Saints Bento Challenge

Last night, I was sitting at my computer when Buddy grabbed a cup off the dish rack and opened the fridge. He’s not supposed to do this without permission, but apparently this was an emergency. I asked him what he thought he was doing and his reply was, “Mommy! I need milk to drink or I’m going to DIE!”

Whoa! I have no idea where that came from, but I thought, I better get the kid some milk, huh? Turns out this was just a lure to get me away from the computer so that he could type gibberish to people in IRC. Sneaky little guy. Don’t worry, he’s not dead. I got the milk into his system before the mysterious sudden-onset death symptom appeared.

As I mentioned yesterday, I got a Saints bento challenge. For once, I’ve actually managed to deliver on time, haha!

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I was going to do two bentos, one with the Colts and one with the Saints, but I was pretty stumped with how to pull off the Colts one. I’m still thinking, so maybe I’ll be able to do it tomorrow. If not, take a look at Susan’s Colts bento!

I was going to give this to Mr. Pikko, but then I remembered that he had been rooting for the Vikings on Saturday. Anyway, can you guess what the helmet is before the jump?

I cut out the fleur-de-lis from nori first, with my Micro-Tip Scissors, then put it on top of cheese and cut around it with a toothpick. That ended up being pretty easy, so I moved on to the helmet part. Here’s a closer look:

At first I thought I’d use egg omelet, which terrified me because I am still hit or miss with usuyaki tamago and I wasn’t looking forward to spending all night screaming swear words at omelets. Then, by some chance, I was searching my cabinets for something when I found my bag of soy wrappers, which I rarely use. If you look at the photos on Amazon, you’ll see that there’s a really nice golden color sheet. This is what I used for the helmet.

By the way, don’t be fooled by the photos on Amazon. That packet does NOT include the pink sheet. I don’t know who is doing the packaging at Yama Moto Yama, but they seriously need to fix that. I found out about the missing pink when I tried to do Valentine’s Day sushi last year. I ended up using pink rice with the white sheet, but I was still annoyed.

I had printed out three Saints helmets for me to use for various cutting tasks. The first went to the fleur-de-lis and the second was for the helmet. I ended up not using the third picture. After I cut out the helmet, I had to make the black outline. I can’t get nori to stick to soy wrappers, so I ended up using my Wilton food markers. My black one was pretty dry, thanks to me using it on cheese once before, so I had to use the side of the tip, which was really difficult. Anyway, I colored the edge, then laid it on top of the cheese. I cut the face mask from nori and laid that on before cutting the entire thing out of cheese. The circle is cut with a piece of straw.

The helmet rests on top of a brown rice onigiri, which I should have packed furikake for, but forgot. In the rest of the lunch, there’s teriyaki chicken, clementine slices, tomato wedges, and sweet potato. I did the helmet last night and I was so paranoid that I’d wake up and the nori would be curled or the food coloring would run all over, so I took a photo of it in a Ziploc bag just in case. It was fine though, so it was all good!

I’m not really a fan of any pro teams, but I do love football in general. Hopefully this brings some enthusiastic “YEAH!”s to any Saints fans that might just happen upon my blog.

I am actually Superwoman today, having made three bentos in one morning while still being on time. Baby Girl has a field trip today and her orders were very strict:

“NO cute stuffs, Mommy! I just want a rectangle sandwich. No cheese animals or shapes, okay??”

Well… *sniff* okay… Anyway, I did as was told and she granted her lowly peon mother her seal of non-cute approval this morning. It remains to be seen whether she actually eats it. I’ll post that along with a product review tomorrow or Saturday. For Mr. Pikko, I made a standard man bento.

Brown rice with furikake, teriyaki chicken, broccoli, cherry tomatos, a halved strawberry, and a carrot star. I had the chicken marinating from yesterday morning and cut it up and fried it in some coconut oil this morning. Unfortunately, I didn’t use my coconut cooking spray. I’m addicted to the smell. I spray it in the pan then start sniffing all around as the spray spatter flies all around. So good!

LOST in two days!! I can’t wait!!!