Fishing boat bento

Like in Jojo’s school that the parents must prepare food in turn on every Friday, we also have the same rules on Jojo’s bible school each Saturday. That’s two days in a row, and it’s time for me to experiment making some pasta as substitute for egg sheet.

The bible school theme that week was Jesus stopping the storm, so I thought of making a boat and sea theme for everyone. I made some simple sketches of boat and sea and counted that I need at least five different colors to make those scene. This was a very simple bento using sandwiched bread with margarine and chocolate meises filling and using the bread as white ‘canvas’ for all decorations.

I prepared all pasta on Friday afternoon. Since this was the first time I made the pasta, I only made some minor adjustment to the pasta recipe. The basic pasta recipe is high protein flour and a little of vegetable oil and egg. We also need a pasta machine to make the pasta dough into thin pasta (lasagna) layers.

We will get a light yellow colored pasta if we only using those basic ingredients. For other colors, we need to add different colored liquid or powder into the basic ingredients. For this project, I used cocoa powder to make the brown colored pasta (the pasta also got chocolate taste), tomato ketchup to make the orange colored pasta, strawberry juice to make the pink colored pasta, and light blue food coloring to make the green sea colored pasta (the combination of blue and yellow from the egg yolk make the green colored pasta, next time I’ll try adding egg white only).

We need to cook those layered pasta on boiled water and dry them with kitchen towel before we eat or cut them with vegetable cutter or knife. The cooked pasta can be stored in freezer for a month as long as we wrapped them well with plastic wrap.

As for the ornaments, almost all of them were made using tools, mainly vegetable cutter for the moon, stars, clouds, the boat, fishes (using sliced carrot), and pastry cutter and knife for the sea. Except those fishes, all of them were cut on Friday night and stored in the freezer then assembled on Saturday morning.