bento#34 Battlestar Galactica

I knew exactly what I was going to make this day. I had to make this on this day, no matter what.

Bento #34: Battlestar Galactica
Created and eaten on: 01/16/2009

Yes, this day was the premiere of the 2nd and last half of season 4 of Battlestar Galactica. (a.k.a. “BSG”) I had seen a couple of episodes of BSG when I had cable TV before I met my boyfriend. But I had already missed several episodes, so I decided not to watch it. Then I started going out with my boyfriend and he kept telling me how good the show was. He had, of course, boxsets of BSG, so we did a marathon on it in 2~3 weekends. I love doing a marathon on any good shows. Watching it during broadcast is good, but then if there’s a cliff-hanger in the end of an episode, you’ll have to wait for a week… and I’m very impatient. BSG is a good show to marathon, because almost all episodes end with a cliff-hanger. I was so glad that I did marathon because I was totally hooked.

I thought of making a BSG bento before, but since it’s a drama and BSG is a live action show, I didn’t know how I’d make it. The only thing I could make from the show would be… a Cylon! The Cylons were created by humans as cybernetic workers and soldiers, in other word, a robot.

The Cylon is gray, so I dyed rice with black sesame seed. (see “how to dye rice naturally”) The shape of its head looked complicated, so I drew the head on the piece of paper and marked which part was raised and which part was lower. Then I put plastic wrap over the drawing and shaped the rice into the Cylon’s head. Of course, I couldn’t sculpt the details with rice, so I cut seaweed for the shade on the face, and put it on the face/head. I sliced carrot, and using a straw cut out a tiny circular shape and put it on as its eye.

If you’ve watched BSG, you’d know this…  (it’s hard to explain if you’ve never watched BSG) but in BSG “everything has its corners cut off.” Meaning, anything that normally has four corners has “eight or six” corners in BSG. (Paper, picture, dogtags, etc…) So I made Japanese style hamburg and rice into an octagonal shape. The rice ball (?) didn’t look too convincing, so I cut seaweed into an octagonal shape and put it on the rice. Then I realized that the bento box also had four corners, so I cut ham on and put on the corners, and cut/sauteed asparagus to put in the corners.

After that, I really had no idea what else I could do. The bento looked lonely and not finished…
I decided to make Cylon Raiders (fighter craft piloted by the  Cylons) with cheese singles. I had two different kind of cheese singles, so I made one as a normal Cylon Raider, and the other one for Scar. Wiki describes that Scar was a particularly vicious and elusive raider identified by a gash on the side of its “face”. It was very easy. I just cut the cheese using a circle cookie cutter and knife to make the Raiders.

Also I wanted to try something that I thought of doing while I was dying eggs for the how-to for my blog… to make Earth! (see “how to dye eggs naturally”) Finding Earth is the main goal of BSG, so I dyed a quail egg light blue with purple cabbage, and put tiny pieces of lettuce on it.

When I finished the bento, I looked at it, and thought it was too dark… Gray, brown, black and green. So I cut out pieces from leftover cheese and carrot with a straw, took out some edamame and sprinkled them all over the bento box.
I still wasn’t sure if it looked “sci-fi” enough, so I cut our cheese with a star shaped cookie cutter and put it in. I don’t usually do this, but because Cylon head has no expression, I thought it’d be even cuter to have star shaped cheese around it.

This came out to be a very simple bento, yet super nerdy. Of course, almost all my boyfriend’s friends got it and appreciated the details, but not that many of our friends at work knew what it was, and that makes this a good nerdy charaben. 😀

So say we all!

Cylon:
– rice mixed with black sesame seeds and salt (see “how to dye rice naturally”)
– seaweed and carrot

Cylon Raiders:
– cheese singles

Scar:
– cheddar cheese singles

Earth:
– quail egg dyed with purple cabbage (see “how to dye eggs naturally”)
– lettuce

Other food:
– egg sheet as background (see “how to make an egg sheet”)
– Japanese style hamburg
– rice and seaweed
– asparagus
– ham
– broccoli
– edamame

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