Hello Kitty Roast Pork Bento (286)

As you can see, I finally saw the “Read More” button in my WordPress editor. Pretty good, it only took me like 6 months to see it. I spent like and hour last night looking for a plugin for it and there it is, already in the editor. Bah!

I also finally got someone to tell me in Simple Terms what the ISO numbers on a camera meant, so this morning I set the number on my camera instead of relying on the auto setting and my bento photo came out noticeably clearer.

I did not have to do any sharpening on this one, which is is unusual lately for me. The only problem now is that you can see my Hello Kitty potatoes aren’t completely perfect. To make these, I used my Hello Kitty vegetable cutters that I bought from JList. I broke two and gave them to the kids on the way to school. Buddy looked at his and when I said it was Hello Kitty’s face, he gave me the most hilarious “NO WAI!” look. He then ate it as if it tasted 10x better than if it wasn’t her face.

Before people freak out and start riots about where I got the Hello Kitty nori punch, there isn’t one. I bought chacha rice packets that have Hello Kitty faces cut out at Marukai Marketplace. While I couldn’t find the one that I have in this photo, I did find pre-cut Hello Kitty nori, also on JList. I had wanted to use my Doraemon furikake stencils that Susperia bought me in Japan, but I found that all my furikake has nori strips or large flakes. I can’t seem to find any type of furikake in my large furikake stash (like 20 bottles; I know, I have issues). I might try it with hana ebi, but it got me curious and I’ll have to search around the furikake aisle a bit more carefully next time I go to Marukai. It would be a shame to waste all of my furikake stencils as I seem to have quite a few.

Going through my furikake drawer (yes, I have a whole drawer dedicated to furikake) made me remember something that I had wanted to blog about a while ago, but kept forgetting about. My grandma did many odd, but funny and endearing things while we were growing up with her. I’ve mentioned her freestyle fried rice in cottage cheese container breakfast before and now I move on to her next thing: juice glasses!

It’s possible that basically everyone does this and not just my grandma, but humor me here and let me think that she’s just that awesome. Furikake bottles with the plastic cap, metal covering, and labels removed make really great juice glasses. As you can see in the photo below, I have one of the furikake glasses on the left. All you do is soak the bottle for a bit and then the label comes off. My grandma used to have an entire cupboard of these and they are just the right size for having juice in the morning. I must admit, they are a real pain in the ass to wash, but they’re really fun to drink out of and sturdy too.

Some time back, the “awesome” brand, Mishima, changed their furikake bottles to have some kind of screwtop, which devastated me. How could they do this to me?! Don’t get me wrong, their new “flip top” cap is made of complete win, but the glass… the glass was so good how it was. Surely the inventive people in Japan could have come up with a way to implement both the flip top while keeping the juice glass jar?? YOU LET ME DOWN, MISHIMA!

Yesterday was a big day for bento forums, with Biggie and Just Bento both opening up their own forums. This reminded me that I had a forum as well, only I’d been letting it rot for quite some time. I went to go check and was sorely disappointed to find that in my several months’ neglect, spammers had come and riddled the place with over 80 spam threads. I deleted all of them, so ha! Anyway, I hate to look like a copycat, but I’ve been wondering to myself how to create better discussions and meanwhile my forum just sits there. My scatterbrainedness knows no bounds.

I realize that two forums for bento sites larger than my own makes me utilizing my forum seem a little silly, but I thought about it and decided to use it for specific topics and site related events that can’t really be conducted via comments, rather than a place for people to chit chat about bento in general, since I figure people will find more activity at LiaB or JB. (although if people did want to, that’s fine)

Anyway, to start things off, I wanted to go with a topic on Ugly Duckling bentos. There were some days last year when I was just totally uninspired and posted something truly mind boggling, but in a bad way. I’m sure there some of you out there who feel the same about one of your past bentos that you wish you could “take back”. If you do and you don’t mind, feel free to add to the thread. (after registering) The spammers still seem to like my forum, so hopefully I can get at least one person that’s not using asdkuuewk@gmail.com to sign up. ^_^

I’ve also added a new poll to see what people would like to see more of here.

Edit: I was reminded by Yvo that I forgot to talk about what I put in here. I’ve got two slices of pot roast pork, tomato, broccoli, and sweet potato! The little yellow balls on the rice are part of the Hello Kitty chacha rice packet.