Inarizushi Bears

I am feeling so much better today! So much better that I decided to give myself a little challenge and try to make some cute inarizushi :) A-chan really liked them in our picnic bento last week and I still had enough left over to play around with them some. The bears came out pretty cute, I think. They are both a little different from one another and they are definitely not perfect but I had a lot of fun making them.

In the bento: The bottom tier holds a lot of rice with furikake and a huge carrot star. The top tier has two inarizushi bears, lots of frozen blueberries, a carrot star, a baby tomato and some simmered kabocha.

Once again I simmered the kabocha and the inari in the same mixture: water, soy sauce, mirin and brown sugar. It's only been about two months since I first tried kabocha and I'm really enjoying experimenting with it! I am planning to put some into our Japanese curry for dinner this evening, too :)

The bears' faces are made from provolone and nori with ketchup cheeks. (I would have used sriracha, but the ketchup was already sitting on the counter so I decided to give it a try) Their ears were the hard part. They were cut from other pieces of inari with a circular cutter. But they didn't want to stand up! After the circles were cut out I had a lot of pieces of inari that couldn't be stuffed with rice and were all kinds of weird shapes. So I shredded them and mixed them with sushi rice and sriracha for my bento.