Totoro and Susuwatari

Mama was feeling rather diligent yesterday d:) so she tried two new things. 

The first is this Eggs in Treasure Bags learnt from Just Bento. One huge lesson I learnt about this recipe - not all inari skins are created equal; you MUST look for the biggest inari skins so that the bags can be tied up. Or else you use the smallest chicken eggs you can find. I had to enlist Takoyaki's help to get the bags closed up. The result is super yummy though!

The second thing I tried out was making Totoro from rice. I saw this in a pic somewhere online. Seemed easy enough.

Totoro and Susuwatari Bentos

Other stuff in the bento are the Treasure Bag Eggs, seaweed chicken, cherry tomatoes and fruits. I hope Totoro likes his grape balloon d:)

Closeup of Totoro

 

Totoro is made out of two parts of rice - one plain white and the other mixed with ground black sesame seeds. The whiskers are made of pretzel sticks (I used Pocky since that was all I had) and the eyes are from an eggwhite sheet made from the extra eggwhites that couldn't fit into the Treasure Bags, haha! The pupils, nose and markings on the tummy are cutout of nori.

Susuwatari is just a round riceball wrapped with a piece of nori and eyes same as Totoro's. On hindsight, the eyes for these guys should be MUCH bigger. Oh well.

To make the grey part of Totoro, first I had to grind up some of my homemade gomashio. I broke out this suribachi that I got from Daiso some time back. It's just an earthenware mortar with grooved sides, and a wooden pestle to go with it. The kids enjoyed helping to grind the seeds d:)

Mini suribachi from Daiso

Making this bento was so much work. I think I'll take a rest before doing something like this again.