Musubi and Spam Bento

Last night I fell asleep putting the kids to sleep and so I didn’t get to do prep work for Baby Girl’s lunch today such as picking the box and working out the kinks in her food choices, making this morning kind of a hectic rush. As she was falling asleep, we talked about her lunch. She hates rice right now unless it’s in a particular form, so I offered ume musubi. She said she wanted ume musubi and ham sandwich.

When I woke up this morning I realize what a strange lunch that would end up being, so I went and asked her and she agreed that would be weird.

So we’re in the kitchen with two musubis in her box and just staring at it, wondering what the heck to do next. We ended up going with shoyu spam slices and fruit on the side.

There are two kinds of ume musubi. The plain white one has soft ume flesh in the middle and the one in the front has the little crunchy ume in the middle with nori wrapped around it. While we were making the one with the ume in the middle, she told me it looked like a pillow, which cracked me up. In Hawaii, lots of crafters make pillows that look like sushi or musubi and we see the nori wrapped ume one a lot in stores or at craft shows.

On the other side, there’s strawberry slices and some kiwi. She taste tested the kiwi and said it was a little too sour, so we packed some sugar for her again in the little yellow bear.

I went on YouTube to see if there were so many onigiri making videos that I shouldn’t bother making one of my own, but while there I saw something interesting. You see, my kids are always complaining that I don’t put enough salt on my hands when I’m making musubi. In one video, the person doing the tutorial sprinkled salt into the rice before mixing it up and molding it. I can’t believe I never thought of doing that before!

So with this genius idea in mind, that’s what I did this morning. I sprinkled a bit of salt into the middle, mixed it up, and made the musubi as usual. We’ll see what she thinks of it when I see her after school today. In the meantime, I should probably have a tutorial for making them anyway. Hopefully soon!