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.

HB Bento retro-posted from 10/8/2009

Wow, I was looking back at my postings for October. There's a reason why there are so few of them. I just got really tired of resizing pictures. Part of the problem is that my digital camera is kind of old, so it takes these really huge-file-size pictures. Which are silly for a blog. So I have to resize them all down to 500px. which is not a big deal, but takes a long time when you have to move the giant files around. Anyways, I digress.

This is the second HB Bento, which I don't think was ever posted.

Contents of bento: bottom container- frozen blueberries, an orange pepper stuffed with La Vache Qui Rit and one green olive, 3 slices of this frozen fried tofu stuff on top of tempeh, edamame, and soba noodle stirfry, topped with a fishy of pickapepper sauce. The tofu was purchased in the frozen section of Grand Mart (a great chain of international grocery stores in Northern VA). Top container-yellow corn chips, container of salsa, 3 koala chocolate cookies, 2 japanese bean rice cake things.

He ate everything but the bean cake things, but it was not as much of a success as the first one. Firstly, HB expressed his preference for more simple meals--less variety. And he also clued me into the fact that he can't stand La Vache Qui Rit cheese, even stuffed in a pepper. Oh well. Now I know. He was so polite about it. Part of the problem is that this box holds so much food, it's a challenge to try and fill it. Better luck next time, I guess. :D

10/1/2009-Soba Noodle Stir-fry and HB bento

This posting is a kind of exciting posting because it features pictures from the first photographed HB-Bento! Woo! The very first bento I made for myself (long, long, ago) was accompanied by the very first HB-Bento (i.e., the first bento for HB). Well this posting contains the illustrious SECOND HB-Bento (the first one to be photographed). Back when I started I thought it was a little weird that people take pictures of their lunches. But then I got into reading bento blogs. Man, are those pictures key.

Contents of my bento: plum, 2 mini-peppers stuffed with garlic and herb La Vache Qui Rit; soba noodles stirfried with edamame, sweet-soy simmered tempeh, and topped with broccoli and turnip.

I simmered the tempeh with some kombu and dried black fungus (mmmmmm fungus) in soysauce, mirin, and a little rice vinegar. I also added in a big spoonful of brown sugar. Deeee-licious.

The whole reason why HB got a bento today too was because I bought him this swank new bento box. It's a tiffin-style container from World Market. And it's dishwasher safe, which I have tested out. Mostly, though, it holds a lot of food and doesn't look plastic or girly, which means there are more places he can take it. It also looks like it would hold up to some beating, which is also crucial.

Tiffin! Metal (stainless steel), Indian bento-style container. This one has two compartments and it snaps together nicely. It's pretty waterproof, though I haven't really tried testing the limits of that. The outer surface of the compartments has this nice dimpled pattern in the metal. It's really quite an attractive item. Purchased from World Market for the low, low price of $10.

And here it is filled with foods.

Contents of HB bento: on left, mini-pepper stuffed with La Vache Qui Rit (garlic and herb), some baby carrots, a plum, 2 toothpics of edamame, packet of miso soup, and a silicon baking cup filled with homemade spicy, salty cashews (I do them on the stove top with curry powder, salt, and cayenne). On the right, soba noodle stir fry (same as I got, just in a huge, HB-sized portion).

A closer view of the bottom container.

I did pack this the night before and stuck it in the fridge, as is my wont.

The verdict was very positive. Hooray! And he said he didn't mind the container, so I think there will be more HB bentos in the future. Excellent. The term that I found in this book I got from the library (The Food of Japan: Authentic Recipes from the Land of the Rising Sun, by Takayuki Kosaki and Walter Wagner) is aisai bento, or loving wife's lunch. Essentially, it's the lunch that a wife packs for her man, which may or may not embarrass him in its decorativeness. The book is, to my estimation, so-so. But it does have some nice narrative in the beginning about different areas they cover in Japanese cuisine.