Beef Broccoli (296)

Only three days left to enter my 200k Bento Contest! Also, you can now subscribe to my blog posts by email! See the link in the sidebar. –>

Gah! I don’t know how he got there or what he intends to do, but there’s a pig in my bento today! *shriek*

The good news is he looks friendly. He’s also quite pasty, so he might be a gamer piggie and therefore, once I find a good way to approach him, we should get along smashingly.

I made the pig out of kamaboko and fish sausage, using my food cutter wheels from Japan. I followed one of the little guides in the book that came with the cutters.

Sorry for the crappy picture, I’ll try to scan it instead later, but you can see how the instructions work. There are three wheels. One is pink, one is yellow, and one is green. The shapes in the guide are colored according to what wheel you find the shape on. The head of this pig looks like an oval and I tried to do the same, but instead I got a pig with a moon face. I have never seen these wheels sold online, but there are still a lot of good cutters you can get on Amazon. Some good searches to do are for fondant frosting cutters, such as these garden shape cutoutsor for vegetable cutters like these flower shapesoffered by House of Rice on Amazon. When I first started bentoing a couple years ago these things weren’t on Amazon, so if you’re starting out recently, you’re in luck!

The bento is made up of hapa rice topped with red hana ebi and roasted sesame seeds. Next to the beef broccoli are some sliced baby carrots and raspberries in a mini silicone food cupfrom a set I got for Secret Santa last year.

I’ve been ramping up my blog networking lately and one of the ideas I’ve come up with requires the services of an artist. I’m looking for someone that does commissions of cute characters for a price range from cheap to reasonable. ($5-$15 per drawing) The character(s) I want will need to be with food while bringing across humor in facial expressions and actions.  Or if you want to trade me bento items, we can talk about that too. Anyway, if you think you can help me out with this, comment here with your email address filled in (not in the comment) and we can talk a bit. I’d prefer to have someone that has samples already available so that I can look at your style.