Today's bento is very simple and very quick to prepare. I mold the rice into square shapes and put a layer of thin ham on the top. Put tomato cherry tomato, mixed veggie (corns, green beans, carrots), and for the meat ... is pork with 5 spices wrapped with thin zucchinni layer. Also put some decorations from radish pickle and crab stick only the red part. I love using 5 spices to marinate chicken or pork. It smells nice and tastes yummy ... My mom's friend brought the spices from my hometown, Belitung in South Sumatera. The one usually sell in supermarket is not very good so I always ask someone from my hometown to bring or send the spices if I run out the stock

Andrew, my son is having his 6th birthday today . For his special day, I prepared a birthday theme bento for him. Put some broccoli and baby corns for the vegetable. Steamed mini chicken mushroom siomay (I used the tofu skin that I soaked into the water from last night instead of siomay skin), stuffed with chicken mince meat and mushroom) for the meat. Decorated with flower-shape carrots, and made the birthday cake ... gift , number 6 and put a star kamaboko on the top of the rice that I've sprinkled with furikake before I put the decorations. I used my small alphabets pasta to write 'happy birthday'.

Wish him a happiest birthday and all the best with all my love. May God always bless him forever and ever.

Monday always a busy morning as a new week is starting again. I made a simple yellow rice bento with yellow fried chicken and omellete. Decorated with strawberry, small flowers from carrot (orange), radish pickle (yellow) and cucumber (light green). Punched some seaweeds with heart-shaped puncher and wrapped around the yellow rice. In Indonesia yellow rice is also called 'nasi kuning'. The color yellow itself is from turmeric. The flavor of the yellow rice is very rich and smell nice because of coconut milk and orange leaves or Indian Bay leaves that usually added when cooking the yellow rice.

Today, I want to share some tips on how to make coloring on the rice so it looks more colorful and become not so boring white rice for bento. Here are how I color my rice :

Y E L L O W R I C E

I use an egg. Choose the fresh egg and beat the egg until even. The next step is same like if you want to make egg fried-rice.

B R O W N R I C E

I think everyone know how to do it. Just put some sweet soya sauce and like 'yellow rice' do the next step like if you want to make fried-rice.

G R E E N R I C E

I was using this trick before when my kids were little and they didn't like to eat spinach. Clean the spinach under the running water until clean and then boil them (don't boil them too long, you don't want to get a soggy spinach later). Quickly take them out and put them in cold water to maintain the green fresh color after few minutes put them in colander to drain them. Squish the spinach until the water drain up and chop finely the spinach. After that you can mixed them with the white rice until even.

P I N K R I C E

It's the same way to do the Green Rice only instead of using green spinach I use red spinach. Remember not to boil green and red spinach at the same time because red spinach will produce pinkies color and will effect the color of green spinach.

Tada ... you've got 4 colors rice for your bento. Pretty simple steps but yet you get fun in the process. Hope this will be a useful tips and will be making more tips to share on this blog.

This is my 15-minutes quick bento for the kids. For the vegie, I put cabbage and carrot and stirred fried them. For the meat, I put baked salmon and cheese. I just sprinkled some bacos on the top of the salmon. The salmon itself shaped like a coin (I call it salmon coin). I bought them on a deli store near my kids' school.

Put some strawberries and seaweed cut with my puncher for the decoration. At the bottom of salmons is rice as usual for carbohydrate. Doing the quick 15-minutes bento for me is very helpful in the busy morning or if I'm late to wake up and have to prepare the kids' bento.