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Noah’s Bento, Upper Deck (300)

I am so completely and utterly exhausted. It’s 5:16 AM and I haven’t gone to bed yet. I didn’t even finish my 300th bento. 🙁

I came up with the idea on Friday. I’d been browsing through the Japanese bento book that Elmer from JPButton gave me for Christmas picking out animals I liked and such and eventually I had an inspiration. An ark bento full of animal onigiris! And I could oh so cleverly call it Noah’s Bento! Woo!

This of course, meant that now instead of making a nice little zoo of animals, I now had to make two of each. Doh. But no biggie, right? I thought with proper planning and the right strategy, I could pull it off. My imagination is pretty wild apparently. It was around 4 AM that I realized, “Hey, I don’t think I’m going to finish this…” It was then that I pulled the plug on the two layered monstrosity and began to clean up my completely demolished kitchen.

So, though not what I’d originally planned, I present to you… Noah’s Bento, the upper deck!

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I hope this makes at least one person shriek at their computer screen at work, cause after 7 hours of bentoing, I need some amusement.

If the world of AIB were washed away in a storm today, the world would be left with dogs, pandas, ducks, cats, chickens, lions, and OMG… Domokuns. I know, weird. The thing is, I had started off my uber 300 strategy by making most of the onigiri first.

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I wrapped them up all toasty in saran wrap and put them in an airtight container. Then I started cutting out the nori faces, which made me want to hang myself. People who have used nori punches know exactly what I’m talking about. And yes, I tried toasting the nori. Trust me, it didn’t help me tonight for some reason. I must have punched 10 eyes for every 2 I could use and since I thought I was punching for like 30 animals… well…

I’ll go into detail for each of these pairs, starting with the doggies.

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This is rice mixed with soy sauce, which is a tip from the JP bento book. I used an onigiri mold and cut the ears by hand. The face was punched with a Hello Kitty bunny rabbit nori punch.

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These pandas are made from rice and nori with kamaboko eyes. I used a bear onigiri mold that came as a set with the dog one.

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These duckies are rice “dyed” with egg yolk, another tip from the bento book. I cut the feet using one of the tiny little cutters I bought from Ichiban Kan. I’m not sure I’ll let anyone eat the yellow ones though, yolk and rice is just kinda funky.

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These cats are made with nori and fish sausage. It bugs the heck out of me that I forgot to put one last whisker on the right side kitty…

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These chickens are made from nori, fish sausage, strawberry (combs), and carrot.

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Here are my lions! The male lion has an inari skin mane and they both have nori faces.

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I hate to say it, but these are my favorite. LOL! If you don’t know what a domokun is, you can read about it here. I first heard of domokun from Fark, where at the time, that infamous kitten picture was being shown in practically every thread. I have a Domokun on my desk, but some pranksters at work have put a kleenex diaper on him as well as a rubber band and tissue eye patch. Domokun vandalism aside, I have to admit he looks pretty badass. I’ll try to take a picture of him later.

I had made preparations to make tigers, birds, moogles, giraffes, zebras, cows, turtles, elephants, pigs, monkeys, sheep, and rabbits too. Seriously, I don’t know what I was smoking when I decided to make all of those.

View the large size. One last close-up:

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The outside is lined with butter lettuce. Mixed into the middle of the animals are pieces of broccoli, carrot flowers, orange cauliflower, okra wrapped in ham, tamagoyaki, slices of lady apples, chicken karaage, cherry tomato, and sugar snap peas. I have no idea why, but I added 4 tsp sugar to the egg, so it’s disgustingly sweet, with green onions too. Yuck!

When I first started putting the dogs in, I realized the bento box was too tall, so I cooked yakisoba to layer the bottom so that the animals wouldn’t look sunken down. So, while there isn’t much meat up top, there are a lot of veggies and noodles underneath, which makes it a decent meal. I’ll be sharing it with the office today. Now I’m off to go get 30 minutes of sleep before I have to get ready for work!