The snowman was made with three onigiri. As for the facial details, I used shiitake mushroom and a heart foodpick for the hat; nori cut with hole puncher for the eyes and the buttons; black sesame seeds for the smiling mouth, a maize ear (corn) for the nose, and crab stick skin for the scarf.

As for the bento fillings, I made chicken karaage, ham and lettuce roll, and put a cherry tomato, cauliflower chunks (I didn’t use the usual broccoli chunks since I wanted more white like snowy Christmas day for the bento), and a half mandarin orange.

The other ornaments I made were a Christmas tree shape cucumber made with vegetable cutter and a pair of snowflake cheese. I cut those snowflake with the art knife, took a while to made them but I’m quite proud of the result.

So I think this is the last bento I made for 2009. I will post some more post from my cooking class before the end of the year. Merry Christmas to everyone and happy holiday, God bless us all ^_^

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.

I have a good portion of rice ‘au grass’ so I’d better make a good use of it and then came the snowman idea. I made three rice balls with different sizes so I could balanced them while I stacked them, but still the top and middle rice balls were easily fell and then fall apart. I realized that I have to do the photograph quickly and made some preparation for it.

I used carrot and nori for the details on the snowman. Carrot was use to made the hat, the long nose, and the scarf; all of them were cut with knife. And I use nori for the eyes, mouth, and the buttons; all of them were cut with emoticons puncher. The additional materials were toothpick to stick the hat to the head and parsley stalk for the snowman arms. The rice balls were decorated one by one before I stack them together. I still needed a skewer to put them together and did the shots very quickly after I assembled them together.

For those who still here, I want to share of what I learnt at school today. We learnt more about sauce in culinary world. There are five mother sauces; veloute, béchamel, espagnole, hollandaise, and classic tomato. From those five mother sauces we can made lots of derivative sauces such as bercy, normande, mariniere, supreme, albufera, allemande, etc. We will learn to make those mother sauces and some of their derivatives during our time at school.

We also learnt how to prepare chicken for cooking. When I saw those butcher with their cleaver at the market cutting those poor chickens, it seemed very easy. But here the chef taught us to cut chicken the professional way using regular vegetable knife, we can cut the chicken easily without putting much pressure. It felt awkward the first time I did it but I’m sure I will be getting good with more practices.

After preparing the chicken, we also need to make rice ‘au grass’, supreme sauce, and aromatic garnish.

The rice ‘au grass’ is a French dishes, we should use the original French ‘au grass’ rice but since it’s very expensive we used the regular Indonesian rice.  This menu is like a simple version of Hainam rice we used to eat in Chinese restaurants but we only use chopped onion, salt, butter, and white chicken stock to make the rice. On the final result, the rice smelled good and tasted quite nice, sweet and salty but not too savory.

The aromatic garnish was prepared to be used to give the chicken some aromatic taste. We first sauté mirepoix (the combination of carrot, leek, onion, and celery stalk; dice cut) and bouquet garni with butter, and then adding chicken stock to poach the chicken.

The supreme sauce was made from veloute (white roux and chicken stock taken from the aromatic garnish) mixed with whipping cream and butter.

For the presentation on chicken dishes, the chef said that we need to prepare both chicken breast (white meat) and thigh (black meat) on a plate. For this menu, we poured the supreme sauce and add chopped parsley for finishing touch. Overall it’s quite a nice dish, easy to prepare, taste good and healthy.