And.....Go!

A happy Mokona is going to school with A-chan today. She was a little nervous so I wanted to make her a special charaben. Ah, the magic of the bento! The sight of this one helped turn off the nervous tears and got a sweet smile started instead. For the first day of school A-chan requested fried tofu and a number 1 somewhere in the bento. I remembered the tofu, but forgot about the 1. She reminded me at breakfast and I rectified my mistake with some hasty free-hand cutting.

I can't wait to hear about her adventures today. Almost all of the children that go to her Tae Kwon Do studio are in her class this year!

In the bento: Jasmine rice with furikake, provolone cheese mokona, fried tofu, baby corn spears, blackberries, grapes, a cherry tomato and three baby carrots. Not shown is the soy sauce bottle that somehow never seems to fit :)

The furikake is a mixture of sea salt, toasted sesame seeds and tarragon. It's a very simple flavor to go on the rice and A-chan has liked it a lot in the past.

Mokona's body was cut from provolone cheese slices using an egg shaped cookie cutter for the main body and the baseball bat shape from another cutter for both the feet and the ears. The face was punched from nori, with a sugar dot for the forehead and tiny smudges of sriracha for the cheeks. It was all 'glued' together with a bit of mayo. I first assembled Mokona on a plate while the rice cooled off in the bento box. Once the rice was cool to the touch on the bottom of the box I transferred Mokona on top.

Woohoo, the first day of school photo! We managed to only be three minutes late despite the fact that school started half an hour earlier this year. I believe the reason we were late had to do with the fact that we stopped to snap a photo of her new dress for the first day of school and our cat Purrpurr just had to 'help'.