bento#55 LocoRoco

I woke up a bit too late for a kyaraben, but a bit too early for a regular bento this morning. I sat down, started up my laptop, checking my email, and just stared at my sketchbook. I had drawn the sketch for a bento, but I hadn’t figured out how I’d put meat in it. I went to the kitchen to get orange juice, and I just decided to try making it.

Bento #55: LocoRoco
Created and eaten on: 6/18/2009

Loco Roco is a PSP game, and it’s one of the games my boyfriend loves. It’s a cute yellow round squishy thing that eats little fruit things and gets bigger and bigger. This yellow thing rolls and bounces around to very cute music. That’s the best I can do to describe the game. 😛 But if you look at the trailer, that’s exactly what it looks like.

Still unsure how to put meat in the bento, I boiled an egg, took the yolk out, mashed it and mixed it with rice to dye the rice yellow. I think I like the color of yolk better than curry powder. (see “how to dye rice naturally”) It’s more vivid than curry powder.

As usual, I sauteed renkon (lotus root). I didn’t want to see the bottom of bento through the renkon, so I put lettuce on the bottom of the bento box, and put renkon over it.

At this point I still hadn’t come up with a way to put meat in the bento. I had cooked beef steak the night before, and I didn’t think it’d fit in a LocoRoco themed bento… So I opened the freezer, and I realized that I had made bunch of meatballs the other day and froze them. I searched and see if there were brown ball looking characters in LocoRoco, but I couldn’t find any… So I decided to hide the meatballs inside the big yellow one. These meatballs were for bento, so I made them small (about 1 inch in diameter. They make great Makkurokurosuke), so I managed to put five meatballs in it. I guess it’s kind of like a huge onigiri. (rice ball)

The next step was the ground. I mixed the rest of rice with ketchup, put it in the bento box, and molded using a plastic sheet. I knew five small meatballs weren’t enough for my boyfriend, so I cut a couple of meatballs in half and buried in the ground. In game, the orange ground has circle patterns on it, so I cut out cheese using a plastic bottle cap, and put them all over the ground.

Once the ground was done, I placed the big yellow one in the bento. Oh my goodness the yellow rice ball was huge! I didn’t think it’d be this big.

I felt like I needed to put about two more meatballs, but there wasn’t enough space in the rice for the ground. I saw that I had drawn the cute cloud looking character, and I had a cutter of the exact same shape. So I sliced daikon (Asian radish) and cut out the cloud using the cutter. Then I sliced the tip of the meatballs and put the daikon cloud on the top of the meatballs. I was worried that daikon might fall off, so I put a tiny bit of mayonnaise between the daikon and meatball.

I carefully peeled the pink part of kamaboko (fish cake) with a knife, and cut out a circle shape using a plastic bottle cap. Then I sliced kamaboko and cut out a smaller shape using a plastic bottle cap and cut it in half for the wings.

For the color of green, I made bushes with snowpeas on the ground, and broccoli for the top part of bento.

Originally, I wanted to put more characters in the bento, but since the yellow rice ball filled about a half of bento box, I couldn’t make anything more except one small yellow rice ball.

After I put all the characters in bento, I started making the face parts. For their eyes I cut out kamaboko using a straw and plastic bottle cap. I used carrot for the cloud’s mouth, and the pink part of kamaboko for the smaller yellow rice ball. For the pupils I cut out seaweed and black sesame seeds. Then I took out the carrot flowers I had made and frozen from the freezer (see “how to freeze carrot flowers”), and sprinkled them over the bento. There are actually flowers that look exactly like the carrot flowers in the game. 🙂 How awesome is that? I cut out musical notes from seaweed using a cutter.

Even though I couldn’t make all the characters I had drawn in the sketch, considering that I spent less than half the time that I usually spend making bento, I thought it turned out pretty okay. 🙂 I think drawing each character in detail and having meatballs and carrot flowers already prepared helped a lot this time, and I’m proud of myself for it!

LocoRoco (the big yellow one):
– rice mixed with egg yolk
– meatballs (inside)
– kamaboko and seaweed

LocoRoco (the small yellow one)
— rice mixed with egg yolk
– kamaboko and seaweed

Pink flying thing:
– kamaboko and black sesame seed

White cloud thing:
– radish, kamaboko, carrot and black sesame seed

Other food:
– beef meatballs
– renkon
– cheese
– broccoli
– snowpeas
– carrot flowers

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