4/2/2010- My Famous Fake-BBQ-Chicken-Wingaling Pizza

Ah! My blog reading public--if any of you are left out there....

As some of you may know, I've been finishing up a master's degree this spring, which has left me with very little time for bento-ing. Homelife has been REALLY busy/strange as well, which all combines for no blog postings.

The end, however, is in sight! I'm posting the meager samples for April.

A bento featuring my famous BBQ fake chikin-wing-a-ling pizza:
Contents of bento: pizza pieces, baran, strawberries, mixed salad. (The little jar has salad dressing in it).

Unfortunately, I think this one would have been better refrigerated. The strawberries and salad were a little worse for the wear by lunchtime. I also should have used the lift-out trays; the pizza was a little damp from the strawberries. OH WELL, it's still delicious.

Here is my recipe for the pizza:

Make pizza dough (or buy preprepared--I won't look)
Flatten on pan
Top with BBQ sauce
Cheddar cheese
Chopped onions
Fake chikin-wing-a-lings *see note

Bake until awesome and done at 400°F. Allow to cool before you eat or you will burn off all the skin on the roof of your mouth...like I do every time.

*Ok, so I have LOVED the Morningstar Farms BBQ chikin wing-a-ling buffalo wing things for many years, but I recently learned that most low-fat soy products are processed using HEXANE which is a terrible thing. You're ok with organic soy, or with Quorn products (which are mycoprotein, not soy). Boo-Hiss!
In the next couple of weeks, I will be experimenting with other, non-neurotoxin-containing fake chikin products to see if I can come up with a tenable solution for what to use for the "fake chikin" part of BBQ fake chikin wing-a-ling pizza.

3/6/2010- Leftovers (a little of this and that) and a Pretty Salad

I decided to pack a bento last night, since I wasn't going to get any school work done. The faux-gratin potatoes I made took waaaaaay too long. (Who knew slicing 10 lbs. of potatoes by hand would take a long time??)

Contents of Bento: Faux-gratin potatoes with a flower, pasta salad, 2 silicone heart cups on a bed of steamed broccoli, filled with black bean quesadilla filling. Gratuitous carrot letters. (I meant to highlight how cool the texture of the broccoli florets looked as a background, but it just looks self-aggrandizing.)

Tiny side car of salad with carrot garnish and cranberries. Don't it look purdy?

Everything was very tasty and the pasta salad was dry enough not to bleed over. However, there was a dressing disaster. I packed a little spice jar with some salad dressing and laid it down on its side on top of everything in my little bag. Biiiiiig mistake. Lots of leaking dressing everywhere. But I'm pleased to say that I washed my bag with hand soap and it seems to be no worse for the wear. So, make sure your dressings and sauces are packed in leak-proof containers: don't do what donny don't does!

Because the faux-gratin potatoes are so darn easy to make, I'm going to include the recipe here:

1 onion
3 cloves garlic
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1/4 c. baco-bits (which contain no actual bacon...just lots of food coloring, salt, and soy protein)
1/2 c. strong vegetable stock, or 1 bullion cube in 1/2 c. water
1 lg. container FAGE greek yogurt
1 bag of mixed shredded cheese
salt and pepper to taste

oh yeah, and 10 lbs. of potatoes, actually, only 5 lbs. (still a lot though!) thinly sliced. If you have a mandolin cutter, please use it and save yourself the hassle.

Mince onion and garlic and sautee in olive oil until nice and brown. De-glaze the pan with the bullion stock. We use this awesome stuff called Better than Bullion, which must have about 40% of your daily salt in each teaspoon, but MAN, is it tasty. Add in the baco-bits and cook. Add more liquid if it gets looking a little dry. Dump in the potatoes (I pre-cooked mine a little, but not enough, in the microwave). Add greek yogurt, salt and pepper to taste. Put a lid on it and let it sit over low heat while you preheat the oven to 350 (which you forgot to do before). Get out a nice, big casserole. Put a layer of cheese in the bottom, add a thick layer of potatoes, another layer of cheese, a layer of potatoes, and finish with cheese. If you have restraint, you'll have between 1/3 to 1/4 of the bag left. If not, throw away the empty bag.
Bake, covered, until the potatoes are done. Then remove the cover and bake until the cheese is browned and bubbling. Allow to cool slightly before eating so you don't burn the heck out of your mouth. This would also be great garnished with scallions or green onion.

So, it's definitely faux-gratin, since the yogurt tastes very yogurty. But it's quite addictive. I ate way too much of it last night, despite the fact that I got tired of waiting and the potatoes were not all the way cooked through. Usually I pre-cook potatoes (after they've been sliced) in the microwave to speed up the process, but I guess 5 lbs. of potatoes just take a long time to cook.

9/22/2009- Pesto Pasta and Mini Pizza bento

I usually pride myself on making homemade food, but I've noticed that lots of my bentos have had "convenience" items in them this month. Little hors d'oeuvres just make such nice bento additions. If I take homemade leftovers, often I just put them in a tupperware and don't bother to make up a bento. That's also because I love my Totoro bento box and don't want it to get stained with tomato or tumeric (which feature prominently in the cooking in our house). I know the solution is to use my glasslock box. But, meh, the Totoro one just has such awesome dimensions. The taller sides make it much easier to pack things in it.

So here's another bento that uses some convenience food. Tiny pizzas from Trader Joe's! Man, they're just so CUTE, how could I resist?

Contents of bento: Pesto pasta (storebought pesto, sorry) with kalamata olives, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese. Left side: A little spinach salad on the top, two sweet corn tires, two mini pizzas separated from the corn with a baking cup folded in half. The side car at the top has a molasses cookie cut in the shape of a maple leaf, in honor of the first day of fall :D

So, you think I would have learned my lesson a few short days ago, with the pasta salad debacle. My bento got kind of jostled around a little bit and I guess the pesto oil got siphoned along the rubber grommet...again. It was all along the edge and flowing down the side by the pizza. Bah! Oh well, nothing ruined. Corn tires are fun to eat. And I love my new tiny side car. (I have three, they came with four, but I sent one to a friend.) They are 40ml, polypropylene, and completely watertight. I got them from here: this ebay store with bento stuff . They shipped out pretty fast, and were packaged with all the original Japanese packaging. Totally awesome.

9/17/2009-Gyoza bento

The other night I made delicious Japanese-styled foods for my housemate and I for dinner. We had gyoza, some store sushi and seaweed salad, miso soup, annnd sauces and some broccoli and bell peppers (raw). I think that was all. It was tasty and light. The gyoza were the frozen vegetarian ones from Trader Joe's and I steamed them in my mini bamboo steamer. It's the first time I've used it, but MAN, is it great! I can just put it over a little sauce pan with a cup or two of water and go. I have a large size one, too, but it's kind of a pain to use.

Contents of Bento: Gyoza, celery, and carrot sticks on the right side. Garnished with some red bell pepper. Rice on the left with green grapes on top. Other stuff (clockwise) steamed broccoli, 2 prunes, mini baybel cheese, hummus stuffed pepper.

In the past when I've done stuffed peppers, I've been able to find mini peppers. This is just the end of a skinny pepper from the farmer's market. The little jar has gyoza sauce (rice vinegar and soy). I put it in a glass jar because it was the left over dipping sauce from the night before and had some gyoza oil in it. (Which I wanted to avoid getting stuck in my little fishes). And of course, the Bear of Salt appears to be looking over to the right, possibly to keep watch for marauders. This picture was actually taken at my desk at work, right before I ate everything. The rice had been leftover in the fridge for a while and I didn't reheat it or anything "to restore texture" so it was hard and crunchy. :( Other than that, everything was quite tasty.

9/11/2009- Pasta salad bento

I learned an important lesson about leakage today. Oh man. Here's the pic after I packed it last night:

Contents of bento: Homemade pasta salad on the left: steamed broccoli, shells, red pepper, and some homemade garlic dressing that's been kicking around the fridge, topped with some shaved parmesan.
On the right: carrot sticks, green grapes, two Morningstar farms buffalo wing-a-lings (my name, not theirs) in a decorated paper cup, one prune under the red silicon cup which has a piece of oat-cookie-bar thing in it. There's a lettuce leaf underneath everything, which I hoped would prevent any leakage.

Now for the lesson on leakage. I mixed up the pasta salad last night and all was well. I knew it would be kind of juicy, so I spooned it out of the bowl, sort of draining it. I should have made a better effort. I don't know what happened, exactly, but it leaked under the middle barrier, it leaked up into the lid, which suctioned it over lots of other stuff on the right side. The only consolation I can give myself is that at least I put the oat bar in a silicon cup. It was untouched. And the rest wasn't really a big deal to have some dressing on. The wing-a-lings were especially good with it. When I make them to pack in a bento, I stick them in the toaster oven until they're dried out and crispy. There's no way to keep them from absorbing some moisture in the box, so I like to dry them out as much as possible. I'm really into them. As far as fake meat goes, I'm don't cook with it much, but things like this make great bento items. I also use those wing-a-lings in a great homemade pizza thing, which I may post about the next time I make it.

I'm also glad that the Totoro Bento Box didn't leak into my lunch box, so I suppose it's water-tight-ness is a good thing. Next time, I think a slotted spoon. Or maybe packing up the dressing separately. I ate the dressing soaked leaf, too. Hah.