So the safest choice was using cooked shrimp, tamagoyaki, and sausage for the nigiri. The rice was made with my nigiri rice mold. I wanted to make the nigiri by hand but since I already bought the mold for a long time and haven’t use it, I’d better use it now. The Indonesian term for this behaviour is called “gak mau rugi” (lose translation is don’t want to incur loss).

I put the usual broccoli chunk for filling and the elephant sauce container fill with soy sauce. For the other bento box, I filled it with cucumber rolled with ham, edamame and carrots (cut with vegetable mold) in a pink silicon container, and a mini mandarin orange.

I have to go to another town to attend my wife’s aunt funeral for 2 days, so until next time …

If we want to make unagi dish at home, we can buy packs of unagi kabayaki at premium supermarkets, the price is about USD 7.15 per pack. I must eat it all by myself since my wife doesn’t like it at all. And while I really love to cook, I can’t eat lots of food, so I must think very carefully when I want to buy something. Luckily my dad is visiting so I can eat those tasty unagi together.

I didn’t made bento for my dad, we ate those unagi with rice, shredded nori and green onion, with some peeled corns. But I put away some unagi pieces to make unagi tamagoyaki. I made tamagoyaki several times already but when I put those unagi into the pan, I really had a hard time to flip the egg and it was a mess. It really was harder than I thought. I need the wide blade spatula I saw once at one Japanese online store for easier egg flipping.

And while the end result was not a total mess, I think that I should just use two eggs instead of three because the unagi looked too small and the whole thing will look much better with slimmer portion of the egg. I already run out of unagi so I have to try this in another time.

The twin onigiri was made with my palm covered with plastic wrapper since my rice ball mold haven’t arrived yet, but I really wanted to do that manually, feel what it’s like. The result was not perfect, I didn’t make a perfect round ball, need more practice to do better than that. The pink one was done with pink furikake, I covered the already made rice ball with the furikake instead of mixing them before the onigiri was shaped into a ball. So I only made the outer portion pink while the inside was still white.

Nothing fancy for the decoration, I just put flower sausages and put some facial detail with nori, cheese, and carrot.

While the fish was marinated I started my preparation for the decoration. I prepared a fish theme bento with rice but I didn’t make onigiri (rice ball) for this one. This was the first time I didn’t make onigiri for my rice bento, I’ve seen so many bento using rice as based and people created some amazing decoration on top of it, but I didn’t have enough time to prepare something good, just a simple decoration for this.

The fish sausage was very easy to make, just cut sausage into half and then cut some line with a knife for its body and v-shape incision for the tail. For the tamagoyaki, I added spinach, again an experiment that I’d always want to try. I thing the spinach thing is a great idea from the Japanese moms so their children want to eat some vegetables.

I added some broccoli and strawberries to fill the space. The finished result was looked very simple. The fish recipe I tried was a failure, me and my wife didn’t like it at all, I think I just stick with the regular tempura batter recipe.

For the police car onigiri, I used the triangle rice mold and cut the top part a little bit so I could put a half cherry tomato there, paste a nori stripe and nori car window (cut with scissors) and put two slices of sausage wheels and cheese on top the wheels.

I arranged the police car onigiri and the ham negimayaki on one box, added broccoli chunks to fill the space. For the other box, I put yesterday tamagoyaki, two slices of mandarin orange, another broccoli chunks, and two lychees.

We can get canned lychees anywhere but rarely have fresh lychees sold at fruit stores since maybe they’re seasonal fruits, so when I saw them with a bargain price I immediately bought them. They tasted really good and very refreshing ^_^

I still had beaten egg remain so I added more eggs to make tamagoyaki. But somehow I put them in the sushi bamboo mat too long that its outer part became jagged, the looked was unique but I didn’t intent that.

I bought this new bento box from Food Hall. I wanted a large 3:4 bento box so I can fit all the foods in one box instead of 2 separate boxes. So this new box was perfect for me. The light blue color also great since I’ve never had one before.

The two teddy onigiri were made using the teddy rice mold, the brown one made with white rice mixed with soy sauce and tomato sauce. It turned out that the taste was quite unusual, next time I must use other method to make a brown onigiri.

As for the filling, I just used a boiled broccoli and cherry tomatoes since I had no other vegetables in the fridge ^_^