2-8-2011 Pasta, Fake Meatballs, Sandwiches

A hearty set of lunch for myself today. I started the day with some more snow shoveling. We got about 4 inches between tonight and this afternoon. That's actually *nothing* compared with what we have had in the past. Ah, growing up in Virginia gives you such a different perspective on snow. For example, we shoveled the 4 inches, instead of busting out the snow blower. That's how you know it's not a big deal.

Anyways, I digress.
Contents of bento: pasta, fake meatball, celery leaves for garnish on the smaller bottom tier, clementine, dried cranberries, more fake meatballs, celery sticks and a dried peach under the meatballs to fill the space. Sauce in a side car.

A close-up of this part:


I actually ended up putting the sauce into my smallest side car. The container pictured was way too big, in my opinion.

This lunch is in my awesome and cute elph box that I got when I graduated from my master's program. However, it's pretty tiny and when it's packed more loosely like this, not really enough lunch. At least not during winter when there's lots of snow shoveling to do.

I decided a second, snack-sort of bento was in order.

Contents of bento: Three tiny sandwiches, garnished with celery leaf and flower pick. The sandwich fillings are (from top down) peanut butter and homemade grape jelly, provolone with dried apricots, and local Nantucket creamery cheese with olive hummus. They are sitting in little paper cups with sea life on them that I got from my contest SWAG.

Those paper cups are seriously awesome. They keep things dry because they are plastic coated. They're also very cute: you can almost see the one in the elph box. It has penguins on it :D

Everything was delicious. Packing the sauce in a separate container and dipping, rather than just keeping everything in one dish was a great way to ensure the pasta stayed al dente. I also didn't feel the need to heat anything up. Very efficient.

2/7/2011- green noodles bento

Actually, the stuff in the noodles is green. The noodles are white rice noodles. I am super-pleased with how this bento came out. Not particularly decorated, but definitely a real "bento's" bento. Lots of colors, lots of little things, and an asiany main dish.

I started with the leftovers from dinner: rice noodles with baby bok choy, edamame, shiitake and white mushrooms, turnips, onions, cashews, garlic, celery--a pretty simple south-east-asian-type stir fry.

Then I had to hunt around to fill the other tier. I decided that I wanted a big portion of stir-fry, so that went in the larger top tier. HB and I chipped up and shoveled the HUGE amount of ice that was in the driveway yesterday. Yuck. So today, something substantial and protein-rich for my aching body.

Contents of bento: Asainy stir fry on right, local awesome cheese in the yellow silicon cup, a dried cranberry, some pecans, sugar snap peas, and a whole row of baby tomatoes.

But what to go in the other spots?

Some clementine segments and a spicy fake chikin wing-a-ling with a carrot heart. awww. I also put in a flower pick to eat the tomatoes with--I think it sort of looks like a flower with a sugar snap pea leaf/stem.

Everything was delicious at room temperature, even though I made this bento last night after dinner and it spent the night in the refrigerator. I was thinking about it: my bentos are made usually 15-20 hours before I eat them, not exactly the fresh experience that someone would get from a bento made at 7am and eaten at noon.

What do I lose by making them ahead? Probably some textural things. My noodles were a little dried out, not bad. The wing-a-ling's breading was also not crispy. It wasn't mooshy either, but the texture was a little diminished. My carrots and cheese were also a little dried out, again, not badly so.

For me, however, what I gain by making them ahead more than makes up for these minor losses. I can make them the night before, thereby streamlining my morning. I can also put leftovers directly into my bento box, saving an intermediate dish. My food only gets heated once, rather than twice (if one were packing leftovers). And I can also cool everything down all the way before refrigerating--which means I don't have to worry too much about food safety.

If I had to make a bento lunch in the traditional, morning-of, Japanese style, I think I wouldn't. I think that bentos, certain kinds of bentos particularly, can be very successfully made the night before. If anyone out there (does any one read my blog? oh well, maybe someday some one will...:D) thinks that bento-ing is not for them because they are not a morning person, it's just not true. :D

11/15/2010- Pasta Salads Bento

Finally, our fridge has reached a point of maximum leftovers, so there is enough variety to pack the kind of bento I like to pack. Lots of little things. :D

Contents of Bento: Top tier- two pasta salads. The one on the left is tamari-roasted carrot and asparagus, wild rice, and mini bowties with lots of fresh ginger. I put it on some spinach leaves to prevent leakage across the barrier. This was what HB's mum made for dinner the other night. The pasta to the right is rotini with fake chicken and peppers, olives, onions, and artichokes. I made that for dinner last night. It was cooked down with some vegetable broth, a little red wine, and whatever else I felt inspired to throw in. It made a pretty good "Sunday night chicken dinner" for people who don't really eat chicken!

The bottom tier has two strips of red potato pizza with broccoli, snap peas, and a small tomato. I had to cut the bottom of the tomato off to fit it into the tier, so I shaped that slice into a sort-of heart shape, which is on the pasta above. Since the larger part of the tomato was bottomless and leaky, I put it in a silicone cup.
The side car has homemade chocolate-covered apricots. I made this great chocolate sauce (with a little southern comfort) the other night for dessert. It has also made great covering for apricots! Hooray!

I also took my little bbq sauce guy for the pizza.

The best part about this box is that it has chopsticks in the lid. It makes for very satisfying eating of portions like this. When you eat small portions with a fork, you can feel cheated (at least I sometimes do) but when you're using chopsticks, it's lots of trips to your mouth, even if it isn't a lot of food.

Well that's my real post of the week. I'm hoping that I'll be able to exceed my goal and post twice a week, but I'm going to resign myself to baby steps for the time being.

11/13/2010- Snack Bento

Sometimes I will take a plain ol' container of leftovers. Most of the time, in fact. But this time, I also packed up a little snack bento that was better than nothing :D

Contents of snack bento: olives, carrot sticks, hummus. Pretty straight forward. It was actually too many carrot sticks, but that's ok. I just ate them later.

10-2010- Veggie Burger pseudo bento

Sometimes I like to just take a simple lunch. This is one way to make a veggie burger and chips lunch into a bento-appropriate one.

Contents of bento: Condiments in the glasslock, blue corn chips in the small container. A frozen veggie burger is in the tinfoil, and a frozen pita bread is in the paper towel.

Everyone has their favorite ways of packing things, I like to pack frozen bread products in paper towels so they don't get soggy. I'm lucky to have a toaster oven at work, so I can just heat everything up there. I really don't like microwaved veggie burgers, they're much better when they're crispy. The burger is wrapped in tinfoil so I automatically have a little "pan" to use in the toaster oven. If you don't use the office toaster oven tray, you don't have to clean it. (And in some places I've worked, I seemed to be the only person that ever cleaned it....bluh)

Here is a detail of the condiments (which is actually the only strictly "bento" part of this lunch.)
Contents of Condiments box: lettuce, red pepper strips, tomato slice, a little silicone cup of cheddar, dill pickle slices, and a teeny-tiny container of bbq sauce. This little container originally held wasabi in a container of take-out grocery store sushi. Thanks, HB's mum, for saving stuff like this. I'm just thrilled because it actually fits in the glasslock. It's a pretty shallow box, so it's hard to find lidded containers that will work in it.

09/2010- Summer pasta bento, take 2

I'm not sure when I took this for lunch. I know it was sometime in September. I apologize for the terrible quality of the picture. I know I'm not exactly an artist-photographer, but I feel that at least people can *see* the things in my pictures. This one, not so much....

Contents of Bento: mini penne with pesto and sungold tomatoes, two olives, a mini baybel cheese. The salad is spicy asian greens and spinach with a small container of homemade tomatillo salsa in the middle which will act as dressing.

In the summer I often like to use salsa as a dressing for salad greens. It adds flavor and interest, without me having to make up dressing. (We don't really use the pre-made kind). I always pack dressing separately for salad because otherwise you end up with a soggy mess. Yuck.

9/4/2010- Leftovers Bento!

Even though I'm a working girl again, I don't have a whole lot of time for bento-ing. Or maybe it's just that our kitchen set up is not conducive to being creative. Anyways, excuses aside, I do have a bento or two to show you for September:

Leftovers in bento form! I think this was eggplant parmesan (from a restaurant) on the left and I know that the right was sauteed string beans with eggplant, onions, and balsamic vinegar. The garnish is a celery leaf.

This is in my glasslock box, which is so crucial for hot lunches. I'm very leery about microwaving plastic (as I've mentioned before). There are times, however, when I wish I had a more bowl-shaped glass container. Ah well, I will have to keep my eyes peeled. This is a good example of how to arrange leftovers in an attractive way. So always remember, you don't have to make special stuff for you bento. (This is a note to myself as much as anyone else!)

8/12/2010- Sandwich Bento

I like sandwiches. They're easy to hold, I like bread, and they taste great at room temperature. But for some reason I don't often think of packing them in a bento. There are these great little buns you can find at the grocery store up here. They're like hamburger buns, but about the size of the palm of your hand...well, my hands are small, but you get the picture. Perfect for bento. Here you go!

Contents of Bento: carrot sticks; sandwich with pesto, cheese, and hummus on tiny bun; blueberries, tomato, lettuce, and leftover pasta salad. Side car with melon and a flower pick, and a peach. (Do I dare to eat a peach?........yes........)

It was great! I put all the lettuce on the sandwiches. By keeping the lettuce off (cheese goes next to the bread, with squishy stuff on the cheese) you can avoid terrible soggy bread, one of my least favorite things. And the place where I'm working is in a converted old mill building, so it's right by a river. I ate my lunch on a nice big rock down by the river. Very pleasant. :D

Retro posted from 6/30/2010- Orzo salad for a car bento

On my way down to DC, I packed a bento lunch so I wouldn't have to eat fast food. I should have taken a picture of it, because it was lovely. This posting has my bento lunch that I packed for the ride up. Less pretty. In fact, pretty darn simple.

Contents of Bento: mini peppers, orzo salad with feta, tomato, olives, and chickpeas. That's it folks. Pretty straight forward.

A car bento is, however, a great way to eat delicious food and also to save your pennies. If you are in the business of penny saving, like I am, it's pretty crucial.

5/7/2010- Fresh Noodles and Salad leftovers Bento

Yesterday was HB and my 4th anniversary. Yay! We had a lovely set of meals: lunch at Chez Trinh, dinner at Francesco's. Mmmmmm nothing says marital bliss like gluttony. Anyways, I packed my leftovers from lunch in HB's tiffin. It was perfect for the salad/stuff combination that I always get at Chez Trinh.

Contents of Bento: Rice Noodles with Fried Tofu and delicious sauce. With extra cucumber, chopped basil, green onions, carrot hearts, and two fishes with my recreated delicious sauce for the salad. The other container has chopped romaine and red leaf lettuces, and a few carrot hearts.

The fishes have soy, rice vinegar, and a little fish sauce. It was not nearly as good as the delicious sauce the original dish had, but I had to bring a little extra. On the ride home from the restaurant, the little clamshell container they had given me with the leftovers leaked in the plastic bag it was in. There was still some sauce, but not as much as previously. :(

This is a great way to do leftovers--take some home, then fill it out to a full meal with whatever you have at home. I had no bean sprouts, but lots of cucumber and lettuce. And even a little bit of fresh basil. It worked out great.

Anyways, I just dumped the container with stuff on top of the salad and tried not to shove it into my mouth as fast as possible, like I usually do when I eat this dish. It's just so good...mmmm delicious Vietnamese food. I actually put a freezer pack into my cooler bag with the tiffin. I was worried about the lettuces getting wilty. Everything was delicious!

Look for a Francesco's bento later this week, perhaps.

5/5/2010- A rather traditional bento

Last night I was up kind of late working on updates for HB. But, I stayed up even later because I needed to cook something to take for lunch. We had dinner out after my late night at work because I was hungry then. Anyways, I digress...

Fortunately, there was enough stuff around that I made a pretty awesome lunch, even without having a particularly stellar plan for it.

Contents of Bento: Trader Joe's Yaki Onigiri with takuan slices in between, two fishes of soy sauce and rice vin, cucumber sticks, and okazu made with sesame oil, onion, carrot, celery, frozen spinach, and quorn--the sauce is a little soy, a little hoisan, a lot of miso, and a little sweet mustard and hot sauce.

For decoration, I have some striped cucumber ends and carrot hearts. Like I've said in previous posts: I just love those little carrot hearts. They make everything look better and more decorated.

I just sort of whipped up the okazu and then had to wait for it to cool. I know this doesn't look like a whole lot of food in the box, but it was really filling. Quorn fills you up comparable to chicken (if my memory serves correctly) so it's actually more calories than it looks like.

Everything was DELICIOUS at room temperature. So good, in fact, I may recreate the okazu for dinner tonight. When I made it last night, I just made enough for my bento. I also love those yaki onigiri. They've been languishing in my freezer for a while, but it was a great way to get some grain into this bento. My only problem with them is that they're really hard for me to pick up with my little lunch chopsticks. They get kind of slippery and they're pretty dense (heavy for their size). Too bad my mouth isn't big enough to eat them each in one go.

4/24/2010- Tiny Pesto Bowties

I love the tiny pastas that Barilla sells. They were on sale at the grocery so I had to get some. They are absolutely perfect in bento boxes. They also cook really quickly.

Contents of Bento: Tiny bowties with pesto and capers, small breads, tomato bruschetta under the two cheese hearts, frozen cherries, carrot sticks. Two cheese people, who are clearly in love.

This is my lame attempt at charben. But I think it's kind of sweet. I tried something new with the bruschetta. I filled up the silicon cup, and then laid and tucked this plastic lacy sheet over and around it. (The plastic was from part of a wrapper around really fancy Brazilian bon-bons--don't ask.) I was hoping that the surface tension of the bruschetta would keep it neat and tidy. For the most part it worked! Hooray!

The people cut-outs were from tiny cookie cutters that I've had for a while. The heart cut-outs (of cheese and carrot) were free handed. I'm actually getting pretty good at those carrot hearts. They're really not that hard to do.

4/13/2010- Salad Bento

Not a bento in the traditional sense, with a divided box, but in lots of little containers. I had a really rich dinner the night before (which I don't remember what it was....) usually I'm not a "big salad" for lunch kind of gal. Anyways, it was the perfect amount of food on this day.

Contents of Containers: Salad w/ carrot (duh), small jar of sunflower seeds, small container of cut mushroom, cheese slices and toasted french rounds. All of the lids to the 4 containers are stacked by size in the background.

I kept the sunflower seeds and mushrooms separated out for an important reason. Mushrooms tend to get slimy when they're too damp, and the sunflower seeds were salted, which would have leached water out of the lettuce and carrots. By keeping them separated, everything was lovely by lunchtime.

3/17/2010- More Chickpeas and Asparagus for Spring

We've been eating asparagus right now. It's in season and just so lovely and green-tasting. My favorite way to do it is in a baking dish in a relatively hot oven (400-425°), drizzled with a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar, or with a little sesame oil and soy sauce. Deeeeelicious.

Contents of Bento: Spanish lemony chickpeas, with mixed rices underneath; asparagus broiled in the oven with sesame oil and soy sauce; a new cucumber radish shallot salad; blood orange sections and a lady apple.

I was pleased with the little carrot heart decor- also hand cut, like the bento dinner I did a few days ago. I showed this box to HB for his opinion and he said, "how are you going to get the lid on?" Well, I had arrayed the orange pieces and the asparagus this way for artistic flair. A lot of the bento blogs I read use this technique for pictures. But to answer his question, I tucked the ends of the asparagus around, put the lady apple on its side at one end and the orange sections in the other. I suppose I could have taken a picture with it that way, but it just seemed a little more aesthetic to photograph it like this.

3/11/2010- Bento Dinner and Bento-rama

I went on a glut of bento-making and made up 3 bentos all at once. This is because I made onigiri-appropriate rice (2 parts short-grain brown, 1 part white sushi rice) and I wanted to take advantage of that. Those will be posted as I eat them, but I also made up a bento-sort-of-dinner for HB. Sometimes he works late in the evenings, so I made a pretty, bento-inspired spread for him when he came home tired.

Contents of...bowl: Spanish Saffron/Lemon chickpeas, under white and brown mixed rices, decorated with carrot.

And yes, I did cut those carrot hearts by hand. I used a knife to cut an elongated heart shape out of a baby carrot, and then cut slices to make hearts. They actually don't look that bad from this distance. They looked a little anemic close up. I have included the quarter for a sense of scale. In case you were wondering, yes, this is an enormous HB-sized portion.

The Rest of dinner: Cucumber-radish salad (with white wine vinegar, shallots, marjoram, a little lemon juice, and honey and cranberry for sweetness), two tiny pieces (in a sauce-bowl) of BBQ chikn-wing-a-ling pizza.

Actually, I'm not too sure what all I put in the dressing on the cucumber salad. I felt a little like I made it in a trance. All's I know is that it's mostly vinegar and there's no oil in it. It was also super tasty. I thought it would be a nice spring-type salad. Though I suppose cucumbers aren't in season yet...whooops.

HB was very pleased (I believe "Oh wow!" was what he actually said). I've been struggling with wanting to make him ai-bento, but not being able to make them the way he eats (large portions of one thing, not tiny portions of lots of things--which is how I eat.) So this was a good compromise. And you know, it's just nice to do something nice for your HB once and a while.

1/18/2010- Bento-sized Calzone

Another try at a pretty bento. Our housemate had a "Make Your Own Calzone" dinner, so I made part of mine into a tiny, bento-sized one. This is a good technique to use to fill your bento. Are you making something for dinner? Cook a small serving of it especially for your bento. Making burgers? Make a mini-burger for your lunch at the same time. (or what have you) It saves time and makes for a cuter way to take leftovers.

Contents of Bento: Mini Calzone, sitting in foil, steamed broccoli with carrots below, carrot sticks, and green salad with mushrooms above. There is a tiny foil cup with a marinated artichoke cut into little pieces (garnished with an olive). The elephunt has balsamic vinegar for the salad. The small side car has sauce, and a strange garnish pattern. Patterns are pretty, right?

I heated the calzone a little bit when I went to eat it so it wasn't so cold. Cold cheese makes me a little sad. I had packed this bento on Sunday night, but it was fine when I went to eat it on Tuesday. The calzone has cheese and artichoke hearts inside. Deeeeeelicious.

Here's what it looks like all packed up in my kinchaku bag. See my awesome, new, tiny chopsticks! I love thems :D they are so tiny!

Crossposting- Bento Safety

After my last couple of postings where I talked about how I'm not really concerned with food safety, I've been feeling like the universe is telling me I should be.

For example, this blog entry from Just Bento (one of the ones I follow) gives some tips and hints for keeping your bentos fresh and safe. I feel some sort of obligation to repost it here, since I'm so terribly blase about food safety. In an effort to present a balanced view, I thought I should put it up.

I unrelated news, I had a dream last night about trying to pack up a bento. In my dream I had all of these new bento boxes...hah!