Totoro Charaben - Play with Your Food!

In Japan, lots of moms wake up early to make bentos for the family. Some also make charabens (character bentos) to encourage kids to eat healthier. I think this concept is cool because it shows a lot of love and care that goes into preparing the food.

I’ve been following this bento blog called AnnaTheRed’s Bento Factory. You should check it out, she’s sooo awesome and detailed - she inspired me to play with food!

Here are my results:

All I can say is, man that takes a lot of work. A lot of the love goes into crafting the details. I’ve never created art from food before, and I’d say from start to finish, this took me about 4 hours. However, I was working non-stop with a clear-cut strategy in place (I drew my plan and wrote it down in steps on the left so I could time things better).

I was planning for Totoro to wear a spinach leaf on his head and pose with an umbrella in his hand (after his stomp during the rain scene) but I ran out of time. Here is my general but methodical plan.

1. Dye the egg

This is to prepare the medium-sized Totoro, who is represented by a blue boiled chicken egg. Following, AnnaTheRed’s instructions on how to dye food naturally, I boiled red cabbage (which produces blue water!), peeled a hard-boiled egg, and placed it in the blue liquid (after it cooled) in a glass container. Every few minutes I would stir the egg so that it dyed evenly. Then I set it aside for a long time.

You can see the final result of the dye in the inset of this photograph.

2. Make flowers

I happened to have some flower-shaped cookie cutters I bought from Sur La Table for Christmas. If you’re using bigger cookie cutters, make sure the carrot is big enough to accommodate the cutter size - I happened to have small ones, although I was planning to use the medium-sized cutters. Oops!

Carrots are tough, so make sure you cut thin slices. My hands go pretty chewed up by the cutter because I cut them thick in the beginning (ow!)

I also had fish cake and proceeded to “skin” off the pink part so that I can cut medium flowers from it. I created small flowers from the white parts, and used a body-spray cap (I washed it of course!) to make the white parts of the eyes for lots of things (you’ll see later).

3. Cook stuff

Here I had to multi-task while cooking different foods in order to get them all finished about the same time. I washed 2 cups of rice and put it in the rice cooker, which took about half hour to cook. Unfortunately from this point on, I couldn’t take as many progress photos since I was so busy.

I prepared the asparagus by trimming off about 1/3 of the stem from the bottoms, tossing it in olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then spreading it out on a tray. I stuck it in the oven at 400 degrees for about 7 minutes.

I made ground turkey soboro for the “ground” that Totoro stands on.

Then I started the prep work for the dust balls. I cut seaweed into strips and hole punched a bunch to create eyes and set it aside. For my rice balls, I like to have ume and shiso (also called “ohba”) inside. So I minced up the leaves, pitted the plums and mashed the two together.

At this point, the rice was done - it was time to put everything together!

4. Play with your food

I grabbed a bunch of asparagus and lined it on the plate.

I split the rice in half and put it in a separate container and stirred in a mixture of black sesame seeds and salt. I then followed the instructions for shaping Totoro but without a template, so I eyeballed and winged it because I’m impatient like that. That’s why my Totoro is not so accurate. =) Instead of cheese, I used leftover white fish cake.

Next I poured the turkey soboro onto the plate to emulate the ground. I took the dyed blue egg out, rinsed it, cut ears into it, placed eyes and then placed it on the plate. It started rolling around so I placed some fishcake underneath it to hold it in place. Looking back, I should have placed the eyes lower, ah well! =)

I took out a quail egg, cut its ears, then carefully poked 2 holes where the eyes should be and pushed black sesame seeds into the holes. I placed it next to Totoro and it also started rolling around. Some fishcake helped remedy that!

Next I started scattering the flower carrots and fishcakes that I had prepared previously, just enough to fill up the empty space. I admit, it looks SO much better with these decorations. So I’m finished with the Totoro plate!

Time to make dust balls! I like AnnaTheRed’s idea of using saran wrap to make the balls so my hands don’t get sticky. I flatten some rice onto the saran wrap and scooped some ume/shiso onto it like so:

Then I roll it into a ball and squeeze and squeeze. Looking back, I made them a bit big.

Then I rolled it in the strips of seaweed and placed eyes on them. They look crazy!

It’s a lot of work! Kudos to AnnaTheRed for making bentos on a consistent basis. I don’t have enough energy to do this all the time. Her Totoros and dustballs look better!

Still, seeing my guy’s reaction to this was just priceless and made it all worthwhile. =) Actually I would love to do this again in the future.