As a crafter and food enthusiast, creating a bento box would seem to be the perfect project for me. What you may not guess, however, is that I hate cooking. Luckily, my bento required absolutely no heating beyond a microwave to warm up leftover rice!
Rachel asked me to make a bento box in preparation for the Anime Festival on Saturday, February 13. How romantic, eh? Anyway, bento boxes are yet another wonderful Japanese invention, like washi tape and pokémon. Bento, roughly translated, means, I believe, “ridiculous amount of energy to create tiny, adorable, somethings.” Or something like that. They are basically little portions of food like sushi, rice, vegetables, fruit, etc. arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. They can be quite elaborate. Google image it.
You can use anything. A pimento and mento bento would be quite a cento.
Ahem. Here’s the how-to.
MAKE YOUR OWN BENTO BOX
Total time: 1 hour
What I Used:
- one box (I used a round gift box from Ikea, but tupperware works very well. Or, if you’re a bento snob like Jason, something like this. Or, cuter, that.)
- aluminum foil
- 2 slices sourdough bread
- 1 cucumber
- 2 cherry tomatoes
- 1 clementine
- plain cream cheese
- fruit jam/jelly/preserves
- rice
- vegetable peeler
- sharp knife
- ice cream scoop
- rolling pin
- wax paper
Instructions:
1. Line box with aluminum foil, set aside
2. Scoop a ball of rice with ice cream scoop, place in box
3. Wash vegetables, peel cucumber
4. Cut a few round cucumber slices, star
5. Cut long, thin strip of cucumber
6. Score 2 cherry tomatoes
7. Peel clementine, cut thin slices
8. Flatten slices of bread with rolling pin, between wax paper. Cut off crusts, roll again
9. Spread slices of bread with whatever. I did one with jelly, one with cream cheese and thin slice of cucumber
10. Roll up bread (like a sushi roll), and slice into cylinders approximately 1.5 inches long
11. Arrange everything in some cute way in the box
THE BIG REVEAL…
Enjoy!
1 Comment
Amazing!! These sliced clementines look SO cool! (And delicious, of course!)
I’ll definitely have to try this sometime!