April 22nd Bento

Today's bento was probably my prettiest one yet, but for some reason, my pictures haven't been turning out this week, so I apologize that it doesn't look as good in the photo. I dropped my camera on the weekend, I'm wondering if that has something to do with it.

The bentos today were losely based on the theme "squares"

The sushi is called a "Four Seas Roll" and it's another one from the Sushi for Parties book that I got last weekend (Did I mention I love this book?). Usually it has nori curves all through it, but I used mamenori instead (mostly because I don't like the taste of nori much, but partly because it's prettier), which is shaped like nori, but its actually a soy paper and it comes in all different colours. I used a green sheet for one roll and an orange sheet for the other. Each roll makes four pieces of sushi, so that was exactly enough for two bentos. The center of the sushi is just plain old sweetened rolled omelette (tamagoyaki), and the outside is wrapped with nori. I think these turned out really nice for my first try.

For meat, there's a bacon wrapped chicken "tournado" premade from the butcher. I baked it the night before as usual. There are two leek dumplings, some sugar snaps, a container of boiled edamame and sweet potato flowers, sesame fried bok choy, green and yellow zucchini slices, a stack of watermelon slices, strawberries, blueberries and a french mint chocolat from Laura Secord.

In other news, I am super excited because I just ordered an AeroGarden with the Japanese herb kit. Apparently it will take a few weeks to get here because I'm in Canada, but soon I will be growing my very own shiso leaves and mitsuba! I haven't been able to find Japanese herbs anywhere locally so I'm crossing my fingers that this will work.