Needed:
Container with lid
Rice, cheese, hot dogs, and other foods
A Bento lunch is nothing more than a lunch with a theme, a personalized meal, or a dinner with unusual things inside. Instead of rice, you have a rice ball, instead of cheese, you have cheese animals. That’s the fun of a Bento lunch. You can use regular foods but turn them into interesting shapes or designs. This guide will help you with some of the common things that can be added to a Bento lunch.
A hot dog octopus will thrill any child at lunch. To make the octopus, cut a hot dog in half and then slice the cut end. Slice into it to make a “+” shape. Slice about halfway up the hot dog piece to create the legs. Put two dot eyes on him with an edible food marker. A hot dog piece also makes a nice flower. Simply cut the end off of the hot dog and use the small piece as it is. The wrinkled end of the hot dog looks like a flower, particularly if you cut the wrinkles a bit deeper.
A rice ball can be nearly anything that you want it to be. Make the rice as you normally would and then shape it into a ball. Make vegetable ears, food marker eyes, and other attributes to turn the rice ball into a kitten, an Angry Bird, or another character. It can help to look at pictures of these things as you design the rice ball character. Rice can be tinted with food coloring so that gives you lots of opportunities to create unique characters.
A hard boiled egg is much more than that when you give it a face and put it in a Bento lunch. After peeling the egg, give it two dot eyes with a food marker, and then make a slit for a mouth. Cut a slit about a third of the way into the egg. It instantly turns the egg into an edible character; change the look of the guy by making different eyes. Make scary eggs by peeling away some of the whites of the finished egg.
Cheese animals, and other shapes, are easy to make with a cookie cutter. Lay out the sliced cheese type that you want to use and cut it into duck shapes, seashells, letters, numbers, and other images. Put them on top of sandwiches and other foods. Cut cheese into strips and other shapes to make stick-like people.
Cracker flowers are filling and pretty. Lay a round cracker in the lunch container, cut a flower shape from cheese, and lay it on top of the cracker. Make another flower from a different type of cheese – make it a bit smaller than the first one – and put it on top. Finish with a circle of the original cheese. With a cookie cutter, flowers can also be made from cucumbers, lettuce, bread, lunch meat slices, and brownies.