Maki Sushi Bento (270)

I cooked 4 cups of rice to make fried rice for our office potluck yesterday, but ended up with way too much rice for what I’d fried up to go in it. For once, I packed it in a container and put it in the fridge. Normally I forget to do this and end up finding crispy rice crackers the next time I go to cook rice. Needing to use it all up, I decided to go for sushi today.

Not having any tobiko, I made regular California maki along with some ume cucumber maki with paste that I bought at Marukai a couple weeks ago. After eating it I realized that I need to be a lot more liberal with the ume paste. My FFXI friend Erika recently went on a trip to Japan to attend the Tokyo Game Show and do some sightseeing and she was EVER SO KIND as to pick me up some bento goodies I’ve never seen elsewhere including a set of food cutters on colored wheels. There are tons of awesome shapes and I hope to use them to make the cute samples in the instruction book. I’ve used some to add little carrot embellishments to my ume maki. So cuuuute! She also sent me some things I bought from Ichiban Kan’s website, which doesn’t ship to Hawaii. *glower* I now have oodles of food cutters to make kyaraben!

I did some thinking and I’ll probably show some, but not all of the bentos that I’m hoping to put into my manuscript (which I will submit stubbornly to publishers until I get somewhere, should the initial one I talked to not take me up on it). I figure if I have time, I’ll make extra lunches and give them to people or sell them at a small price to victims in the office. My boss frequently forgets to eat lunch, so I think she’d make a great target.

I finally took a picture of the mystery plant in my little garden bed. Being too lazy to buy more dirt, I’ve been stashing all my pomegranate peelings and melon skins and kiwi skins and what not in there, turning it into a bit of a ghetto compost heap.

I really don’t know what this is. Cucumber? Zucchini? I know it’s not watermelon. If no one can tell me what it is, I’m going to have to just accept that this is my first crop in my handmade flower bed and wait until it gives me something. What an interesting way to garden, kinda like how I do it in FFXI! Hahaha!

People have been asking lately what I do with my scraps. Yesterday Keahi asked what happened to the rest of the star pizza. I brought it in a ziploc bag and ate that too! ^_^ If it’s veggie scraps usually I toss it into my compost bin by the sink or eat it if I feel like it. Sometimes I use the scraps to prop up my food in my bento. Food isn’t always standing up on its own in my lunches, occasionally they’re like me: too short and needing a bit of a boost.