Princess Bonbon Bento

This week, the bento challenge is "game characters". At first I thought, hey I can do Pikko! But after some thinking today I decided she was too hard and obscure to boot. So Pikko got dumped and I began to brainstorm for an easily recognized game character. Wanting to stick with something Final Fantasy, I chose the ever lovable chocobo! This bento is dedicated to my little chocobo chicky, Princess Bonbon. I raised her from an egg and reserved from my garden the precious cupid worms and vomp carrots that were so valuable at the time. Eventually she was retired to the stables in Windurst.

The body, legs, and beak are made from bell pepper cut with an X-acto knife. The toes and eyes are made from thinly sliced cauliflower stem! I was going to use cheese at first, but decided it would be too soft and difficult. I learned my lesson from cutting out Elmo's eyes! The black lines didn't come out how I wanted it to, creating a blurry black "glow" around the lines. Still, it did it's job. It's made out of nori carefully inserted into slits in the pepper. side view/close-up

The entire thing rests on a bed of somen noodles, which came with several colored noodles. Isn't that cute?? I love it! I found it at Daiei. I wasn't going to use it tonight, but my ever wonderful daughter decided to chew on the package, crushing a bunch of the noodles and puncturing the packaging. As for the "KWEH?"... hahaha!!! I made that with nori using my Quickutz dies for scrapbooking. Bet the Quickutz team never envisioned someone using their product for making lunch!

The pictures came out pretty bad; obviously I haven't yet found time to make my lightbox. Originally I thought putting it into a yellow container would be nice because it matched the chocobo, but instead it made her hard to see. :( I'd move it all to another container and re-take the pictures, but that would require energy that simply doesn't exist in my poor weary body right now. This bento took me a whopping 2 HOURS to make. Good thing the kids knocked out early!

The bottom layer of the bento consists of salmon flavored onigiri, Aidell's chicken meatballs (teriyaki pineapple), carrots, and edamame.


This bento is kinda nuts points-wise, costing me 7 points. I can knock off half of that by exercising tomorrow. I just have to remember to do it! Currently I weigh in at 133.4 lbs, which I'm very happy with. Five months ago I was 155. Scary... +_+