Soot Ball Onigiri

When I first started getting full on into doing bento every day, one of my favorite images was from Little Yuzu's blog in which she did some soot ball onigiri from Spirited Away. Since the bentochallenge this week is Hayao Miyazaki, I had to do one. It's been done quite a few times on other blogs I've seen such as Lunch in a Box and Kitchen Cow, but as I mentioned it's one of my favorite bentos ever so despite the unoriginality that's what I'm eating today.

Yesterday I went home with a bad stomach ache so Mr. Pikko brought me back some pork hash from dinner at his mom's and some kind of tofu carrot patty, which tasted really good. I decided to use that for the filling in my onigiri. The rice came out to just about 1 cup cooked rice, so this bento will be 4 points just like yesterday's. It may look like more, but the filling takes up a decent amount of space inside.


The eyes are made with swiss cheese and I had a hard time with it because I don't have anything circular to cut them out with that small. My first try, I used the bottom of one of my soy sauce bottles but that turned out to be too small so I used one of my thermos soy sauce bottles instead. The nori pupils were punched with my happy face punches from Japan. The stars are made from carrot, Okinawan sweet potato, and cucumbers.

I showed it to Baby Girl and she loved it but I showed it to Buddy and he immediately backed away whimpering with his scared face, so I guess big black onirigi with eyeballs staring at him is way too scary! lol

As you can see from today's and yesterday's photos I'm pretty bored with my plain white background and so have decided to put my numerous furoshiki cloths to use as prettier backgrounds. So far I am pretty happy with how it turns out. It adds more life to the photo, don't you think?

I didn't go jogging again last night because of my lingering stomachache plus my legs are so sore I can barely walk right. We'll see how I do tonight. No promises on that one since tonight I have to make #100, get more bento orders ready, and do the drawing.