August 18th Bento Lunch

BF was on vacation for most of last week which is why I haven't posted much. Everything is back to normal today though, so I got up bright and early this morning and decided to make a donburi bento. I think this is the first time I've actually made rice in the morning. Usually I make it the night before and refrigerate or freeze it. It didn't actually take too much extra time though because by the time I had the donburi topping finished, the rice was ready.
Here's a picture of what is in the donburi. The recipe is a variation on one that appears in the book 'Bento Boxes - Japanese Meals on the Go'. There is a sliced inari pouch that I boiled for a few minutes in a mixture of 1/3 cup chicken broth, 1 Tbsp each of mirin, soy sauce and sake and 1 tsp sugar. Next I added some canned mushrooms I had leftover from the weekend (mushrooms are the one vegetable that I don't eat fresh. I've never liked fresh mushrooms but I love the canned ones), and let it boil about two more minutes before adding the parsley. Once the parsley had wilted, I added a beaten egg and stirred the mixture until the egg had set. The last step was to transfer it onto the rice in the bento box. I used the bento box divider in order to be able to compact as much rice into that area of the bento as possible.

It looked a little plain so I put a couple of red pepper butterflies on top. On the right hand side of the bottom tier are slices of steak left over from last night's barbecue. Between the steak, the egg and the inari, this bento is pretty heavy on the protein, which is fine for BF. If it was for me, I would have left out the steak altogether.

The veggies are simple. Just asparagus, broccoli and sugar snaps. My grocery store has been out of asparagus for the past week so we were happy to be able to get some yesterday.

For fruit there are orange slices, half of a plum, strawberry slices, blueberries and two cherries. I learned a neat trick for orange slices, to make them easier to eat. You just slice the orange away from the rind for about two thirds of the way across the wedge. Then when you go to eat it, you can just hold it by the peel and tear the orange off the rest of the way. For dessert there is a chocolate mint square from my freezer stash.

Sadly, I think summer is nearing it's end. I saw the first sign of it this weekend: strawberries were $4.99 a box. Well, at least it's still hot out!

As an aside, this weekend I started reading "Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art" (previously I was just using it as a reference whenever I needed a recipe or ran into an ingredient I didn't know how to cook). Ordinarily I wouldn't read a cookbook cover to cover but this book is really exceptional in how much there is to learn from it. There are full chapters on knives, sashimi, sushi, soups, pickles, sweets and tea, as well as chapters on each of the fundamental cooking methods (grilling, pan frying, teaming, simmering, deep frying, etc), each with a discussion of the subject and accompanying recipes. I'm discovering all kinds of new cooking techniques and philosophies on food, it's really exciting. I made some awesome chicken udon soup this weekend, and I've been working on perfecting my own version of eggs and rice as a light breakfast. Next I think I'm going to tackle light appetizer-style soups. I definitely recommend this book, it's completely changed the way I approach cooking.

July 30th Bento Lunch

I accidently drained the battery on BF's fancy camera, so the picture quality today isn't great since I used my little point & shoot.

Today deliciousness won out over pretty.
The main component of today's bento is rice paper rolls. They started out from a recipe in my Vietnamese cookbook, but by the end of it I had made so many substutions and changes that I think it is now an original recipe.

The rolls are filled with a layer of lettuce, followed by a few dots of hoisin sauce, strips of sausage, two egg sheet strips and topped with a layer of sweet potato matchsticks fried with canola oil and garlic. Yum! So this covered off a lot of the carbs and most of the protein for the bento.

I find it really tough to make rice paper rolls look pretty. Does anyone have any suggestions? This time I just put a few parsley leaves on them.

For added carbs, I cooked up some lotus root slices with red pepper. They're propped up against some lentil snacks that you can't see. The rest of the veggies are the standard asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and yellow zucchini. For fruit there is half of a clementine, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and some tiny choke cherries. I think these are super cute and they are crazy sour.

No dessert today because I sent BF into work with a batch of chocolate and vanilla cake balls. I will try to post pics/recipe later today.

June 9th Bento

I found all kinds of new things at the grocery store this week, so I got to try some new foods in today's bento. And I learned a new way to cook - with banana leaves! They only had about six at the store. They're about two and a half feet long and about a foot wide, dark green and shiny. So today we had lemper!
Lemper is an Indonesian food that consists of coconut rice in banana leaves. Here's how I made it:

The night before, cook up some short grain white rice using two thirds coconut milk and one third water. Fried up some ground chicken with a pinch or two of curry powder and some chives, and when it's cooked, splash on a little lemon juice. Cut 5 inch squares of banana leaf and put 1 Tbsp rice in a rough sort of rectangle in the middle of the banana leaf and 1 Tbsp of the chicken mixture on top of that. Fold up the sides and tie with a small strip of banana leaf, and they're ready to go in the fridge. In the morning when making the bento, steam the lemper packets for 15 minutes (this is the longest time I've ever spent cooking anything for a bento by a long shot, but it was so worth it), remove from the steamer and let them cool for a bit before placing them in the bento. I stacked up two in mine.

This was without a doubt the best rice I've ever had in a bento. It was so moist and flavorful, just heavenly. And making them was fun. There's something about wrapping rice in leaves that feels really simple and wholesome. I have more banana leaf cooked foods planned for this week (we went back today and bought two more), so stay tuned!

Because of the small amount of rice, I packed in a whole bunch of sweet potato flowers (boiled with a little butter and cinnamon on them) for additional carbs. And because of the small amount of chicken, I packed two of the mini quiches BF made yesterday, and a couple of bites of cheddar for additional protein. There was some empty space so I threw in a couple leek dumplings.

For vegetables we have the usual broccoli, asparagus, sugar snaps and yellow zucchini. I found some new fruits though! In the bottom corner there is a fresh lychee. I had never tried these before. They have delicious flavour with a bizarre juicy-membrane like consistency. Sorry, that's best way I can think to describe it. Appetizing, right?

There are a couple of cherries next to that (they're down to $4.99 a pound so I've been eating a lot of these), and above that there red and white raspberries. I didn't even know white raspberries existed. Turns out they taste just like red ones, but I like the colour that they add to the bento. There are some blueberries and strawberries, and to finish it off, a cupcake from the batch this weekend.

Here's a diagonal shot too because I liked how the banana leaf looked in this one:

What We Do With All The Leftovers

BF and I think it's really important to eat a healthy varied diet with all kinds of different fruits and veggies. Every Sunday we stock up on produce for our bento lunches and every week we use most of it up.

But, come the next Sunday before the grocery trip, there's always at least a few leftover fruit and vegetables kicking around, and they're not really fresh enough at this point to use in the following week's bentos.

So we cook them all up for Sunday breakfast!

BF puts on the kettle for green tea and coffee and briefly sautes all of the leftover vegetables. He mixes them with five beaten eggs, a little milk and some spices (salt, pepper and basil today) and bakes the mixture at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.

While that's baking, I make a batch of crepes (I use the recipe from the Company's Coming series brunch cookbook, it's really easy) and I cook up any leftover fruits in a pot on the stove with about 1/4 cup of water and a couple tablespoons of sugar. Once they're cooked a bit, I remove the pot from the heat and stir in a mixture of cornstarch and water to thicken it up.

Once everything's ready, we take our crustless quiche, berry crepes and hot drinks out in to the living room, turn on a movie and have a lazy morning.

BF found my mini muffin pan this morning, so he made some mini quiches at the same time for bento. Yay!

In the four months that I've been making bento lunches for BF and I, everything about the way we eat has changed in a really positive way. We eat almost entirely fresh, homemade foods and have all but eliminated processed foods from our diet.

Our attitudes and tastes have changed as well. Our standards have gone up as far as what we are willing to put in our bodies. Where as before I used to love a big bowl of pasta with a heavy cream sauce and maybe some cheese or meat, now I'm shocked at the portion sizes of complex carbs (pasta, bread, white potatoes, etc) that are considered typical and find myself looking at these types of meals and wanting to fill up on vegetables instead. Rather than feeling like I'm missing out by not eating heavy foods, I feel like I'm missing out when I don't get enough fresh fruits and vegetables.

I still enjoy a bite or two of fried or fatty foods, but my tolerance for eating large quantities of them has gone way down. For example, I might eat a breaded and fried chicken strip, but I can't imagine eating six, which is a 'normal' portion size. I would want a side of veggies instead. For a lot of processed foods, I find them so salty now that I can barely eat a bite. I didn't mean to cut so much salt out of my diet as an intentional choice, it was just a result of eating more fresh foods, so now I'm much more sensitive to it.

It actually surprises me the extent to which my tastes have changed because of how heavy my diet used to be in fried/fatty/carb heavy/processed foods. I think if someone had told me I would actually prefer vegetables to french fries six months ago, I wouldn't have believed it.

So, add that to the list of reasons why I love bento! And why you should start eating bento lunches if you don't already.

May 7th Bento

Last night BF made a yummy sauce with tomatoes, chicken thigh pieces, zucchini, asparagus and who knows what else, and there were leftovers! So today I did a donburi style bento lunch.

The bottom is the sauce BF made, some more miso steamed spinach and some egg scrambled with chives. I know I had spinach and egg with my last donburi bento so I should have tried something new, but it was so yummy that I couldn't help but do it again. Everything is over a bed of rice.

On the top we have a few spanikopitas, some cabbage/cranberry/walnut salad, plum pieces, a couple of snow peas, carrot sticks, berries and a pieces of lemonade flavoured fudge.

It was a good bento, but it turns out I'm not a huge fan of tomato sauce at room temperature, so I'm not sure if I would do it again.