The Hello Kitty onigiri while it’s easy to make but we still need to spend lots of time adding her facial detail, her whiskers alone have 6 (six) parts, that’s about the whole facial detail we need to complete one panda. So we usually separate our team into two groups, one is making all the onigiri and the other completing all details with nori for those onigiri and quail eggs. Of course the detail team is working longer hours.

While the detail team is still working, the other can start to put the side dishes into the box so we can finish them all in the same time. After that I took some pictures of our work and start packing them for delivery.

And speaking about delivery, I had a bad experience delivering this one. The traffic in Jakarta is getting ridiculous each year that I had to spend 140 minutes just to cover 16 km of road (on Sunday morning, we can go to my parents house in Bandung for just 120 minutes only, and the distant is about 180 km). It’s not that bad at every hour, the traffic hell usually takes place around 06.30-09.00 a.m. to the business district and 05.00-8.30 p.m. from it.

This traffic problem is getting worst each year that it becomes headline for 4 (four) straight days this week in our biggest newspaper. But sadly from what I read, I don’t think that our government can solve this problem, it’s too big and complicated for them. They have the chance to start working the solution 5 years ago but they’ve never done anything significant and as we can see, the problem is getting worse and the solution is become more complicated.

But since I don’t have the say nor have the authority to solve this then what I need is to adapt and adjust myself to beat the traffic. So I just need to deliver all the orders earlier, better early than late they say

We tried to pack as many things as possible for this bento. There’s pair of onigiri (rabbit and bear, shaped with onigiri mold), a bunny (with carrot ear) and a piggy (with ham ear and nose) quail eggs, a pair of chicken nuggets with our special panko mix, sausages, broccoli chunks, corn ears, and an assorted shaped jelly (bear, elephant, rabbit, duck, and car).

The most difficult thing to do preparing this kind of bento was placing those tiny cuts of nori onto all the onigiris and quail eggs. Usually I made my assistants did all the cutting first and had them separate all the different shapes and put them into different containers. And then in the morning after we’ve prepared the onigiri I started to decorate the onigiri with those nori.

It’s a long process but after we finished them all, usually we’d become really happy to see all those cute face from those onigiris and quail eggs and take some pictures of them.

The twin droplets onigiri were made with my palm since I don’t think there’s a special mold for them. I made the rice ball shape first and then pull the top part to make it pointy. The pink one of course made from white rice mixed with pink furikake. The facial details were using nori and carrot (on the white droplet’s cheek) and cheese (on the pink one’s cheek). To fill the space I added some broccoli chunks and sausages.

The other container was filled with chicken karaage, a pair of chicks quail egg (nori, carrot, with food picks to make the chicks) and I also put the good-looking champagne grapes to complete the set.  I really like those grapes, it’s like they perfectly made for bento making purpose.

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.

I still like white rice better, but I love red rice for its unique and natural color, and it’s perfect for my Halloween bento ^_^

I used 100% red rice to achieve darker color for the night sky. Not as dark as I expected but it’s still good. My wife suggested using black rice for great dark color, maybe I will try that someday, but I have to buy some black rice first (never bought and ate it but I know it’s very expensive).

The crescent moon was made with a slice of cheese cut with a bottle cap. The clouds were from slices of kamaboko (Japanese fish cake) and cut with knife. And those bats were nori cut with scissors.

The bottom part was regular bento filling, (from left to right) a strawberry, corn, a pair of quail egg skulls, two shrimps, a slice of marinated grilled salmon, edamame with food pick, and a broccoli chunk, with two pumpkin jacks carrot slice. I made more than two jacks, but there’s no more space to put them all. Those quail skulls were the same cut as my previous bento but I used nori instead of cutting the holes with a straw so they’re not the same like the skulls from yesterday.

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