6/10/2009- Onigiri and other stuff bento

So the other night when I made the thai-basil sort of eggplant dish, I made Japanese short grain rice to go with it. And I made a few onigiri, using the plastic wrap method, which I stuck in the fridge. I have made them by hand before, too, which is fun and painful (a little bit), but since I wasn't going to use them the next day, I thought I would use the plastic wrap method so they'd be prepped to not dry out. Two days later, here they are in my lunch, with a strange assortment of some other things. I left the onigiri wrapped in their plastic when I packed up my Totoro box, so they wouldn't lose any moisture into the box (no soggy cheese).

Contents of Bento: two plain onigiri on left; baybel cheese with heart cut-out (the heart ontop of the onigiri is the wax from it); under the cheese is celery and carrot; also celery and carrot at the bottom of the box.
In the middle is some leftover orzo salad from going out dinner the other night, with pine nuts and red pepper added, garnished with basil, in a red silicon cup. It needed some serious help, it was quite bland.
The blue silicon cup has 3 artichoke hearts and two olives; under that is one prune. I lined the bigger compartment with a lettuce leaf.

You may ask, why is there a big, honking space in the top right corner? Well, it was waiting for one of those mushroom "meatballs" from Trader Joe's to cool down from the toaster oven.

Voila! Finished bento.

Well, sort of. I needed some serious sauces, since most everything was dry. So, I brought some of my containers:

Sauce bottles!

The two fishes have soy sauce in them. The panda bear is filled with Balsamic vinegar (for the artichokes and meatball) and the tan bear is The Bear of Salt. He always has salt in him. :D I love these little sauce bottles, they're such a boon to bento packing. All the sauce bottles were just jammed into the box wherever they would fit (not very pretty) so there's no picture of the whole thing as it looked like when I went to eat it.

Everything was tasty, including two-day old onigiri. The pasta salad stayed in its cup and there was no leakage. Hurray!