Most of our Hello Kitty bento are come with a pair, so far we have paired her with bear, panda, rabbit, and now it’s time for her to have piggy for friend. The basic shape of piggy head is ball, I have a ball onigiri tool but its diameter is too big for our bento box, so for this project I had to make my own onigiri ball with hands and plastic wrap.

While we need more time to make pasta kyaraben but we can prepare them a day before, so on the delivery day after all other food are prepared in the box, all we need to do is put the assembled pasta character on the rice. But with this kind of onigiri, whether it’s Hello Kitty, rabbit, bear, and all other characters, we need to prepare them on the delivery day, that’s why we need more time to prepare them.

The hardest thing and usually took most of the time is adding those nori parts, Hello Kitty alone has 10 parts (6 whiskers, 2 eyes, and a nose and a bow ribbon). I tried to leave her whiskers to save time but then it’s not Hello Kitty, so as long as I get Hello Kitty orders, I’m stuck with her whiskers

The piggy was more manageable. We can prepare the sausage ears and nose also the the carrot cheeks a day before so all we need to do in the morning is assemble all the prepared parts (which is easier to put) and nori cut for its eyes and mouth. I used half cook pasta to pin those ears since I don’t want to use toothpick which can be dangerous for those children.

So between preparing orders, answering customers’ calls and emails, creating bento samples, delivering orders, editing our bento pictures, while still doing my other business, I really have to sacrifice my writing time until I’ve got more spare time to do multiple posts.

This project came just at the day of my wife vacation. Her plane was very early in the morning so she could only help for about 1 hour before she went to airport. The order was 30 Princess Aurora, 10 Doraemon, and 20 Hello Kitty & Piggy bento. While we can easily prepare 60 pasta kyaraben bento with just 3 persons, things were more complicated with addition of Hello Kitty and Piggy onigiri.

We continued our preparation after mommy left, but somehow Jojo knew that mommy left him in his sleep, he woke up at 5.30 a.m. (usually at 7.15 a.m.) and wanted to take a morning walk. That left me with just one helper, and I just had a bad feeling that we could not finish on time. So we continued with just two persons, of course we lagged behind since I really didn’t except Jojo to woke up so early.

We managed to finish just 30 minutes behind our schedule, but I have to alter our usual photo shoot since we didn’t have much time left. While usually I like to line up all my bento together without the lid cover (since they reflect badly) for this time I just lined up 15 of them already with the plastic cover. I still managed to take each bento picture individually, but I really miss those line up pictures.

The delivery time was 8.30 a.m. and I always want to deliver the order 30 minutes early. I knew that if I start driving at 6.50 a.m. I really took gamble on the traffic. The traffic was light in the beginning, but somehow it jammed up bad, which make me very stressed out. Later I found out that there’s a container broke down right at the road turn

After I passed the container the traffic went smoothly again, I managed to arrive at 8.15 a.m. which is not bad considering all the problems I’ve got since the morning.

I still had to adding things to make a representable the bento, balanced the color and composition since the base menu is mainly only have brown color. I did the twin piggy onigiri with white rice mixed with pink furikake. I used half cooked spaghetti to attach the sausage nose and ears. The orange cheek was from crab stick skin, attached with the help of mayonnaise. As usual, the eyes and mouth were from nori cut with emoticon puncher.

The meat and tofu were put over a lettuce together with the twin onigiri and some broccoli chunks on the same bento box. On the other box, I put a half egg, chopped celery and fried red onion on yellow silicon container, and half mandarin orange. I should have add another container for the stock since the whole menu is supposed to be served like a soup but since we ate this at our dining room I just leave the stock in its original pan.

Here’s the brief recipe and how to cook (for 2 servings) :

Ingredients:

• a white tofu (we have this 10x10x4 cm tofu sold on market)
• a slice of pork chop (with some fat) OR a chicken breast (with bones)
• 1 or 2 boiled eggs
• 2 cloves of small red (Spanish) onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 spoons of dried shrimp, soak them into boiled water
• sweet soy sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil
• chop celery and fried red onion
• salt and pepper
• fried (sliced) garlic

How to cook:

• Dice the tofu  into 1 cm squares, fry them until half cooked
• Prepare the pork or chicken, and put them into 3-4 cups of boiled water to make stock
• After the meat is cooked, set aside the stock, dice the meat into 1 cm squares like the tofu
• We can add some salt & pepper and fried garlic into the stock
• Grind the red onion, garlic, and dried shrimp until they mix evenly
• Prepare a saute pan with small amount of oil, put the grinded condiment into the pan about 1 minute and add the half cooked tofu , pork/chicken meat, and eggs
• Add 8 spoons of sweet soy sauce, 2 spoons of soy sauce, and 1 spoon of sesame oil into the mix
• Add 4 spoons of stock, sauté until the water evaporate
• Serve the meat over rice, pour the stock over and add some chopped celery and fried onion

I made this prototype on Thursday. Since we still could not get the food container we want, we bought this laptop type plastic food container at Daisho, Rp 22,500 (around USD 2.40) for 16 containers. The plastic was better than yesterday for my mini bento set since there were local made. I made bigger bento than yesterday mini bento since the kids could ate them for their lunch time, and also I wanted a bigger challenge than yesterday. Although it’s only 15 set, but we have 30 onigiri and 30 quail eggs to decorate.

But after yesterday experience, I’ve learnt that nori decorating was a pain in the @ss and I really need to avoid that as much as possible if I want to make large quantity bento set. But right now I didn’t have much design alternatives since I was too tired after preparing 20 mini bento set so the best way was to make slight changes from the prototype design.

First of all was the pink onigiri. The prototype was using white rice mix with red furikake, but my wife said maybe some kids won’t like the smell and taste of furikake. I really could not argue with that right now so it’s better to change it with red rice and white rice mix to make it red (but not pink, I personally like the pink onigiri since it’s cuter).

Another change was I replace the bunny quail egg with cherry tomatoes to save time. The piggy quail egg only need 2 eyes while the bunny needs 4 nori pieces for their facial, we could save lots of time if we skip those bunnies. I also add some cauliflower chunks instead using all broccoli.

We didn’t prepare anything the night before since we’re too tired and want some sleep, expect the quail eggs since we cooked lots of them the night before for 2 days used. I wake up at 5 am on Monday. Our housemaid already cooked the white rice and the red rice & white rice mix (we have 2 rice cookers). So I started with cutting the broccoli and cauliflower. They need to be put inside a bowl of water first before ready to cook to maintain their colors. Mix some salt with the water for the broccoli and a little of cooking oil for the cauliflower.

While waiting for the vegetables, it’s time to cut the sausages. I still have 2 brands of sausages, the good one and the bad one (the one that won’t expand). I have to mix them since I didn’t have spare sausages.

After cutting 60 flower sausages in 30 minutes, it’s time to boiled the vegetables along with the sausages, of course with separate pots. While waiting them boiled, I microwaved two slices of ham and started cutting them to create piggy mouths and ears.

It’s already 6 am when my wife wake up. While I prepared the lettuce to cover the plastic food container, she started making the piggy and punching some nori. While she’s busy I started making the onigiri, there’s 30 onigiri to be made. Same like the yesterday mini bento, I used dried salted fish for filling. After my wife finished assemble all piggies, she continue making the onigiri while I started to arrange the onigiri, vegetables, and sausages into the container.

I was still arranging when my wife finished the 30th onigiri, so she started putting the piggy quail eggs, cherry tomatoes, and corns into the paper cup. When I finished arranging the strawberries my wife also done with her paper cups. It’s already 7 am and here came the dreaded part of bento making; nori decoration sigh … :S

It took us 1 hour to finish decorating all the facial expression. I did most of the onigiri while my wife did all the piggy eyes and helped me with several onigiri. We made different expression for the onigiri to make them more lively but the real reason was to utilize most of punched nori since we got all sorts of emoticon icons in one punch.

I was really glad we could finish the hard part of the job and the last thing to do was wrapping the food container with plastic wrapper. The job still need 2 people, one person must hold the container while the other wrapped it close.

The last thing to do was arrange them all to take some pictures.

I took Jojo to school, his teacher already prepared a banner to celebrate his birthday. We celebrated together with his friends and teachers, took some pictures and the class started. I went back home to prepare the goodie bags like yesterday. Around 10 am I came back to school to send the goodie bags, hope that the kids will like them and no one got sick after eating the bento ^_^

What a week, it’s very tiring but a rewarding week for all of us. I will take some rest from bento making for a few days, not many people made 35 bento set in 2 days …

]]> http://mymealbox.com/bento/jojos-birthday-bento-part-2/feed 4 http://mymealbox.com/bento/yellow-piggy-meatball-bento http://mymealbox.com/bento/yellow-piggy-meatball-bento#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:14:02 +0000 mymealbox http://mymealbox.com/?p=79 I didn’t have too much time preparing for my bento so I just used a couple of meatballs and seafood tofu bought from Food Hall. I rarely bought processed meat other than sausages but I wanted to try them for a while, so here we go.

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 ^_^