bento#37 Headcrabs from Half-Life

My boyfriend has been playing a lot of older games lately. He was telling me that there were some games he never actually finished, and wants to finish them before he bought any new games. One of the games happened to have cute fleshy bug looking creatures a.k.a headcrabs.

Bento #37: Headcrabs from Half-Life
Created and eaten on:2/3/2009

I actually never played Half-Life, but even if you’re a casual game player, you’ll probably know what the deal with crowbar and headcrab is.

The plot of Half-Life is pretty complicated to say the least. But if I were to describe the game, the game is Sci-Fi FPS (science fiction first-person shooter) game. You’ll have to kill fictional alien parasites, and the poor zombified people who have become a host of this alien. The headcrab looks very similar to a face hugger from Alien, and they move around on the ground jumping at you shrieking. You can acquire fancy guns in the game, but when you don’t have guns or out of ammo, you’ll have to use a crowbar. A lot of gamers found fighting aliens with a crowbar in a sci-fi setting pretty awesome, and the crowbar became somewhat of an iconic weapon amongst a lot of gamers, and there are a lot of “crowbar references” in many games. (You can actually finish the whole game just using crowbar as well.) When I was watching my boyfriend play Half-Life, they started to look rather cute than scary, so I decided to make a bento of them.

For the background, I sliced renkon (lotus root) and sauteed them and laid them on a bento box. I mixed rice with black sesame seed and salt (see “how to dye rice naturally”) and put it on the top of the renkon. To make the rice look like the ground in perspective (just like when you’re playing the game), I put broccoli along the sides of rice.

For the headcrabs, I cooked bacon, cut it into small bits, and mixed it with potato salad I had made the night before. I shaped it like the body of  the headcrab, and used a toothpick to make the mouth part. First I tried frying it, but the bacon inside the potato salad started to pop in the oil and it just fell a apart… So I placed them on baking sheet and baked them until they were brown. I think the headcrab came out great. The bacon bits in golden brown potato looks just like the headcrab yet delicious! While I was baking the headcrab, I cut potato into ” > ” shapes and fried them.

After I finished frying the fried potato legs, I placed the headcrabs on the rice, and stuck fried potato into the body. Then I cut kamaboko (fish cake) for its teeth and stuck it underneath the body.

Creepy or cute?

I placed fake crab meat on the rice and made the tip of the crowbar with boiled konnyaku (yam cake). The konnyaku wasn’t very stable, so I put konnyaku and fake crab meat together with raw pasta.

Get your crowbar ready!

I put the Half-Life logo I had cut out with seaweed the night before and put it on a slice of cheese and cut the cheese around the seaweed.

To finish it off, I put a little bit of the sauce for hamburg we had the night before on headcrab for blood, and it was done!

Then I realized that it looked a little too gloomy… I mean, the real game does look creepy and scary, but it’s a bento after all. So I sliced carrot, made little flowers, and put them on the bento. (see “how to make vegetable flowers”) I think it did brighten up the bento a little.
My boyfriend didn’t mind them though, he liked how realistic the headcrabs looked and they were quite delicious. 😀

Headcrab:
– potato salad with bacon
– fried potato for its legs
– kamaboko (fish cake) for its teeth
– hamburg sauce

Crowbar:
– fake crab meat
– konnyaku (yam cake)

Vegetable flowers:
– carrot

Other food:
– rice mixed with black sesame seed and salt
– renkon (lotus root)
– broccoli

For more pictures of my bento, visit Bento! set and Bento details! set on my flickr page.