bento #14: Katamari Damacy

Since I started making bento most my bento have been Studio Ghibli themed, and I wanted to make something different. My boyfriend and I love video games. We each own a PS2, an Xbox 360, a Wii, and a DS lite. So I decided to make a video game themed kyaraben for a change. I looked at his video game collection and found a game we both have and love. And it was Katamari Damacy!

Bento#14: Katamari Damacy
Created and eaten on: 10/17/2008

Katamari Damacy is created by Japanese developers. The game has a very unique concept and style. For a full description of the game you can look at Katamari Damacy in Wikipedia. Basically you’re a very tiny “Prince”, and his father the King of All Cosmos destroyed the stars, constellations and Moon. Now the Prince has a mission to rebuild what his father destroyed by rolling a very tiny katamari (clump) onto “stuff” and make the katamari bigger. The stuff consists of pretty much anything you can find in Japan. And in the game, they are scattered all over the house, streets, park, town… everywhere. I’m not going to review the game here because this is my bento blog, but the game is sooooo addicting.

Once I had an idea, it was pretty easy. I just needed to make a rice ball, and put lots of stuff from the game on the rice ball. I knew it’d be a lot of work, so I tried not to worry too much about the details.

First, I made an egg sheet and put it in a bento box for background. Then I made a bowl out of rice, put left over curry in, and covered it with the lid which was also made out of rice.

Then I made tiny sushi, tiny carrots, tiny radishes, rice balls, etc…

Making those little foods may look like a pain in the neck, but it was actually the most fun part of making this bento. After that, I put the little foods on the rice ball. At this point I was already giggling looking at the “katamari”, because it looked so ridiculously cute! I wrapped potato salad with microwaved lettuce leaves, and shaped it like Prince. For the Prince’s arms and legs I snapped off the stem of parsley.

This bento may look crazy & complicated, but I had an awesome time making it. Everything went pretty much the way I wanted. Of course, I couldn’t close the lid on the bento, but I could care less. Besides, that was the whole point of the game!

I’d usually write what each parts are made of in the end of a post, but for this bento, please visit my flickr for the detail. There is just so much detail to write in here!

EDIT: Seems like I’m getting a lot more traffic than usual, (thanks to reddit, digg, metafilter, kotaku, kottke, etc…) and I just wanted to make something clear for those who never had Japanese curry. As you can see in the pictures above, there’s chicken curry (with potato and carrot) inside the rice bowl/ball thing. You usually eat curry with rice. That’s it. The little foods are just extras. And they’re mainly vegetable and egg.
So please don’t worry. My boyfriend is getting enough nutrients just from curry and rice. =D

This is also a good way to pack curry for bento, because this way, the curry doesn’t stain your bento box.
You don’t have to make a bowl out of rice, but just fill a lunch box with rice, scoop some rice with a spoon (don’t scoop all the way to the bottom) and pour curry in. If the curry is too soupy, it might leak to the bottom, but if it’s leftover curry and was in the fridge overnight, this usually works well.

For more pictures of my bento, visit “Bento!” set and “Bento details!” set on my flickr page.

Tagged as: broccoli, carrot, crab meat, curry, eggs, katamari damacy, potato salad, quail egg, sushi, tomato