Bento: My Second Attempt

My friend built me a new computer so in gratitude I made him a bento. AnnatheRed inspired my modest creations. Her blog goes into detail on how to make each component, though instead of cheese I stuck with white kamaboko.

I learned how to make the chickadees from her, as well as the makkurokurosuke (dust bunny), and the mini-totoro. Oh, and the big Totoro, too. =P

The chickens are mourning the loss of the poached egg. Underneath is a mound of oyakodon mixture.

AnnatheRed is an amazingly prolific blogger. She makes bento-making look easy, but believe me it'll suck your life away if you let it. These two boxes alone took 3 hours from start to finish. Totoro's mouth refused to cooperate, and the meatballs I cooked had mysterious slipped off the stove and onto the ground. By the end, I was deliriously gnawing on a sheet of roasted seaweed.

If I should ever make you a bento, consider yourself special.

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In Other News:

Did anyone check out the going-out-of-business sale at Famima's WehHo branch?

My first attempt at a bento.

How to Make a Bento!

I attempted my first ultra cute! bento box yesterday. I used quail eggs and kurobuta sausages, fashioning their eyes with roasted seaweed cut with a craft paper puncher. The green beans are seasoned with grounded sesame seeds, sugar and soy sauce (goma ae).

It took an amazingly tedious 45 minutes to finish what you see above (plus two rice balls):

I brought it to work today and was the envy of the office. Then I scarfed it down. Don't know if I'll ever do it again, but if I do it means I must really, really like the person I'm giving it to. ^^

Here are more cute bento lunches I found on flickr. I commend their efforts to please their boyfriends.




By the way, this will be tomorrow's 'leftovers' lunch:

Autumn Bento box

Click To Play

One of my favorite meals in Japan is the kind you can buy at the train station. This bento box is a seasonal selection. Notice the big yellow nut on top of the middle plot of rice. Chestnuts are the seasonal ingredients right now and so you'll find a lot of kuri-gohan (chestnut rice) being sold in stores. There's also 'sekihan' on the right, which is red bean rice. From top-left to right is karaage (a chicken nugget), a nub of salmon, and shrimp. The rest are strange pickled things mothers force-feed their children.

Put Cute Things in Your Bento

(Photo credit: e-bento.com)

Every now and then when I'm feeling really domesticated I get these ideas for ultra-cute bento boxes to take to work. Typically, you start off with a small tupperware of rice sprinkled with furikake, then you add a couple pieces of karaage chicken and a tin-foil cup of hijiki or edamame. Throw in a few slices of kamaboko and plastic frilly toothpicks for color.

Now if you're super adventurous you can make a few inari sushi pieces (aka footballs) like the ones above. The heads are made of boiled quail eggs which can be found in cans at Marukai or any other local Japanese market. Dried sheets of nori (seaweed) are good for making faces.

There's a ton of cookbooks at the Japanese bookstores dedicated to this sort of stuff. Maybe I should get into the creative bento mode instead of eating cheese all the time.