I made a teddy bear bento prototype about two weeks ago and now it’s time to make more mass bento to be shipped in the morning. The big difference in this project with my previous mass bento projects is I can’t prepare lots of thing on the previous day since the teddy bears have to be made like onigiri and they need to be made fresh (the Naruto egg sheets and the fish boat parts can be made 1 or 2 days prior).

So the preparation was minimal. I could only prepare the chicken nuggets, cut the vegetables, cut the bears’ carrot butterfly ties along with nori eyes, noses, and mouths during the previous evening. The rest must be made in the morning before the scheduled delivery.

So I set the alarm on 3.40 a.m. and in the next morning begin all the work with my assistants. First thing to do was washing the rice and soaked all green vegetables with water and salt to remove any worms inside them (especially in the broccolis). After that while we wait the rice to fully cook, we blanched all vegetables and prepare the boxes with lettuces.

After the rice was ready then the hard part was begin. I need to make all those bears with my hand. The heads were easy since we used onigiri mold, my wife expertly made those heads while I made the bear’s bodies first. As expected, she finished her task way before me.

As time went by, I still haven’t finished completing the bear parts while my assistant already finished deep frying all the chicken nuggets. I didn’t worry since I expected that and there’s still enough time to finish them on time.

While I was still making the parts, the others began to fill the completed bears with all the filling. The last thing I need to do was put the bears’ nose and mouth. The time was 7.40 a.m., I took some pictures of the finished bento and cleaned up myself while my assistant packing those bento for delivery.

I went from home at 8.10 a.m. and luckily the traffic was lighter than I expected so I arrived at the given address just in time. I hope that all those children will be happy when they eat those bento.

There’s much calmness when we worked today compare with my previous Naruto episode. As for this project, while I admit that we still need to improve on our finished product but what I can assure is that I always do my best and put my heart and effort into each bento I make.

The result was not as cute as those bears but I’m still quite happy about it. It’s a very simple rice burger bento that fits well with the square box I had.

I made the chicken burger patty by myself (not seen in the picture, the patty is below the bear face, sandwiched in between the double rice burgers).

The ears were made with chicken sausages and carrot while the eyes were a kidney bean cut into half for each eye, and the mouth was made with cheese slice and nori.

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 still had beaten egg remain so I added more eggs to make tamagoyaki. But somehow I put them in the sushi bamboo mat too long that its outer part became jagged, the looked was unique but I didn’t intent that.

I bought this new bento box from Food Hall. I wanted a large 3:4 bento box so I can fit all the foods in one box instead of 2 separate boxes. So this new box was perfect for me. The light blue color also great since I’ve never had one before.

The two teddy onigiri were made using the teddy rice mold, the brown one made with white rice mixed with soy sauce and tomato sauce. It turned out that the taste was quite unusual, next time I must use other method to make a brown onigiri.

As for the filling, I just used a boiled broccoli and cherry tomatoes since I had no other vegetables in the fridge ^_^

I got a rough idea on how the finished teddy bread look, so I prepared the sausage first. After I cut two thin slice for the face, I cut the rest to make several flower sausage. The flower sausage was not that hard, just use a straw to cut and mark the middle area and then with knife; cut from the straw line to the outer part and your done. Just be very careful with the knife since it’s very close with the fingers when doing this stuff.

I fried the sausage but strangely they didn’t expand as expected. I really had to blame the sausage, I used other brand the other day for practice and the result was good. I must keep a note to never buy this brand again for making bento.

The teddy face was made with cheese cut with knife, eyes and mouth from peas skin cut with emoticon vegetables cutter. I had to settle with the reddish cheek while I wanted them pink, kind of hard finding a pink sausage around here.

As for fruit part, I really had to eat up all kiwi in the fridge, so no other choice then, cut with the trusted v-shaped kiwi cutter ^_^