When cute bento is mentioned, automatically we think of lunches that’s oozing with cute. Characters made from colorful rice sculptures, cut-out flowers featuring all the colors of a rainbow, and well-thought out sceneries making an astounding tableau of images. Sometimes though, a well-placed cute little addition can suffice and transform your ordinary lunch into something really cute.

Take this lunch for instance. When you break down its components — bistek tagalog, rice, and fried potatoes — it’s very simple. I could slap them in an ordinary lunchbox and get an ordinary lunch. Instead of doing that though, I assigned the meal elements to form a little stage for my cute addition. I placed the meat at the bottom, forming “soil.” I slipped a strip of sushi grass between my rice and meat to act both as a divider and as decor. Instead of simply slicing my potatoes, I used a vegetable cutter before frying to get flower-shaped potatoes. And finally, I sliced a bit of tomato and garnished it with nori and cheese to make a lady bug. I used scissors and punchers to make the ladybug’s head and details on her back. To make her eyes, I used cheese, nori, and a straw and puncher.

Instant cute, yes? Not to mention easy enough to incorporate into your other lunches, no matter how normal looking they are. Cute doesn’t have to be difficult, I’m sure you’d agree now, so go and try it yourself.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 10:55 pm and is filed under bento. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.