I could talk about games for hours but I should create another blog for it since I only want to talk about bento and cooking related stuff in this site. So I searched for Mario ghost and I sketched it on my notebook. I knew it will be quite a challenge to make the ghost exactly like in the game.

I never made a complex shape onigiri before so I must figured it out the right approach for it. I made a ball shape onigiri first for the body and then create the ghost tail and two arms separately, then I pasted them one by one into the body part. They didn’t blend well at first so I had to sculpt it more with my fingers. The shape was getting better although it’s not exactly the same as my sketch but I decided to stop tweaking the shape since I was afraid it might break. The last thing I did was push the center body part to make the mouth shape to make the onigiri more 3D like.

As for the details, the eyes were nori cut with emoticons nori cutter added with round shape cheese cut with straw. The mouth was nori cut with scissors. Those triangle fangs were cheese cut with knife. Lastly, the Rolling Stones tongue was made with ham shaped with scissors.

The funny thing about the ghost on those Mario games is while they’re big and scary, actually they’re quite coward since they only chase Mario (and friends) when Mario not facing them and the ghost will stop and shut their eyes everytime Mario is face to face with them ^_^

As for the scared mushrooms, they’re very easy to make, the key is to find cherry tomato with the right size. If we can find it, then we just need to cut the cherry tomato into half, remove the inside and put it on top of the quail. We can use toothpick or half-cooked spaghetti as toothpick replacement (if we afraid someone will accidentally eating the toothpick) to keep the mushroom head and body together.

Once the mushroom intact, we can add the details. The circle can be made using cheese or nori, which ever you’d like. Since the mushroom on Mario games is white (bright colored), I used cheese and cut them with straw. The eyes were nori cut with my trusted emoticons nori punch.

For the filling, I made some lemon chicken and covered them with lettuce to separate the fried dish with the vegetable and rice portion. I put corn to add some bright yellow into the mix, the usual broccoli chunks for green color and to fill those small gaps, and seedless grapes at the bottom part.

This was the fourth Halloween bento I’ve made these past two weeks, I really like making themed bento but I think I should stop making Halloween theme bento since I’m afraid I won’t have good ideas for next year Halloween unless tonight I’ve got another idea for a really simple Halloween theme bento.

But first I really want to try out the emotion nori puncher I’ve been waiting for weeks to arrive. I really want this puncher since my emoticon vegetable cutter while it’s very good but it can’t cut nori at all.

The onigiri also made with my new arrival triangle rice mold. Our housemaid cooked the rice with less water than usual so I’ve got a dry onigiri,  it still edible but it didn’t look good on the picture. All the facial expression was made with my new emoticon nori puncher. The puncher was sharp, it cut real good but the weather in Jakarta always very humid so I must use them immediately before they absorb the water from the air and became damp, or next time I really need to store the punched nori into a container to avoid the weather exposure.

I also want to try my hands making tamagoyaki. I looked the recipe around the web but really couldn’t get dashi anywhere so I replace it with water. The result turned out not bad but I certainly need more practice making those. Those food picks also from my new arrival, the chicks eyes and beaks also from my new puncher.

We really can’t see the enoki mushroom inside the meat roll, I messed up cutting them too short so when I wrapped the sukiyaki meat around the enoki mushroom it looked like they’re hiding inside the meat. But overall this dish was very easy to prepare, we only need to wrapped the cooked mushroom with those thin sliced meat and then cooked them inside a frying pan with small fire for just 5 minutes.