Katsu Curry is one of my family’s favorite meals, so I make this pretty often. If I have extra time, I’ll make cute panda bear onigiri for my kids, they just love it! It’s an easy recipe, but you do have to be good at multi-tasking to get everything ready in a timely manner. Read over the whole recipe, even though they are listed in different steps, to get everything done at once you have to cook the curry, katsu, and prepare the onigiri at the same time.
You can use any Japanese Curry Mix of your choice, my favorite is S&B Golden Curry and luckily it’s widely distributed in the U.S., so it’s pretty easy to find this box at any grocery store.
I’ve had this panda onigiri mold set (order here) for quite sometime, but I only figured out recently to get the face shapes to punch out cleanly, you have to toast the nori sheet for about 30 seconds. Even then, you’ll most likely have trouble with the mouth coming out cleanly – so be prepared to cut out extras.
If you want to cut the carrot slices into cute shapes, you can use this vegetable cutter set (order here)
Fukujinzuke (Japanese pickled vegetables) is typically served with Japanese Curry, you can find it in the refrigerated section at any Japanese market, H-Mart also carries this.
I cut the Fukujinzuke into triangle shapes for the flowers and used parsley stems as the flower stems
