A while back, I was asked to do a bento demo for the Japanese Club here at USF. My instructions were to “do the most awesome demonstration possible” with a $100 budget to a local supermarket. “Most awesome” is a pretty tall order, lol! What we ended up settling on was a ‘Make Your Own Bento Box’ event.

My task was then to figure out how in the world 40 people are going to make their own bentos in a room with no kitchen! In other words, all of the planning, washing, cooking, and cutting had to be done before I got there. I found some styrofoam takeout containers for them to use as bento boxes and prepped everything so that all they needed to do was assemble and decorate.

Ever wanted to know what 88 octo-dogs looks like??

All in all I prepped:
88 octo-dogs (yeah, they had to be cut by hand and cooked)
45 onigiri (also formed by hand)
washed and sliced 5 cucumbers
washed, peeled, and sliced a daikon radish
boiled and peeled 48 eggs
cut 42 radish stars
filled 40 soy sauce fishes (half were fishes and half were adorable tiny little bottles)
wash and pluck a gazillion grapes off the vine
steam some edamame
and get everything else together (carrots, bags of apple slices, boxes, ketchup, little ketchup containers, nori, all of my punches and cutters, miso and furikake for the onigiri, etc.)

All we needed then were people! I think quite a few more than 40 people showed up... this is a picture of just over half of the room... half!

To get everybody excited and motivated I turned it into a deco-ben contest and the winner, by popular vote, got to take home a bento starter kit. This definitely got everybody motivated! I was truly impressed with the amount of creativity in that room!

This fountain cracks me up! :) Love it!

We ended up getting a bunch of entries for the deco-ben contest, this is just a few.

The winner was an adorable Hello Kitty bento.

It was a lot of work putting this together, but it was worth every second! I had a blast hanging out with these guys and playing with bentos. It was really cool to see so many young college kids get excited about playing with their food, lol! Hopefully I was able to inspire some of them to start packing their own bentos.

If you’re interested, you can find a lot more photos of the event and more information about the USF Japanese Club at their Facebook page.

In the meantime, I’m going to take a nap. :) And as always...

Happy Bento-ing!