Emoji Onigiri Bento (335)
After coming down with a vicious head cold on Thursday, I’m hopefully back on track. I’m still honking like a goose, but at least I can sometimes breathe through my nostrils. I’ve been having the worst time sleeping with this congestion and meds I take didn’t seem to help. I bought a Vapo-Rub stick too, but that only worked for about half an hour. I was pretty miserable, but still not miserable enough to try the ginger tea that my co-worker suggested. Ugh!
Today I am doing another product review for From Japan with Love, this time it’s for a really awesome Emoji nori punch. The punch is awesome because it’s got several things my other punches don’t offer, namely asterisk shapes, a slightly slanted mouth shape, and an A-OK sign. All of these and more are offered on ONE punch, which makes a bentoers nori-punching life oh so easy.
Emoji is the word that the Japanese use for emoticons. With the characters ( ) * . | ^ b you can make tons of different cute nori faces that you’d usually see on the computer. Some examples include:
(^_^) (*^.^*) (^.^)b ^_* d(*_*)b *o* ^o^
The possibilities are pretty endless. I was able to use the parentheses as eyebrows and a mouth at the same time. The circles are large, so they can double as a shocked mouth or eyes. The ^ make for great “smiling eyes”. The asterisks make good confused eyes or cheek blush, too. The punch is thankfully made out of metal. I’ve found plastic punches to be so frustrating that I want to punch the punch in the face. The little green tab in the front doesn’t appear to do anything. I have no idea what it’s for.
The bottom of the punch has a unique feature I’ve never seen in a nori punch. It’s got a little cap on the bottom to catch the nori pieces as you punch! When you’re ready to take them out, simply pop open the lid and your nori pieces will be neatly stored inside. I’m a big fan of this little feature.
Being a pro at throwing nori punch tantrums, I automatically tri-fold my nori sheets before punching to ensure cleaner cuts. Even with this method I still get some pretty antagonizing results. Thankfully, this punch came through really nicely on the first cut and I breathed a sigh of relief.
For the bento, I made three little triangle onigiri and put it in the box on top of the lettuce. It was a bit hard to find the right arrangement for them as I was really sleepy this morning, having taken a whopping 2 tablespoons of Tylenol Cold last night, which ended up keeping me awake for an hour for some reason. Anyway, after that I layered in pieces of leftover tonkatsu and put a little sauce bottle with Ikari sauce inside. In the next door section I added cantaloupe flowers and a lady apple, placed upside down for the red color on the bottom.
To embellish I added some pieces of parsley to fill the gaps. I waited until I was just about to take the picture to add the nori pieces with a tweezer since I didn’t want them to wilt on the onigiri. I ended up with one grouchy onigiri, one pleasantly surprised onigiri, and one simple happy onigiri. Don’t they look cute!? 😀
Over the last week I’ve been agonizing over whether to get the Nikon D40
The other day, Mr. Pikko asked me if I’d heard Baby Girl sing Buddy Holly. I had heard her do it in the car, but couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying because she was in the back, but after he mentioned it, I asked her to sing in the house. Her lyrics are freaking hilarious.
Wee oo I look just like Buddy Holly,
Oh, oh and you’re mamee tie bo mo,
I don’t care what you say about a sting ray,
I don’t care about that!
LOLOLOL! To give an update on Buddy, he’s his usual manipulative, cute, toddler self. He’ll do something naughty, like scribble black crayon all over our couch, but then out of nowhere will say, “I love you Mommy.” That love is like a light switch. This morning when I told him he couldn’t take the ball he won at Fun Factory to school, he told me he “doesn’t like” me and that I’m “uga-lee”.
*bawwww*
But he loves me. 😉
Tags: Bento, cantaloupe, from japan with love, Kids, lady apple, lettuce, nori, nori punch, Onigiri, parsley, Tonkatsu