FFXI 8th Anniversary Bento

This year Final Fantasy XI turns 8 years old and though I’m still viciously bitter over the loss of my character’s name, I still love the game for the memories I have playing with my friends and so things like their Fan Art Contest still make me want to enter. It also helped me to finally get my Final Fantasy XI themed food blog, Pikko & Piketo, started.

To explain the name, Piketo is the first half of the Culinarian Guildmaster’s name, Piketo-Puketo. Since I’m basically attempting to document myself cooking my way through the recipes of the cooking guild, I thought it was a lot like Julie & Julia. When I went to go find the name of the guildmaster and saw that his name started with “Pik”, I thought it was surely a sign that I simply had to do it. As you can see, I started off with meat mithkabobs.

This is the bento I made for the fan art contest, though I turned in a different photo. I had actually liked this one better since the folder underneath actually looks not bad, but the mandragora is out of focus and that bugged me more than the weird way the folder was positioned on the other shot.

In the veggies tier, I have a Mithran tomato, San d’Orian carrot sticks, a rolanberry, and two slices of grilled corn. The mandragora onigiri is made with Tarutaru rice, fried cotton tofu skin, stone cheese for the eyes, pamtam kelp on the front, and apple mint for the top leaves.

For the baby chocobo, I dyed the Tarutaru rice with curry powder and then topped with pamtam kelp.

Moogle is plain Tarutaru rice and I topped his nose with some pomodoro sauce. His ears are made with sliced sausage.

Here are my fresh fruits and veggies. I had a faerie apple that I was going to use, but I couldn’t fit it anywhere in the box.

I wish I hadn’t left this to the last minute. I’d had this scheduled for a week ago and even bought all the food to do it in time, but I just never got around to it until this morning and the kabobs took a long time to do and so I didn’t have a very good photo background set up for it. The meat looked pasty and the chocobo looked off. I did love how the mandragora turned out, so I’ll definitely have to do a tutorial for people to make those as it was really easy and I know people would love to do that for some kind of party dish or something.

Over the weekend, I had lunch with Susan Yuen and Sheri Chen at Tenkaippin on Kapahulu. We each brought our elder kid and slurped up ramen. Baby Girl stayed glued to my knees and totally embarrassed me, which is so typical of her. Here’s a photo:

It was great to finally meet Sheri and see Susan again, though they both got a taste of my notorious and unfortunate habit of always being late. A stall before Punahou ended up making me half an hour late. Hopefully they forgave me right away, I didn’t think it was going to take about an hour to drive into town on Saturday. 🙁