Musubi & Gyoza Bento (298)
Two more days to enter my 200k Bento Contest! Get your entries in! I’ve posted a list of current entries received on the forums, so check out the list to see if I’ve successfully received yours!
I’ve been pretty good so far this year in making lunches that I’m happy to look at when I open the box, but this morning I crawled back into bed without setting the alarm again, so I woke up around 45 minutes later than I was supposed to. The end result is that I have something simple and am trying a new box out.
I know this looks like a really strange bento box. Upon first sight I knew it had to be for holding musubis, but what the hell? I mean, is there some weird fad in Japan that calls for monster musubis for lunch?
There is a small compartment at the bottom, which is supposed to hold a fancier lunch than what I had time for, which was basically five fried gyoza plopped in. I thought maybe yelling at them to look like a real bento would do something, but no luck.
These are the Ajinomoto brand. They’re frozen, so I have this sneaking feeling you won’t be able to buy them online. They’re easy to make and extremely addictive. I was going to pack only two and eat the other three, but then I saw what time it was. I suppose I could buy or make gyoza sauce, but I just eat them with shoyu. Each package comes with 15 gyoza and you fry them in a pan with water.
This bottom layer is extremely small, so I’d have to fill this with small bits of meat, egg, and vegetables to go with the large portion of rice that goes upstairs. Here are the musubis that I made for the rooftops:
The musubi on the left is plain with nori paste in the middle. The one on the right is mixed together with Ebi Fumi Furikake
I have a couple of other bags of these cut-outs, one being sea creatures and the other being animals. There were Pokemon cutouts as well, but since I’m not all that into Pokemon myself, I didn’t buy those. That and I’m bitter that so many people think it’s HILARIOUS to call me “Pikkochu.” Whatever. Maybe someday I’ll do a Charmander bento. I used to like the little yell he did.
In the photo it looks rather small, so I thought they’d be little cute things, but they’re actually quite large. The tulip is close to 2 inches in height. Anyway, you get small sheets of nori and just pop the shapes out. It comes with a little piece of white cardboard which I think was used to support the nori sheets when the press came down to cut the shapes out.
I was putting the leftover sheets into a ziplock bag when I noticed that the package came with its own little plastic baggie to hold the nori once you opened the package. This was so thoughtful, I loved it! Tonight and tomorrow I’ll be doing some sketching to outline my 300 bento. This is probably going to be an exhausting bento to make, so I have to admit I’m a bit scared of it. Haha!