Pororo and friends, 500 bento order celebration

Today post is a very special for me and my whole team, since we’re celebrating our 500 kyaraben order milestones. We’ve reached our 500 boxes a while ago but I haven’t got the time for this kind of special project. I only counted the boxes that we’ve been paid for since we’ve also done many bento for practice, promotional, samples, and Jojo’s birthday and bible school projects.

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