From the initial sample my friend wanted me to change cherry tomato with sausages and those chicken karaage with chicken katsu, which meant more works to be done since I had to cut all the sausages and cook them while with cherry tomato only need to be washed and put straight into the box. The same with chicken katsu, they need more time to prepare compared to karaage. But since I had three good assistants it’s not a big problem since they could do all those thing.

Officially I started cooking on Saturday at 1 pm, started with all those egg sheets for Naruto faces. I had to prepare lots of pink egg sheets since it also act as a based for all the other facial details. I made them with my crepes pan and turned out I could only make four templates on one sheet, so I had to make at least 15 pink sheets. The yellow sheets were easier to make since they only egg yolk which are thicker and we can make very even color unlike the lighter egg white especially if we have to mix them with another ingredients (like tomato sauce), we really need to mix them well to make an even color on all the sheet surface. Just for the face parts, I used 30 eggs. I still had some unused egg yolks but they can be used for making katsu later. I stop at 5 pm and drive to pick up my wife and we had dinner before going home.

Sunday morning at 7 am I went to the market to buy all the vegetables and other ingredients and continue cutting the face parts until about 8 pm. My lovely wife helped me cut all the cheese and carrot and some of the nori parts. She really hates the smell of nori but still helped cut them, which I greatly appreciate. And while I was busy cutting all those parts, I also needed to coordinate my assistant to prepare all the sausages, chicken, and the vegetables since they need to be prep before we cook them during Monday morning.

So while the other asleep around 9.30 pm since they all need to start working at 4 am, I started to assemble all those face parts. When the time already at 11.30 pm and the progress was very slow, I was also very tired and sleepy, there’s sinking feeling grew in my heart that I couldn’t finish them. During that time I realized that I had to removed some facial details from the original design in order to finish them on time. I was ready not to sleep at all that night but I knew that I need to rest so I have some energy to speed things up in the morning.

I slept for 2 hours and wake up again around 4 am, I didn’t feel like sleeping at all during those time. The others including my wife already wake up and started washing rice, vegetables, and preparing all the food. I made one bento example on where to position the food for the others to follow, helping cutting lemon, arrange lettuce on the box before continuing assembling the faces (while my assistants are having good cooking skills, they never made a bento before so they’re quite slow on arranging and putting the food in the boxes but I’m sure that for the next projects they will become faster).

Because I had limited experience making lots of bento, we run out of lettuce. Luckily the traditional market near our home started at 6 am so I still have time to buy extra lettuce, but I lost a precious 30 minutes for that and added extra pressure for me.

On 7.30 am we could only manage to finished 5 boxes. On 8 am we managed wrapping up 24 boxes. My wife already left because she had an important meeting in the office. She told me later that night that she really panicked but didn’t say it when she left. I could feel my assistants panicked (and so did I) but I knew that I need to stay calm and keep my composure and just continue to finish the job so they could focused on the tasks at hand.

I didn’t know exactly how but we managed to finished 60 bento boxes around 8.40 am. I told my assistant to arrange some of the boxes on the table for getting their pictures. It would be cooler if we could took all 60 boxes in one shot but we didn’t have enough time since they need to be pack immediately. I drove at 8.50 am and thank God somehow He made the usually very heavy Monday traffic empty so I could delivered those bento boxes at 9.45 am.

I know that the overall result is below my expectation but still I’m very happy that my team could pull it off. There are lots of thing to be reviewed internally to make the work flow more efficient so we can produce more bento faster and better. I know that given time and more projects we can be very good. My wife told me that there will be order of 100 (one hundred !!!) bento boxes coming in June so I need to be ready from now.

The naruto bento below was made for my friend’s son 9th birthday party. I only had 6 days notice and the initial order was for 30 bento boxes. I didn’t take the order right away since I was not sure I can pull it off. Later that day I made up my mind and since I’ve made 30 bento boxes for my son 2nd birthday (but in 2 separate days) and now my cooking skill and kitchen coordination is way better than last year I’m quite sure that I can finish 30 in one day. Then after agreeing the task, I asked my friend’s son which character he likes most and the answer was Naruto and Avatar. I searched both pictures and decided that I will make Naruto, I will make the Avatar (the Last Airbender) another time.

The naruto face was made with three different egg colors; egg yolk for the yellow hair part, egg white for the yellow jacket, white eyes and mouth part, and mixture of egg white and tomato sauce for the pink face color. All egg sheets were cut with art knife. The metal bandana was from cheese cut with knife and the carving was cut with toothpick, we have to be very careful to do the inside carving so not to break the cheese. The orange jacket part was from carrot and all the other details were from scissors cut nori.

As for the bento filling, it’s very basic with chicken karaage, broccoli chunks, corn, and cherry tomato. I experimented using lemon slice to neutralize or reduce the smell of broccoli which is not liked by some people. The experiment worked wonderfully, we didn’t smell the broccoli when we opened the bento on the next day.

It was easy to make one bento a day, I need to think how to make 30 bento boxes in 2 days. Then my friend asked me if I can make more for the day and asking for 60 (sixty) bento boxes. Hmmm, on that moment I realized that I should make Avatar bento instead Naruto, but I liked to challenge myself and try to fulfill the target.

I’ve made some modification with the recipe at home. The juice (sauce) recipe is the basic recipe, we can add mushroom or black pepper to make it into mushroom sauce or black pepper sauce.

Roasted sirloin fillet

Principal ingredients (Serves 4)

• 1.4 kg center of the sirloin (gross weight)
• butter, oil
• salt & pepper
• baking powder or meat tenderizer

Cooking instructions

1. Prepare the sirloin, remove the muscles and unwanted fat but don’t throw them away (use for the juice)
2. Put some salt, pepper, and baking powder to the sirloin
3. Cover the sirloin with oil
4. Heat the grill pan with oil, wait until the oil is very hot
5. Grill the sirloin, flip the other side once
6. If we want a well-done sirloin, put it in the oven once we grilled the meat (around 180⁰C for 5 minutes)

Juice

• sirloin trimmings
• 30 g carrot
• 30 g onion
• 10 g celery stalk
• bouquet garni *
• 2 cloves garlic
• 100 ml veal stock (optional) or 200 ml water
• beurre manie * (50 g butter mix with 30 g flour to make paste

Cooking instructions

1. Cut the vegetables into small pieces
2. Saute the sirloin trimmings with oil
3. Put all vegetables, bouquet garni, garlic to the pan
4. Wait until the trimmings slightly burned
5. Add veal stock (or water), wait until boil
6. Add some beurre manie to thicken the juice
7. Use strainer to separate the juice and the other ingredients

Pureed potatoes

Ingredients (Serves 4)

• 1 kg potatoes
• 100 g butter
• 250 ml milk
• salt & pepper
• nutmeg

Cooking instructions

1. Remove the potatoes skin and cut them into 8 pieces
2. Boil the potatoes until cooked
3. Put cooked potatoes in the oven to reduce the water (around 180⁰C for 10 minutes)
4. Minced the potatoes, add some salt, pepper, and nutmeg
5. Heat milk
6. Put milk into minced potatoes and mix them with butter

* Bouquet garni (cited from Wikipedia)
The bouquet garni (French for “garnished bouquet”) is a bundle of herbs usually tied together with string and mainly used to prepare soup, stock, and various stews. The bouquet is boiled with the other ingredients, but is removed prior to consumption.

There is no generic recipe for bouquet garni, but most recipes include parsley, thyme and bay leaf. Depending on the recipe, the bouquet garni may include basil, burnet, chervil, rosemary, peppercorns, savory and tarragon. Sometimes vegetables such as carrot, celery (leaves or stem), celeriac, leek, onion and parsley root are also included in the bouquet.

Sometimes, the bouquet is not bound with string, and its ingredients are filled into a small sachet, a net, or even a tea strainer instead. Traditionally, the aromatics are bound within leek leaves, though a coffee filter and butcher twine can be used instead of leek leaves.

* Beurre manie
50 g butter, softened
30 g flour, mixed with the butter to make paste
Often used to complete the thickening of sauce, used in small quantities

I saw this broken glass pudding while I was surfing for recipes a couple of weeks ago and I really loved it so I proposed making this kind of pudding to my wife and she’s agree, as long as I’m the one who make it. No problem for me.

The original recipe was using jell-o with various kinds of colors but my wife doesn’t like jell-o because (and I agree) she thinks that thing has too much artificial flavors and coloring. The other reason I don’t use it because those stuff are imported so the price is too pricey for just a pudding.

We have this local brand gelatin powder which my wife uses very often for Jojo’s afternoon snack at home but she’s only using the uncolored one. For this project I had to buy every color that available; green, red, orange, and chocolate. I really like to make the blue and purple color using some artificial food coloring but of course my wife was against the idea.

I made each color and put them separately on several trays. After hardened I cut the jelly into chunks and mixed them together into large tray and then poured the still liquid white pudding (uncolored gelatin plus white milk) to cover them all.

In the morning I cut them into pieces and pack them in food containers for Jojo and his friends. It turned out that the orange and chocolate color looks almost the same (I still want to use some coloring to make them more colorful). I don’t know if they like it or not but the teacher said that all the kids finished the snacks. Hmmm, maybe they just hungry ^_^

While we wait our pastry in the oven, we prepared the poach egg along with the albuferra sauce. There are several method to make poached egg (I googled while I’m writing this post) but I think the way we taught by our chef is one of the simplest. We only need to boil water in a sauce pan, add 2 tbs of vinegar and break the egg near the water edge and like magic, the egg white automatically swirl and approaching the egg yolk. We just wait around 3-5 minutes depending on how hard we want our egg, and then we need to soak the poached egg into water with some salt on it to remove the vinegar flavor. It’s done.

The baked puff pastry result was not that bad, they expanded higher than my expectation. After all the food were ready we prepared our plating (put our food and arrange them on a plate to make it looks good to eat) and present it to the chef for evaluation. I picture I post here was taken at home, I only made very simple decoration with carrots lettering and a pair of cherry tomatoes basket with parsley and the sauce inside.

While I have my share of experience making and arranging bento, I found that the art of plating is quite different, although the purpose is somewhat the same, making the food looked great. While there’s no set of rules for bento (other than food safety and other simple stuff) there are already lots of strict rules for plating. And while most of bento makers are easy to please and amuse, those professional chefs are very serious with their stuff. I will stick with my bento though but while I’m learning at the school I think I’ll learn and do more the art of plating and share some of them with everyone.

So at home I only prepare all the ingredients and measure them right and let our housemaid to finish the dough and prepare the apple sauce. But I still have to roll the dough and put it on tray and check the oven myself. We only have a simple portable oven at our home, so if we want to use it then we have to heat the oven on top of the gas stove. We can’t possibly know the oven temperature, the only way to know is using our feeling and checking the oven often until our food is well baked.

I didn’t make any decoration, I didn’t have any idea at all and besides I really just wanted to make it right. I did use the extra dough and made some Pooh and Tiger shape cookies but somehow my kitchen assistant forgot to check the oven and they became burnt, and of course I didn’t want to take their pictures.

Well, if someone is still reading, I want to share about my time at the cooking school.

For these past two days we made several dough; pizza dough, short pastry dough, and puff pastry dough. I didn’t take pictures for any of those because they won’t look good. My pizza, while it taste good it didn’t look great (I will make some pizzas again maybe after I finish all my classes) and so is my quiche lorraine. It also didn’t look great because we used disposable foil tray that made the pie not in perfect circle shape.

As for the quiche lorraine itself, it’s a meat pie using shortcrust pastry dough for the base, with smoked slab bacon, eggs, and cream filling and grated gruyere cheese on top. Most Indonesian only eat sweet pie (with sugar coating, sweet cream, fruits, fruit jams, etc.) so I and the other students didn’t like the quiche; the taste was good (but salty) and we somehow have this expectation in our head that all pie are sweet so when we eat a salty pie, it just don’t feel right for us.

We also prepare a puff pastry dough but we will use it on our next class. To make a good puff pastry dough we must make it in a cold room (about 18 degree Celcius), if the room temperature is higher than that then the puff pastry won’t expand well in the oven. I think the temperature in the school kitchen is more than 25 degree so we’ll see how bad the pastry will be tomorrow.