Today we are making a bento based on the characters in the famous Ghibli movie, My Neighbor Totoro. This bento features the little white totoros made from egg and the makkuro-kurosukes (the little black dust bunnies).
Ingredients:
- brown rice
- hard-boiled quail eggs (if this is not available in your country, chicken eggs are fine. They just will be bigger). Cut a V shape out of the white of the egg to make the ears.
- hot dog (Cut the hot dog into 5 cm chunks and make 2 cm deep cuts on one side of each chunk, slicing it like you would a pie, if you were trying to cut 6 pieces from it, then boiled the hot-dog to make the flower shape above)
- Japanese omelet (called tamago-yaki, directions here )
- broccoli
- edamame
- slice cheese
- seaweed
- mayonnaise
Things you will need:
- A knife
- chopping board
- scissors (that you can use for food)
- food picks
- tooth picks
- saran wrap
Get out your ingredients and mentally prepare yourself for the task at hand. Take your rice and divide it into how many black dust bunnies you intend to make.
Take the rice for one dust bunny and put it in saran wrap so you can squeeze it to make a nice ball. Make all your rice into small balls.
Take your seaweed and wrap it around the rice ball, use the saran wrap to stick the seaweed firmly to the rice.
Take your cheese and use your toothpicks or a dedicated pair of scissors for food to make cheese-circles for the eyes. You will need big circles for each dust-bunny and smaller ones for each egg-totoro.
You make the pupils by using your scissors to cut out little circles to stick on the cheese.
Put the parts together. Use a dab of mayonnaise to connect the cheese-eyes to the characters.
Take your characters and arrange them in your bento box. If you have paper muffin cups, you can put your dust bunnies in them (it just looks cuter).
Take your hot dog flowers and decorate the centers with an edamame bean for each one.
And you are done! Admire the fine work that you put into your character bento!
Show everyone you know that you can indeed create incredibly cute food.
