The King Tut of Lunchboxing

I didn’t think making a Japanese bento box could get any MORE labor intensive, but bless my tweezers and nail scissors, yesterday I saw The King Tut Bento. Feast your eyes on that pharaoh-sized nori-maki, plus a pair of hieroglyphic eye-rolls, suitable for sumo wrestler-size appetites! The hand-rolled works of art alone would require me to set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. instead of the usual bento-mania 5:00, but if I were also to craft those perfectly steamed broccoli florets, simmered root vegetables, octopus and soybean salad, sweet chestnuts, kuromame, fishcakes and shrimp with artfully scattered salmon eggs, I think I’d have to fire up the espresso machine and just pull an all-nighter.

Jonelle Patrick is the author of the Only In Tokyo mystery series, published by Penguin/Intermix. Photo from http://ameblo.jp/kururinzushi.