust us to provide our kyaraben for the birthday or other celebrations of their children. This means a lot for us. We understand that we deliver each orders on someone’s very important day, we always take care each of our kyaraben personally like we prepare food for our own children, with love and care. I’m the happiest person if our bento can brighten up those children day.

This is also a good time for me to reflect on our journey this past six months. I think that for something that started as a hobby a year ago until 500 delivered bento and counting is a good step up. Some said to me that we should deliver more but I restrict myself not to advertise yet, this site, the facebook page, and mymealbox flickr page are our only promotional outlet and all of them are not hard selling tools. Jojo’s mommy did post some of our kyaraben on several forum but maybe now it’s time for us to start step up a bit to make ourselves being known more since my target is to deliver another 500 bento in next 3 months up until we can deliver 500 bento each week sometime next year. I know it’s very ambitious but it’s very possible with the right mind set, planning, preparation, and organization, I’m sure that we can pull it off.

I think that’s all for today post. We will take two weeks break since fasting season will be over soon and all of our assistant will be gone to their hometown at the end of this week. We will also leave Jakarta for several days to visit our family in Bandung.

Thanks for reading this, if you haven’t click our facebook ‘Like’ button please do so, I will be planning something special next time you visit