Cute Onigiri! How to Make Them

I’ve been attracted to onigiris (Japanese rice balls) ever since I’ve known their existence. Mainly & simply because they are oh.. so kawaii! And I fell in love with onigiris even more after watching Fruits Basket, because they are so prettily illustrated & the heroine Tohru Honda was associated with them when she was young. Onigiris are easy to make … even more easy if you cheat with onigiri rice mix (left) and onigiri moulds (below, right) from Daiso, heh..

Whenever you have leftover (Japanese) cooked rice, you can store them in the fridge and shape them into onigiris the next day. Instead of sandwiches for picnics, why not make onigiris for a change? And they are a sure winner with the young (and the young at heart) especially if you add some personalized decorative touches ;) Next round, maybe I will experiment with home-made concoctions for the rice instead of using the premix.

Onigiri

Directions
To make onigiri, cook Japanese rice in a rice cooker (with the ratio of 2 cups of rice with 2 1/2 cups of water). Mix in the onigiri rice mix thoroughly to the cooked rice till it’s to your desired taste. Shape the onigiris into triangular or oval shapes (or cheat by using a mould or even cookie cutters). To decorate, you can use a vast array of ingredients like peas and corns(for eyes), carrots, seaweed & radishes (for cutting ears, mouths), bonito flakes (for hair), Japanese fish cake, ebikko and actually, basically any vegetables you can find in your fridge. Wet your hands slightly when handling onigiri so that they won’t stick to your fingers when you are shaping them. If you are using a mould, stuff more rice inside so that the onigiri is compact and won’t break apart easily.

Here are the onigiris I made this afternoon … as I progress, the workmanship gets sloppier… to me, the biggest challenge of all is to make them cute and take photoes before eating because I get hungrier and hungrier, this is how greedy a person I am ;P~

Ingredients Used bonito • carrot • ebikko • fish cake • pea • Rice • seaweed

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