The bible school theme that week was Jesus stopping the storm, so I thought of making a boat and sea theme for everyone. I made some simple sketches of boat and sea and counted that I need at least five different colors to make those scene. This was a very simple bento using sandwiched bread with margarine and chocolate meises filling and using the bread as white ‘canvas’ for all decorations.

I prepared all pasta on Friday afternoon. Since this was the first time I made the pasta, I only made some minor adjustment to the pasta recipe. The basic pasta recipe is high protein flour and a little of vegetable oil and egg. We also need a pasta machine to make the pasta dough into thin pasta (lasagna) layers.

We will get a light yellow colored pasta if we only using those basic ingredients. For other colors, we need to add different colored liquid or powder into the basic ingredients. For this project, I used cocoa powder to make the brown colored pasta (the pasta also got chocolate taste), tomato ketchup to make the orange colored pasta, strawberry juice to make the pink colored pasta, and light blue food coloring to make the green sea colored pasta (the combination of blue and yellow from the egg yolk make the green colored pasta, next time I’ll try adding egg white only).

We need to cook those layered pasta on boiled water and dry them with kitchen towel before we eat or cut them with vegetable cutter or knife. The cooked pasta can be stored in freezer for a month as long as we wrapped them well with plastic wrap.

As for the ornaments, almost all of them were made using tools, mainly vegetable cutter for the moon, stars, clouds, the boat, fishes (using sliced carrot), and pastry cutter and knife for the sea. Except those fishes, all of them were cut on Friday night and stored in the freezer then assembled on Saturday morning.

I made two sandwiches and put them inside my small bento box along with broccoli, corn, red crispy grapes, and a pair of octo-sausages. For the sausages, I didn’t boil them like usual since it will make their ‘tentacles/legs’ too wrinkled, so instead I put them in a frying pan (without oil) and put the bottom part of the sausage in low heat just to open up their legs to make the result I wanted.

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.

Very easy to make, just bread with ham plus scramble egg and chopped broccoli. Put them together to make regular sandwich and cut them into several pieces to fit into the bento box.

Since we have lots of fruits in the fridge, I put some red and green grapes, strawberries, a slice of green apple, two slices of red apple, and tiny chunks of apple to fill the extra space.

I saw the rabbit ear apple decoration in several bento sites and decided to try made them myself. Had to made several try to do decent shape, need very sharp knife to do it though. The bad thing with apples is they change color very quickly even if we put them in salted water first before we packed them, but luckily the taste do not change very much for several hours.

If you have spare time to read further, besides want to share the bento I’ve made on this website, I also want to invite other bento lovers (especially Indonesian bento maker) to share their work since I know lots of you are making them out there. I noticed that right now lots of bento making tools are sold in lots of places in Jakarta (Carrefour, Food Hall, Ranch Market, Daisho, etc.) and during my regular visit to some of those places their inventory are rotating so I assumed those bento tool are selling well. I also found an online Indonesian bento tools seller and it seems lots of people are buying from them but I can not find any of their work on the web.

Please contact me if you have a bento flickr page, websites, or blogs and I will add you to my link list so we can create a great community to share our works and our ideas.