9/24/2009- Salsa roll-up bento

I actually made my lunch this morning before work, which I definitely don't normally do. I have no idea how long it took, but it felt like "too long."

Contents of Bento: whole wheat tortilla roll-ups with Mexican cheese blend and some tomato/artichoke tapenade, heated to melt the cheese; corn tires (three), two prunes, carrots and red pepper over steamed broccoli and shredded lettuce. The two little side cars have plain yogurt and salsa. The larger one has some corn chips and the ends of the whole wheat tortilla, chipified in the toaster oven.

The thing that makes me the most irritated about packing my lunch in the morning is waiting for it to cool down before I clip the lid on. Needless to say, I did not wait quite long enough and there was a little leakage. But I'm ok with a little leakage. Everything was tasty and plenty of food for me to eat. That's the magic of a tightly packed bento box: there's so much more there than it looks like. The roll-ups actually stayed rolled and didn't leak everywhere. Hurray, two days in a row with no leaking!

9/23/2009- Left over sushi bento

Tuesday night I decided to get a handle on my reading for school. So, after work, I went straight to a Hyashi (a local Japanese restaurant) and had sushi and lots of green tea. And finished 40 pages of reading. uuggghhhhh.

I didn't finish all of my vegetarian sushi, so I just shoveled the leftovers into my bento box from lunch. I had Oshinko, Cucumber, and one piece of Avocado. It didn't end up taking much room, so I had to fill in the box with other stuff for lunch on Wednesday.
Contents of Bento: Sushi on the left, with red pepper accents, carrots (under the celery), two corn tires, two prunes, a stalk of steamed broccoli, and some salad with bell peppers and pine nuts under the baybel cheese. The cheese has a cut out leaf (more fall!) which I put in the box, on top of the corn tires. On the left of the sushi are two fishes, one of soy sauce, the other of sirracha (since I didn't have any wasabi at home). The little jar has homemade vinaigrette with a 1/2 tsp of peanut butter in it.

The attempt at peanut vinaigrette didn't really work, but I still make tasty dressing, so it doesn't really matter. And since it was packed separately from the salad, no muss no fuss. This box was so tightly packed, nothing moved at all, which was really nice for a change. The sirracha was also a tasty substitute for wasabi.

The sushi was a little unusual. The Oshinko and Avocado was sort of tear-drop shaped like this: I've made sushi that looks like that too, but usually it's because I've messed something up. Anyways, it made a nice presentation on the plate, to have the standard shapes and the tear-drop ones.

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.

9/15/2009-Spaghetti Bento, retroactively posted

This bento was made at my folks' house on Monday night. My best friend from high school was over and she watched me prepare it. I believe her comment was: "You do this every day? That's way too fiddly for me." Kinda funny, since my bentos are really plain compared to how some people do them.

Bento Contents: lightly sauced spaghetti (to keep it from sticking together) on the right, made into little bite-size nests, garnished with olive slices; apple rabbits; carrot sticks (under the apple rabbits); a light La Vache Qui Rit French Onion cheese wedge; some kind of spicy delicious cooked green beans in a metal cupcake cup; half of an oatmeal cookie in the red silicon cup.
A container of apple sauce on the side.

The cheese was actually better than I remembered it being. I really liked it when I was a little kid and then went through a stage where I thought the texture was like creamy plastic. But I guess I've grown out of that. The french onion flavor was really nice. I ate it with the carrots. The spaghetti was actually edible with chopsticks, which is an excellent success. I also put some lettuce around the beans before transport (which didn't look particularly great, hence, no picture) and I'm pleased to say the tomatoey oil in them stayed put.

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.

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!

Amazing Bentospiration

So, I don't want to be one of those blogs that only cross-posts other people's postings. (Too meta for me.) But, my friend sent me a link to this awesome yuppie solution to expressing your love for someone with a bento box. Oh. My. Sainted. Aunts. This is amazing stuff. It makes what I do with bentos look like crayon scrawls next to Dutch Masters (or something). Whew.

6/9/09 Bento- pizza, fruit, and veg

Left over pizza for this bento :D but I felt like it needed something else...


What's in the bento, you ask?? It's a mystery!!




Mystery solved! It's fruits and vegetables....
Contents of this bento: small plum, carrots, celery under the carrots, green grapes. And a small jar of carmelized onion, basil yogurt dip.

This jar makes me soooo happy. It was a tiny jar of Bonne Maman jam (like 2 tablespoons) that HB and I got from this awesome bed and breakfast we stayed in for our anniversary. The owner was so gracious and welcoming and I was really excited about getting a tiny jar. However, my glasslock box is too shallow for it. But the new, awesome Totoro Bento Box fits it perfectly! Success! So now I can carry dip and other things that I might want in slightly larger amounts than in a tiny sauce bottle. Or chunky sauces! I see lots of salsa in my future....
Now, I wonder if it will fit with the lid on... must find out.

Also, don't the pictures look awesome? I took them right before I ate, so there was all this natural light coming in through the window of the lunch room at work. Usually I take a picture at night, right after I make them, which is why the flash usually looks so terrible.

9/10/09 Bento- asian eggplant

So this is an angled shot of my bento from Tuesday. Really simple.
Contents of bento: asian eggplant (a sort of thai-basil kind of dish) on the left, rice on the right, garnished with red pepper and a basil leaf. I'm not sure what the garnish is supposed to look like, except some color breaking up the white of the rice. :D

Here is a picture of the whole thing, with totoro lid arrayed nicely.



The side car container also has a small plum in it. I also packed some green grapes. Those of you who know about bentos will notice that I did not use correct bento proportions on this box. There is more like 1/3 rice, and 2/3 other stuff. That's because 1 cup of rice is a serving, so that's what I put in. I thought it was just about the right amount. Everything was very tasty and I usually find my stir-fries good cold. (Though, to be honest, it was cooked too long to be a true stir-fry, but I'm not sure what else to call it.)