Here's my comeback on the road again
Apr. 22nd, 2013 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaBento&co, an online supplier of boxes and twiddly lunchly accessories, hold an annual bento-making competition. They announce a theme, you make a bento box to that theme and send them a photo. They've always been quite keen to emphasise that it's as much a photo competition as it is a lunch-making competition.
However, I like making bento boxes and I like taking photographs. So yesterday I set on to make my entry.
The top prize this year is a trip to Japan, which would be a lovely thing to win. Given that, in previous years, the standard has been very high, I didn't realistically expect to win. But I figured I stood a lot less chance if I didn't enter :)
Bento&co's chosen theme this year was "a pasta bento". Which was a bit of a facer, because I virtually never put pasta in my bento boxes. Also, it's very difficult to make pasta look nice in photographs.
I figured it should be possible to make a nice swiss-roll effect thing with lasagne, but the competition guidelines said it must be "clearly pasta" which I thought that probably wasn't. Also, it turns out to be really, really difficult to roll cooked lasagne around filling. Worried about it sticking, I'd put my lasagne on oiled cling film, and I can confirm that if something is already very slippy, coating it in olive oil does not help. I skipped the oiling for a second roll, but managed to put in too much filling so that one went a bit astray, too.
Anyway, I prannied around doing all the sort of things that I would never dream of doing when cooking: thinking about how it was going to look rather than how it would taste, doing silly little fiddly bows out of chives, cutting heart-shapes out of slices of roast squash...
I still refuse resolutely to put faces on food, though. Or to try and make it look like other things.
It took bloody ages. And, when finished, the result wasn't nearly as impressive as I'd hoped. I then ran into a second problem: it turns out I'm crap at photography. I took masses of photos, on the assumption one would be OK. Then I glanced at them quickly on a decent-sized screen, realised that the auto settings on my camera had some weird ideas, and took some more on manual.
Then I ate the evidence. ChrisC kindly ate a similar but uglier meal made out of the cut-out leftovers, the pasta bundles which I'd tied together unsuccessfully with strips of pepper, and various practice-run bits and bobs.
Then I read the Bento&co rules properly. Which said that the photo must be horizontal, not vertical. And all the manual-setting photos I'd taken had the box vertical :( (No, you can't just rotate it... the perspective goes all weird and makes it look like food is going to fall out of the picture).
So then there was a lot of swearing, and a lot of fighting with the GIMP and with Windows Live Photo Gallery Editor Thing and eventually I submitted a not-that-great photo.
(Unlike many of last year's entries, it conforms to another of my rules: it must fit in the damn box. Most of the really twiddly bento boxes you see, you couldn't actually get the lid on to transport them. Mine you could, so long as you shoved the apple slices in a bit.)
This morning, as a nervous reaction, I put together an ultra-high speed bento containing rice, stir-fried savoy cabbage with mushrooms and chorizo, and some cherry tomatoes.
However, I like making bento boxes and I like taking photographs. So yesterday I set on to make my entry.
The top prize this year is a trip to Japan, which would be a lovely thing to win. Given that, in previous years, the standard has been very high, I didn't realistically expect to win. But I figured I stood a lot less chance if I didn't enter :)
Bento&co's chosen theme this year was "a pasta bento". Which was a bit of a facer, because I virtually never put pasta in my bento boxes. Also, it's very difficult to make pasta look nice in photographs.
I figured it should be possible to make a nice swiss-roll effect thing with lasagne, but the competition guidelines said it must be "clearly pasta" which I thought that probably wasn't. Also, it turns out to be really, really difficult to roll cooked lasagne around filling. Worried about it sticking, I'd put my lasagne on oiled cling film, and I can confirm that if something is already very slippy, coating it in olive oil does not help. I skipped the oiling for a second roll, but managed to put in too much filling so that one went a bit astray, too.
Anyway, I prannied around doing all the sort of things that I would never dream of doing when cooking: thinking about how it was going to look rather than how it would taste, doing silly little fiddly bows out of chives, cutting heart-shapes out of slices of roast squash...
I still refuse resolutely to put faces on food, though. Or to try and make it look like other things.
It took bloody ages. And, when finished, the result wasn't nearly as impressive as I'd hoped. I then ran into a second problem: it turns out I'm crap at photography. I took masses of photos, on the assumption one would be OK. Then I glanced at them quickly on a decent-sized screen, realised that the auto settings on my camera had some weird ideas, and took some more on manual.
Then I ate the evidence. ChrisC kindly ate a similar but uglier meal made out of the cut-out leftovers, the pasta bundles which I'd tied together unsuccessfully with strips of pepper, and various practice-run bits and bobs.
Then I read the Bento&co rules properly. Which said that the photo must be horizontal, not vertical. And all the manual-setting photos I'd taken had the box vertical :( (No, you can't just rotate it... the perspective goes all weird and makes it look like food is going to fall out of the picture).
So then there was a lot of swearing, and a lot of fighting with the GIMP and with Windows Live Photo Gallery Editor Thing and eventually I submitted a not-that-great photo.
(Unlike many of last year's entries, it conforms to another of my rules: it must fit in the damn box. Most of the really twiddly bento boxes you see, you couldn't actually get the lid on to transport them. Mine you could, so long as you shoved the apple slices in a bit.)
This morning, as a nervous reaction, I put together an ultra-high speed bento containing rice, stir-fried savoy cabbage with mushrooms and chorizo, and some cherry tomatoes.
