After much thought, we came into conclusion that our old mini set was too light, so we decide to change the menu becoming more like our medium onigiri set with smaller portion. So now our mini onigiri set consists of a white rice onigiri, 3 (three) pieces of chicken nugget, corn, broccoli chunks, beef sausage, and a quail egg without konyaku jelly. But if customers still want to have jelly for the mini boxes (since kids love jelly so much) I think there’s still room for a jelly in these tiny boxes but we have to remove the quail egg to make room for it

Basically it’s still our signature food combination, animal shaped onigiri with broccoli chunks, corn, beef sausage, chicken nuggets, lemon slice, and strawberry jelly. And as the team got faster each time we make a project, now we can add more details like the cheek blushes on each of animals.

Hopefully we can still evolve this onigiri set and make it more beautiful ^_^

Just a quick post for today, we made this mini bento for Kenneth’s 4th birthday party. Total of 70 bento mini boxes for Kenneth and all of his friends. Hope that they’re all enjoy the breakfast we made.

This bento combined lots of items together, there’s rabbit onigiri with fried anchovies inside, and then we also put rabbit quail egg, sausages, broccoli chunks, sweet corns, along with sweet pink strawberry flavor jelly, plus colorful chocolate candy. So there’s everything inside the mini boxes for those kids.

The burger meat was made with ground beef, bread, onion, and some seasoning. The double onigiri on top and bottom of the burger meat and the burger meat also was shaped with the cylinder rice mold so they’re in the same size. To called it grilled onigiri was a bit incorrect since I didn’t grill them but just put them on a low heated frying pan without cooking oil at all. The result was really good, it had great smell and the frying process added more flavor to it.

For the bento box arrangement, I put the burger first, then the meatball and cherry tomato, then corn and peas to be the based for the quail bunny ears. The bunny face was made with pea for the nose, pea skin cut with emoticon vegetables cutter for those eyes and mouth, and carrot cut with straw for the cheeks.

Again I didn’t have good idea for the other box, I just put a half mandarin orange and arrange some vegetables in tidy fashion.

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