non-bento #4 & 5 Turkey & Does this girl ever close her mouth? January 17, 2009

I’m going to do two non-bento food for today’s post. They aren’t really “bento” by themselves, but if you surround them with egg flowers (“how to make a sunflower”), sausage flowers (“how to make sausgae flowers”) vegetable flowers (“how to make vegetable flowers”), egg chicken (“how to make an egg chicken”), etc… they can turn into the main character in your bento!

I did “how to make turkey sandwich and turkey rice ball with turkey” for Thanksgiving on my blog.
Click on the picture to read the instructions on how to make them. You can also find it under “how-to seasonal” in “how-to.”

non-bento #4: Turkey sandwich and Turkey rice ball!
Created and eaten on: 11/23/2008

And, I wonder how many people can recognize this one…

non-bento #5: Does this girl ever close her mouth?
Created and eaten on: 11/15/2008

It was when I was in Japan for a business trip last year when my boyfriend sent me a link to a website, and when I saw it I just couldn’t stop laughing. I know 90% of “random funny stuff on internet” isn’t funny at all, and I usually don’t find most “random funny stuff” funny at all, so I thought to myself, “I was probably caught off guard. I must’ve been tired from the jet lag and meetings…” but even after I came back from the business trip, if I heard of someone who had never seen the site, I’d send them the link and just enjoy their reactions.

*I’m not going to put a link to the site, but if you just type “Does this girl ever close her mouth” in a google search with quotation marks, you’ll find the site. Don’t worry, the pictures are SFW. (Just the comments about the pictures on most sites are very immature.)

I was working at an anime convention for my work in September last year, and when I took a break to walk around the convention center, I found a pin badge of the icon of the smiling girl, so I bought it and gave it to my boyfriend. He LOVED it. He’d keep in his pocket so he could show it to his friends whenever he wanted. Most internet memes disappear in a week or so, but my boyfriend would do the smile when I was starting to forget about it, and it’d just crack me up every time.

Anyway, for Thanksgiving holidays, my boyfriend went back to his home to see his family. I would have gone with him, but I had to take care of my cat, so I decided to stay home this year. I felt bad that I couldn’t go with him, so I made a small bento for him to eat on the bus.

The bus ride is only for a couple of hours, and he just needed breakfast. I was just going to make him a couple of rice balls with something inside, but that’s too boring… And I thought of making “smiling girl” rice balls! I’ve been wanting to use the smiling girl, but I just didn’t know what other food to put in, but if it’s just rice balls, it’s perfect!

I started to look for the images of the icon of the smiling girl, but then I found two different kinds. One of them is from the website where her pictures were are, and the other one was the same image as the one on the pin badge I bought. I needed to make at least two rice balls anyway, so I just decided to make two different kinds.

I traced both pictures by putting a piece of paper on my laptop monitor, and cut seaweed for the eyes, mouth, and nose. (for the one of them) I made an egg sheet (see “how to make an egg sheet”) and cut it into two circles using the traced paper as a guide. Then I cut ham for the mouth, and cheese for the eyes and teeth. (I used a wavy shaped cutter for the teeth.)

After preparing all pieces, I made two onigiri (rice ball) and put tarako (fish roe) inside of them. Then I just put the egg sheet, ham, seaweed, and cheese on it, and it was done! I made a paper lunch box out of newspaper, so he could throw it out in the trash when he finished.

This wasn’t something that everyone gets it, but I think you can make 🙂 , 😦 , :P, O_o, T_T, :D, icons like this. If you aren’t a big rice eater, you can just use seaweed on cheese single and put it on bread!

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