August 29th Bento Lunch

I felt like making sushi this morning so making bento took quite a bit longer than usual. I was about halfway done when I realized that everything was green and yellow! Oh well, I'm sure it will still get eaten.

I made a sweet, fruit sushi today. For sweet sushi, I use 3 Tbsp of lime juice heated with 1 Tbsp sugar (to make it dissolve) instead of sushi vinegar. I also use mamenori soy wrappers instead of nori. I have to say though, it's much tougher to get this sushi to stick together than regular sushi. It's so pretty and yummy though, that I don't mind making it once in a while.

This time I used mango and avocado as fillings. I know that seems like a bit of a strange combination, but trust me, it's delicious and the texture is amazingly smooth.

First I removed the rind from the mango and the avocado, and cut very thin, flexible slices from the top of the fruit. I cut the remain fruit into strips. I rolled the fruit strips into a regular inside out maki roll and then placed the slices over the seam and rolled it again to make everything stay together. I'm really happy with how these turned out, there is so much fruit in them! I mixed up the pieces and turned them on their sides because it looks more fun than when they're all orderly.

For protein today, I made teriyaki chicken. This is really simple to do from scratch. I used two chicken thighs for BF's bento (I would only use one for mine). Here's what you do:

The night before

• Slice chicken thighs in half
• Place in a small ziplock bag with 1 Tbsp each of mirin, soy sauce and sugar
• Refrigerate overnight

In the morning

• Remove chicken from the bag and fry in a bit of oil on medium heat until browned
• Mix 3Tbsp water with the remaining marinade and pour it into the frying pan with the chicken.
• Cover until the chicken is cooked
• Cook uncovered until the liquid has evaporated and the chicken has a nice glazed finish

The morning part takes less than ten minutes which is a pretty short time to cook meat in my opinion. I put the chicken in a foil tart container that I flipped up the rim on.

For veggies there is some sesame fried bok choy all around the foil cup and some asparagus that I parboiled for 90 seconds and then added to the pan with teriyaki chicken while it was cooking for another 90 seconds (teriyaki asparagus I guess?). There are also steamed green and yellow zucchini, sugar snaps and broccoli.

There was already all kinds of mango in the sushi, so for fruit I just included a few blueberries and three thin watermelon wedges.

On Fridays I try to use up all my leftover produce before the weekend, can you tell?

June 25th Bento

I swear I had a plan for today's bento. No, for real!

It was so gorgeous out last night, and I spent most of the evening on a patio downtown sipping pineapple and vanilla flavoured martinis with BF. I got home at 11:30pm and realized I had nothing to put in the morning's bento.

So I threw a chicken breast (cordon bleu style) and some veggies in the oven for 45 minutes, thinking that would cover off enough of it that I could just throw in some onigiris and fruit in the morning.

I was falling asleep towards the end of it, but I knew it would be worth it in the morning when the bentos were already half planned. After the 45 minutes were up, I pulled the pan out of the oven, removed the foil, and to my utter disbelief, everything was still completely raw, and the pan was only a little bit warm.

I glanced up at the temperature gauge and the oven was turned on to 350 degrees, although the light was on indicated that it was warming up. For the life of me, I can't figure out what happened. My best guess is that I didn't close the oven door all the way, but I can't even imagine that happening. I've been baking since I was like 12 and I don't ever recall not shutting the oven properly.

So it was 12:30 and I was exhausted, so I just went to bed.

And to top it off, when I got up in the morning, and went to grab some onigiri out of the freezer, I realized I was down to the very dregs of my onigiri bucket (I lost track of what I had stocked while I was on vacation), so I used everything that was there, but it meant I was a bit limited in what I could do creatively.

So I think the moral here is to plan better and don't stay out so late on weeknights. But given that the hot weather is finally here and I love summer nights, I'm not sure that's a realistic goal for me :P

Anyway, enough rambling. Here is what I came up with:

On the left, there are two sets of three onigiri (one tumeric and vinegar, one plain). For meat I fried up some pork schnitzel in a little canola oil. These cuts of meat are very thin, so they cook really fast - perfect for bento!

I picked up some Shang Hai bok choy on the weekend which I sauteed in sesame oil. This was the first time I had tried it, and I have to say I can't tell the difference between this and regular baby bok choy at all. I think regular bok choy is prettier with the darker green and the white, so I don't think I'll buy the Shang Hai version again.

There are some sugar snaps and asparagus pieces. I divided the broccoli florets into really small pieces because there were tiny gaps everywhere. I tucked in one of the tiny tomatos.

On the right tier, there is another onigiri (heart shaped, filled with lotus seed and white bean paste), some rolled omelette (tamagoyaki) slices, more sugar snaps and broccoli.

For fruit there are some apricot pieces, strawberries, blueberries, cherries. Dessert is a truffle.

So it was nothing fancy, but we didn't starve!

Tonight I'll be cooking up and freezing lots of rice!