Do you sometimes lose your appetite? If your answer is “yes” and you don’t know what to do, you should try to make “bento”. Bento is a boxed meal which contains rice, vegetable, fruit, or other things. All of those things are decorated together in a box into an interesting appearance so that people who see it will think that it is very delicious. Yes, actually the appearance of the food served is very important. Japanese people had done this for a long time. They decorated their food to increase their appetite and to make them enjoy eating their meals.
So, are you interested in making Japanese bento? If yes, here are some steps that you can follow:
1) Choose the bright color food.
Colorful food will increase your appetites. But it doesn’t mean you can give dye in your food. There are so many colorful vegetable and fruit that you can use, such as tomato (red), carrot (orange), corn (yellow), broccoli (green), etc. In Indonesia there are nasi goreng, nasi kuning, nasi merah, etc. Yes! You can use one of them also to make your lunch colorful. What if you need to use black color in your food? You can use nori. Nori is fickled seaweed from Japan and the color is black.
2) Divide the food on the scale 4:3:2:1.
It means that 4 for rice, noodle, or bread; 3 for side dish; 2 for vegetables; and 1 for dessert or fruits.
3) Be creative
Think about the theme of your bento.You can draw the vignette first in a piece of paper if you hesitate. Then you can start to shape your food, for example squid from sausage, flower from carrot, etc. You can use bento gear that you can buy in the supermarkets or shape it by yourself (using knife).
4) Put the food in the box.
First, put the rice, noodle or bread in the box. Second, put the side dish. Then put the vegetables. And the last put the dessert or fruits in the box. Put it just like the theme that you had decided before.
and.....Gochisousama deshita^^!!
