I know I’ve mentioned before how I’ve recently gotten into bento making, inspired in large part by the justbento website and also Maki’s wonderful Just Bento Cookbook. While browsing her site about a week ago I discovered a bento contest held by Bento & Co, and I decided I just had to enter.
The theme was pasta. You had to use some sort of pasta in your enter, but it had to be Italian and not Japanese pasta (so no soba, udon, etc.)
While I’ve made quite a few bentos before, I actually have never made a pasta bento, but I knew I wanted to focus more on the visual aspect of my bento than on taste. So I sat and pondered pasta, what kind of pasta should I use, what would I make out of it, yadayadayada, when a bout of inspiration(cue the tiny lightbulb) hit. I decided to make a bento featuring spaghetti noodles based on Vincent Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night.”
Please don’t ask how this particular bout of inspiration struck, I’m honestly still trying to figure it out myself, but it did and I went with it.
My first order of business was to figure out how to dye the spaghetti noodles blue. I wanted to swirl them with a fork in order to create the texture of Van Gogh’s painting. So I researched ways to turn pasta blue, assuming it wouldn’t be that hard.
Dyed pasta chillin’ in the strainer.
For the record, it wasn’t particularly difficult to do. When you search “how to dye pasta” online a lot of methods for dying dried pasta(for using in kids crafts) pop up, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted the pasta to eat, and the instructions for dried pasta all involve vinegar so…here’s the method I used.
What you need:
- ziplock bags (or other sandwhich/gallon size bags that close)
- bottles of food coloring
- water
What to do with all that:
- Put a tablespoon of water in the bag along with 20 drops of your desired food color.
- Place desired amount of already cooked and drained pasta in the bag. I only did enough to fit in a sandwich bag. If you’re dying more you may want to double up on the coloring and choose a larger bag.
- Mix the pasta around so it absorbs the color.
- Let sit for at least a minute.
- Drain and rinse. I was paranoid that I’d was all the color off, so I didn’t let the water run completely clear, but you really do need to get some of the excess coloring off.
Pretty easy, right? I made sure to put the yellow in a separate strainer so the darker colors didn’t bleed into it as it was draining.
Beginning to arrange the spaghetti.
Then, once everything was drained and dry-ish, I separated each color into bowls and I mixed in a little melted butter to keep it all from sticking together. Then, working in little batches, and, like a somewhat good Italian, I took my fork and began twirling little batches of spaghetti. In retrospect, using a spoon as my twirling surface would have helped a lot when I transferred the pasta to the box. As I did this, I tried to mix in a streak of yellow or purple in, to mimic the impressionist use of colors. Also, I used two different blues for this: a dark blue, and neon blue (I personally think the neon food colors come out a lot brighter and prettier).
The pasta layer is done. Now to add the decorations.
Once that was done I began laying down my extras. The moon is, rather obviously, half of a hard boiled egg. I used kale as a barrier for my “sauce”, and also as the top mountain line.
I figured a really fresh tomato based salsa might work instead of spaghetti sauce. That would have been way too leaky, and I didn’t particularly want to use sauce cups (as I don’t have any pretty ones).
Instead of spaghetti or marina I used a salsa fresca recipe I found. I was hoping that the veggies in it would pump up the health factor of what was turning into a carb-stravaganza.
I’m beginning to lay the salsa down and also the carrots.
I had to put a little more kale down to keep the salsa from getting everywhere and then I began to put the carrots down. the carrots are supposed to be the little houses from the painting…yes, I know they don’t look like little houses. But they give it texture. And texture is good.
Finally, I finished my carrots, added my snow peas for the weird castley/mountainy/big black blobby thing, cut out some cheese stars and voila!
I happen to think it looks quite nice. I really wish my camera took better pictures, but you get the idea.
Check out all the finalists and the winners here, and cast your vote for the 20 finalists–I think voting goes on for the next two days. They picked some really pretty boxes. And seriously…one of these days I’m making a box that involves things with really cute faces, because that tiny little goat…and that lion…and those two really adorable little bunnies. Love. Just love.
Aaaaand….now that I’ve brought up adorable things. Let me introduce our temporary bookstore kitten:
He doesn’t have a name, and Julie told me that I’m not allowed to name him Little Dude…but that’s what I’ve been calling him. He’s a little over two weeks old now, and he’s made going to work a million times more adorable.
Daaaaawwwwwww! So cute.
Julie is only babysitting him for another week, but that means I get to play with him a few more times! Plus, he’s getting a million times better at walking. I sense he’s gonna wreak some terrible kitten havoc once his legs get strong enough.
This one was from when he was 10/12 days old.
