Somehow I manage to make this one. I made shrimp tempura and Japanese beef curry for dinner, so I thought I could make a simple bento since right now I feel guilty if I don’t make a single bento after a few days off. And also I want to see how straight I can fried my shrimp with some additional cutting (hmm, I should really ask my chef teacher about this next week).

Still I can’t make a very straight shrimp but it’s an improvement, maybe my teacher can give me better suggestion on this matter. I made a shrimp-fish and a twin octo-sausages, they’re very easy to made, I only use sliced cheese (cut them with art knife and straw) and nori (cut with puncher).

In the other bento box, I put Japanese beef curry inside a lettuce and some crispy seedless grapes on yellow silicon container. Although the curry taste really good it didn’t look great on picture, so I blurred it out.

I have some pictures of the food I made in my class (all students brought home the food they’ve cooked in class) and decorated them in the same spirit like my bento, hopefully I can post them each day during the weekend before school start again on Monday.

While the fish was marinated I started my preparation for the decoration. I prepared a fish theme bento with rice but I didn’t make onigiri (rice ball) for this one. This was the first time I didn’t make onigiri for my rice bento, I’ve seen so many bento using rice as based and people created some amazing decoration on top of it, but I didn’t have enough time to prepare something good, just a simple decoration for this.

The fish sausage was very easy to make, just cut sausage into half and then cut some line with a knife for its body and v-shape incision for the tail. For the tamagoyaki, I added spinach, again an experiment that I’d always want to try. I thing the spinach thing is a great idea from the Japanese moms so their children want to eat some vegetables.

I added some broccoli and strawberries to fill the space. The finished result was looked very simple. The fish recipe I tried was a failure, me and my wife didn’t like it at all, I think I just stick with the regular tempura batter recipe.

Yesterday I prepared more ingredients than needed because this bento making was new to me, I didn’t know how much ingredients needed to be put inside a bento box to make it full. There were some tempura that still not been fried and yellow dyed quail egg in the fridge, so I decided to make a quick bento like yesterday with different rice mold.

I already have lots of bento making tools even before making a single bento so I had to try every tools that I have. This week is a good time to do just that.

The white onigiri was made with elephant head mold. I only add sesame seeds for its eyes and the from the result it didn’t look like elephant, I should have add more details, I think adding a pair of ears made from half circle shape of cheese would do some favor for the little elephant.

Same thing with the little chick onigiri. I add some curry powder to make it yellow and add a pea for the eye. Again, I should make a half circle shape for its wing to add more detail.

It’s a good thing writing things down like this, so that I can analyze the bento I’ve done (beside sharing with others) and making some notes for future improvement.

This is my very first bento, very time consuming to made since I never made one before so  I didn’t know the right flow on the preparation. I’m sure once I get the grip on thing I can do it a lot faster.

I learnt most of bento stuff from other people sites, so I kind of summarize everything on my bento notebook (must have item if you’re serious bento maker). I want that all my bento to have this combination of protein (chicken, beef, pork, seafood), egg (chicken or quail), vegetables, fruits, and of course carbohydrates (rice, noodle or pasta).

For my first bento I want to include shrimp tempura (my favorite!), but I just couldn’t straighten them out like in restaurants, need to look more information on how to do that. As for decoration I tried to make the yellow chicks from quail eggs. I was using sesame seeds for their eyes and cut carrots to make their beak and comb.

As for the onigiri, I used the rice mold I bought from eBay (maybe I’ll put my equipments online on some other day). I cut nori with scissors and nori punch to add some details for the bear and hello kitty. I used carrot again for the ribbon and kitty’s nose.

The tomato basket was made by cutting cherry tomatoes and filled them with parsley. Last, some broccoli and peas for filling the bento box.

I found out that the most time consuming activity was adding details for my bear and kitty. But to make them look more lively and adorable you have to add some details on them.

It was very fun doing all that and I felt satisfied when I was finally took picture of them.

I had planned to do this for a couple of months but can not manage to do this until now. There are several reasons for delay I can think of, like I’m not familiar with this blogging thing, but my wife encourage me.  The other reason is that I want to personalize my site, not using another free template, but then my web programming skills is very limited at best and I have to spent hours looking at CSS and html tutorial website. Luckily I love to learn new things so it’s not a problem for me, but still if I want to make my ‘perfect’ design I won’t start writing this now. So expect some changes on the design of this site in monthly basis or when I start to learn more programming stuff.

Until my next post then, hopefully I can post new stuff in 2-3 days basis.