Crayon Shin Chan Kyaraben

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apple, apple designs, bento, character bento, Crayon Shin-chan, cutters, easy, flower shaped apples, food art, furikake, Home Cooking, Kyaraben, lunchbox, nori, quick, salmon furikake, seaweed, seaweed art, shin chan

Here’s an easy kyaraben (Character bento) that you could attempt. This anime character is Shin Chan, one of the many anime characters that bring back a wave of university nostalgia. For the list of tools used, please refer to my first bento post.To make Shin Chan’s face, I used some rice mixed with Salmon furikake (to make the flesh tone). I couldn’t find a furikake that had no seaweed in it so unfortunately my flesh tone had little specks of seaweed in them T___T. It turned out ok in the end though.

For the hair, eyes and eyebrows I cut out strips of seaweed using a sharp design cutter as shown in my first bento post.

As usual, I drew my design on paper, just to make the face fit in with the other food I wanted to put into my bento. Using this design as a template, you can then cut out the hair, eyes and eyebrows by clipping the paper on top of a sheet of nori on a cutting board as shown in the pictures below.  

So the sequence is: Paper, seaweed and then cutting board. All fastened together to make it easier to cut out the delicate pieces of seaweed. Then you mix your Salmon furikake into the rice, place it into the bento box and shape it into the form that you’ve drawn in the design, roughly in the same size as accurately as possible. Then add the seaweed hair, eyes and eyebrows.

If added the seaweed directly onto the rice, the seaweed will shrivel. However I find that cutting out cheese to form the base for the seaweed infinitely cumbersome so I skipped that step. Cheese normally should be the base for any form of seaweed art so that the seaweed remains nice and flat instead of all crumpled and shriveled like it was in my bento T____TSo there it is. I cut out some flowers from an apple, added an egg and some chicken. Then I used a chunk of chilli for Shin Chan’s mouth. I suppose you could use ketchup or do it the professional way and use an egg sheet dyed red. Too much trouble to make the egg sheet for such a small area. Plus I like the spicy kick that the chilli lent. This is the second part of the bento. Just a compilation of the stuff I wanted to eat. Make sure that moist foods like fruits are separated from dry foods using rubber separators or in this case, leaves 😉 I wouldn’t want that egg tart to turn soggy!

I’d like to draw your attention to the apples. I saw these designs in a magazine but couldn’t understand how it was made so I freestyled it… basically I winged it.  I cut some apple chunks with the skin still on, in large cubes. Then I made four shallow cuts in the skin with a small knife, in the form of a hashtag # (I hope you understand what I’m bumbling on about, guess this is where a video would be much more educational than my incoherent words). Use the knife to gently peel off the skin slices in alternate blocks, leaving the skin on in some blocks so that it forms the design as shown. It is actually easier than it looks.

And there you have it, a Shin Chan bento. This was quick, delicious and fun to prepare. Definitely fun to eat as well 😉

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Japanese style rice porridge

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creamy porridge, Egg, healthy, japanese, nori, okayu, porridge, quick meals, rice, rice porridge, seaweed, spring onions, zosui

This is one of those quick fixes that can be done with just cooked rice and an egg. The other ingredients are cupboard ingredients (those that can be stored for a really long time), which is the beauty of this dish really.

If you’ve heard of the nabe (hot pots) that Japanese really love, you’d have also heard of them adding rice into the leftover stock once they’re done cooking the rest of the food. They then turn the rice into porridge, and thus, nothing is wasted.

And it is really delicious! I tried this “zosui” (the Japanese refer to thick rice porridge as zosui/okayu) in Hokkaido after a delicious kani-nabe ( I did NOT just swear at you lol!). Kani means crab, so what we had after the crab hotpot was some delicious stock. The waitress added more stock to it and then added precooked rice and let it simmer for a while before adding egg. It was the best porridge I’ve had!

I try to replicate it here the best I can without such expensive ingredients, crabs don’t come cheap in Singapore. I’ve come pretty close to it I think.

Ingredients (For 2 pax, or 1 hungry person)

• 1 cup cooked rice
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1/4 cup dashi (this is the second bottle from the left) – you can make it yourself, using konbu, anchovies and soy sauce but I found this more convenient
• 1 cup water
• 1 tbsp mirin
• 1 tbsp sake/cooking wine
• Handful of chopped spring onions for topping
• Handful of seaweed (nori) strips for topping

Cooking Instructions

Pour the dashi, water, mirin and wine into a pot and bring to a simmer.

Add the rice and cover the pot with a lid. Simmer on medium high heat until the rice softens. If you prefer really soft rice in the porridge, you could simmer it a little longer, just add some water so it doesnt dry up and stick to the bottom of the pot.

Once you’ve reached your desired consistency, turn off the heat and pour the egg into the centre of the porridge.

Work quickly and use the bottom of a ladle to stir the egg round and round until the egg is completely incorporated into the porridge.

You want the end result to look creamy. This is the end result of stirring the egg well. If you let the egg cook before you stir it in, it is going to look like an egg drop soup. Not like it tastes bad either, it just will not be as creamy as the picture below.

So the egg has to be quickly stirred in, in circles starting from the centre of the pot. If you were to stir it any way you wanted, the egg may end up streaky -___-

Then ladle it into a bowl and top with spring onions and seaweed.

So there it is, creamy Japanese porridge (obviously with zero dairy in it).

I love spring onions so I went overboard with it ;p