I arranged the sandwich into a bento box along with 2 grapes and cherry tomatoes with food pick. I cut the egg sheet with my rilakuma cookie cutter, the teddy’s hands was cut with a large straw.  Those teddies were too thin that they could not stand up well without some support, next time I should add cheese cut from a cheese bar and pasted behind the egg sheet to make them thicker.

I really wanted to make a colorful bowtie pasta bento since they looked very cute in those bento mooks but I’d never seen those kind of pasta anywhere and I don’t really want to import those. The usual pasta that available around in most supermarkets are spaghetti, macaroni, fusilli, and lasagna, but they only available in one color, the usual yellow one.

We have regular stock of spaghetti and macaroni in our kitchen since my wife often cooked macaroni for our son while I often use spaghetti served with fish and fruits salad. We only had a little bit of macaroni and maybe my wife wanted to use them so I used the spaghetti with meat and tomato sauce.

I separate the meat sauce and the spaghetti with loads of lettuce to prevent the leak. There’s lots of open space around spaghetti area, so I added some carrot flowers with outer peas skin for the leaf and stalk. I don’t have flower mold so I used the knife.

For the other box pair, which separated in two container, I put some fruits cocktail with very tasty chocolate and mango pudding my wife made yesterday. The pudding was cast with rilakuma mold.

Finally, the octopus bento, my my their looked ugly indeed. I need to practice more with this sausage art, between boiling and cooking, the initial cutting, choosing the right sausage brands, among other thing. Hope next time I can find a good combination of those and make a good looking sausage ^_^

Those meatballs and tofu melted very quick from freezer and only took 3 minuted to deep fried them.

It’s now time to use the heart onigiri mold since it never been used before. One onigiri was enough since this was a big mold. Add a heart shape cheese cut with heart shaped cookie cutter. The green eyes and smiley mouth was cut from pea skin with emoticon vegetables cutter.

I put strawberries, grapes, and mandarin oranges to quick fill the small bento box. Still got time to did something. I remember there’s still some yellow quail egg in the fridge from yesterday and there was another piggy I want to make. So I boiled just two thin slices of carrot for 2 minutes and cut them with knife to make the nose, ears, and tail parts. Put them in their position, added a couple of sesame seeds and voila … another yellow piggy ^_^

I’ve written down the recipe on my notebook along with the teriyaki sauce recipe. We can buy bottled teriyaki sauce at most supermarkets but the local made sauce had awful taste and got this unnatural smell and the Japanese imported sauce is very expensive, so I decided to make one myself.

For the bento, I made the onigiri with red rice, but I mixed them with white rice so the result was pinkish red since 100% red rice will be very purplish and dark (almost like black/gray) and I didn’t want that color for my bento. Maybe if I someday I want to make a night theme bento, I will use full red rice.

The onigiri was made with the cylinder shape rice mold and decorated with cheese cut with the ever useful vegetables cutter. We’ve never eaten rice with cheese before I started bento making but discovered it’s  a great combination, rice flavor added with salty cheese, yum yum

As for the crab sausages, I cut the sausage from the instruction I read on one of my bento mook. I boiled the sausage but the incision didn’t expand well so I fried them and they looked awful Maybe I should used less oil and fried quicker. There’s always next time …

I planned to decorate the quail but I spent too much time decorating the apple. I saw checkered apples in some bento pictures and I really amazed by them so I wanted to try it myself. The apple on the picture was not my first time, I did practice several times when I also did rabbit apple. While it looked good, it took too much time and I won’t do it often.

I ate this together with my wife. The katsu was good, so did the teriyaki sauce (which way better than the local ready made sauce), we both liked it very much.

The pastei pie was good to make a face, so I cut a cheese sheet to make her hair and use my new emoticon vegetables cutter to add her eyes and mouth. I used a very small bento box so I could only fill with two grapes and a cherry tomato with small amount of broccoli to fill extra spaces.

I made this one around 10 minutes, but the result wasn’t that good, one of the poor quality bento I’ve made. The cheese ‘hair’ should have more layers. I decided to post it anyway so that I can compare and taking notes of the progress I’ve made for future reference.