The Anti-Climactic Bento 400
I had meant to make Bento 400 over the weekend, but after a stomach virus began weaving its way through two family members, I had to put it off. Monday I stayed home with Baby Girl and then on Tuesday, she was fine and ready to go on a field trip which required….. home lunch!! She requested sandwiches, so I obliged.
There wasn’t much for me to do in the ways of sandwiches on the fly (I wasn’t sure if she’d be ok to go), so I went to the good ole sandwich cutters. I used sweet bread, since she loves the stuff, but this turned out to be a mistake. There was no call from the teacher saying that she threw up in the pumpkin patch, so that was good. However, when we picked her up, I immediately inspected her lunch bag to find… Only two sandwiches and two little pomegranate seeds (in the little container) had been eaten. *sigh* My mistake for packing so much the day after she has a stomach virus, but still, I was sad she didn’t eat more than two. She complained that the sandwiches were too sweet with the bread and the apple bunnies were ignored. Buddy happened to see the uneaten lunch and suddenly had the intense desire to eat her lunch for dinner, which was cute, but impossible since it was no good by then. This gives me hope that when Buddy hits kindergarten, he’ll be more than happy to take Mommy’s lunches to school.
Bento #401 is what I’d intended to be my big 400, but that’s what I get for procrastinating. Square Enix is hosting a Shantotto Fan Art Contest to celebrate the launch of their last mini-expansion, A Shantotto Ascension. Since I can’t draw for beans, I really only had one option left.
I started by logging on and taking some screenshots of the devilish doctor and then printed them out to trace. The eyes were hard to do and I think I should have ended up making them fully black instead of what I ended up doing, but you can judge for yourself later.
I think I mentioned that I’d cooked two omelets for this last week and they’ve been in the freezer until two days ago. I was too lazy to cook fresh ones and that turned out to be a big mistake because the peach omelet was very brittle and the yellow one was dry and began to curl as I worked on her. Even with all that going wrong though, I was still too lazy to cook fresh ones, hahaha!
Like I said, I hate the eyes. It took me about 40 minutes to cut them out because of trial and error and then I used one of my mini punches to make the little ovals in the middle. As the hair peeled more, I had to dab it down with mayo to make it stick. With such dry omelet, the nori wasn’t sticking, no matter how much I wet it. I even tried spit and olive oil and finally that helped a little. Once I had her done, I stuck her in the fridge and started working on the bento itself.
After working for so long on her, I decided to keep it easy. I chose an oval wooden bento box, which is from J-List, and lined it with Saran wrap. I plopped some rice in and then fried an omelet. My first one had crab and peas, but I felt like the color was working against me, so I put it in the fridge to eat for breakfast. That and I accidentally folded it over and it didn’t cover the rice…
Sorry for the blurry pics, but I was in a hurry because it was like midnight by this time. I covered the rice with the omelet, added lettuce lining, broccoli, shrimp shumai (frozen and microwaved), sugar snap peas, and tomatoes for color. I cut out the letters “WANTED FOR MURDER” from nori, then placed Shantotto on top. The nori drove. me. bananas. It wasn’t sticking and then started curling, but I managed to get one or two pictures that I was happy with. The coloring was horrible, so I really need to work on setting up my lamp somewhere that I can take better photos.
At the top I added kiwi and orange wedges, though you can’t see the orange in this photo. Not my best charaben effort with the old omelet, curling nori, and weird eyes, but it’ll have to do. Hopefully Square likes it enough to give me a Nomad Moogle Rod, cause I want one to match my Nomad Moogle Cap!
I tried photoshopping her eyes in to see how it would look and it definitely looks less creepy. Now I wish I’d done that before I took pics and submitted it, but oh well. Maybe in the end it’s better that she looks creepy than cute? We can pretend she was all drunk and stuff when she got arrested for this mugshot!