Bento Contest = I am a lucky duck!

Good news, everybody!

In the midst of all of the tornado of turmoil in our lives (we're moving out of our house, uhm, today--but I'm working this week until Saturday and we're not driving out of town until the 1st of June). So yes, incredibly crazy. Who knew we could have accumulated so much stuff in 5 years.

BUT! The good news is this!

I am the proud winner of Bento Zen's contest in honor of Gamene's new apartment. So much swag-- I can't wait to make bentos with all the swag!

Check me out, guys: http://bentozen.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/shikai-maki-bento/
and is was a random thing, so I was especially lucky--one out of 100. :D

I am also a contestant on An American in Bento's theme contest!
You can vote until May 30---so feel free to do so.

Look forward to a glut of bento postings soon...I promise! I've been taking pictures...I just haven't had time to post.

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.

4/28/2010- Lemony Spanish Chickpeas

Once again, the lemony Spanish chickpeas recipe makes an appearance. This time I actually consulted the recipe, from Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates, and it came out pretty good. The first time I made it, I cooked them for almost 3 hours at really low heat after caramelizing the onions really thoroughly. I have not had the chance to repeat that process, but the quicker-cooking version I made for this dish came out very tasty. It's basically a saffron and garlic-flavored tomato sauce with chickpeas and lemon juice. I like it because it satisfies my never ending craving for tomato sauces, but it's not Italianate. A little something different. If you would like to know how to make lemony Spanish chickpeas, you'll have to buy the book or check it out at your local library.

Contents of Bento: mixed short grain brown and white rice (2 parts white to 1 part brown) topped with a takuan sun. Festive! Spanish lemony chickpeas garnished with an asparagus spear.

So, a pretty plain bento, sun deco aside. But I wanted something I could nuke at work, and this seemed to work really well. Of course, the takuan stained the rice yellow, but that's ok.

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.

4/19/2010-Japanese Leftovers

Again, no traditional bento here. And looking at the picture of the contents, it looks very-not-bento. But anyways...

HB and I had Japanese food last night with our friend S. We went to Hyashi, a local place near where I work. HB decided that we should go out to eat since I had finished the draft of my final exit portfolio. (My degree program has an exit portfolio, instead of a thesis. It's a fairly comparable amount of work.)

Wrapped in furoshiki- I am hiding my Styrofoam takeout container with Japanese leftovers. My tiny chopsticks are stuck in the knot, hiding under it is a small container of soy sauce.

Here's how I arranged the leftovers. Veggie yakisoba, edamame, and sushi: spinach, oshinko, cucumber, ume-cucumber, inari. Very tasty and satisfying. I was too tired last night to arrange this in one of my bentos, but I think it looks pretty tidy and nice in this take-out box.

Everything was great at by lunchtime. This one went in the fridge at work, since it was just in a take-out container and not in my insulated lunch bag.

I've been thinking about what to get as a treat for finishing up my degree...any suggestions? They have some awfully cute bentos over at Japanistic: like this one with a tiny elephant on it or this one with tiny elephants in love. In case you didn't know, I'm kind of into tiny elephants...
Regardless, I think my next bento will be a double-decker, elongated style. I think being able to pack different shapes of bentos is an important part of being into bento. :D

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.

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.

3/17/2010- 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.

3/16/2010- Orange Bento

This bento was so overwhelmingly orange, I just had to put a little piece of broccoli in it to give it some green.

Contents of Bento: winter squash, cooked in the oven, mixed with a little molasses and salt; mixed white and brown rices; those Spanish lemon chickpeas. Carrot and broccoli decor over everything.

I'm really pleased with how the carrot flowers came out, don't they look great! Also a quarter for scale. This is by far my smallest box, holds only 407ml and is really shallow. But it's glass, which means the whole thing can go in the microwave, and when it's packed full like this, is a surprising amount of food. This is the last bento from the bento-rama of a few days ago.