Rabbit farm bento

When we were planning what to do for our son Jojo’s 2nd birthday party, I had an idea to make small bento as give away for other kids at the party. It is a custom around here to give goodie bags to kids that attended their friend’s birthday party. On the usual level, parents just pack some snacks in plastic/paper bags for the goodie bags, others just give school bags, piggy banks, coloring pencils, or assorted stationery for kids. It really depends on the parents creativity, time, and of course budget.

We really wanted to give special goodie bags for Jojo’s birthday. My wife wanted to give healthy foods for all the kids, since if we don’t want to give our own kid unhealthy stuff, we shouldn’t give them to other kids too.

The mini bento was my idea, my wife thought that was crazy and too much time consuming. We had this discussion about making our own business together for some time and maybe we can start a catering for kids and with all this decorative bento getting more popular each day, we can start our own bento catering special for kids. Maybe in other countries or cities we can’t pull it off, but we certainly can do it here.  So we need this kind of practice making lots of bento in one day if we want to start our own bento catering.

Of course there’s still a long way to go before we can start the business, but we had to start from somewhere.

These bento batch was intended for kids in Jojo’s Sunday school. They start at 7.30 am until 8.30 am, so we want to give them small meal to eat around breakfast time, besides the kids were only 2-3 years old, they couldn’t eat a lot of food. Small bento was also perfect for our 1st practice. They were 18 children in Jojo’s class at Sunday school, we decided to make 20 bento just in case there were some new kids.

I made one prototype 2 days before so we made them all based on that. We cooked the quail eggs and peel the skins a night before and store them inside the fridge. The carrot ears also cooked and made with vegetables cutter that night. So when we woke up around 3 am on Sunday, the first thing we did was cooked the rice. While we wait the rice, we cut the broccoli and cauliflower and boiled them separately. The corn also boiled around that time and we peeled them after.

The sausages were cut in the morning since I just bought them yesterday at night and didn’t have time to cut them at night. So after made 40 flower shape sausages in 30 minutes, they were ready to cooked. I bought 2 different brands of sausages to did some research and from the boiled result, we could see that the red-brownish sausages were expand better than the pinkish-red sausages (on the right column).

The rice already cooked, all other ingredients also prepared, so it’s time to put them together. We use the plastic food container which not our first choice. We wanted to use this great food container and already contacted the distributor but alas they’re only available after the birthday celebration. So these food container were the our best choice. Since they didn’t have self locking mechanism (while our first choice have) we need to wrap them up with plastic wrapper, I didn’t want to use tape to seal them.

The onigiri were made with bunny shape rice mold with dried salted fish filling. While my wife made the onigiri and put them into the container, I put the other ingredients around. It took us around 30 minutes to finish putting all the parts together. The last thing to do before we wrapped them up was putting the nori emoticons around the bunnies’ face and I found out that this was the most annoying and time consuming part from the whole process.

While the nori were easy to cut with the nori puncher, it was hard to separate and pick up the right emoticons with the tweezer. The nori must be pasted with a little mayonnaise so they stick well on the onigiri and bunny quail eggs.

We finished decorating around 6 am and then shooting preparation. After took several pictures of them we wrapped them with plastic wrapper one by one.

It was a great experience, I’m glad that we could finish on schedule. I also managed to shoot the whole goodie bag package; a mini bento, a mandarin orange, a cup of strawberry jelly with real strawberry inside (made by my lovely wife), a cereal, a chocolate milk, and two cookies. My wife planned to make the cookies by herself but since she’s just out from hospital only a few days before it’s best that we just order them.

Whew, I’m glad that we could manage the whole thing by ourselves with help from our housemaid and my parents helping putting all those foods inside the plastic bags. The celebration at the church went very well, I could see the kids were very happy when they received the goodie bag (who wouldn’t?) and some kids ate our mini bento and not getting sick after that ^_^

This is also my longest post ever, thanks for staying until the end