September 15th Bento Lunch

I managed to get up at a reasonable hour this morning, so I had time to put together this bento lunch.
The main dishes are the onigiri and pieces of honey glazed roasted duck leg, both of which I made yesterday. The onigiri are filled with a mixture of bonito flakes and soy sauce and wrapped with little nori strips.

The recipe I used for the duck is from the book Into the Vietnamese Kitchen (in the carousel on the left side of this blog). It's time consuming to make, but it's such an amazing recipe that I don't mind taking the time once in a while.

The duck is first marinated for 15 minutes in a mixture of sake, salt and ginger juice. I then added the marinated to the water in my steamer and steamed the duck leg for 25 minutes, to make it soft and juicy inside.

The glaze is made from a combination of ginger, garlic, sherry, Chinese 5-spice powder, honey, salt and soy sauce that is heated to boiling and then and pressed through a sieve to remove the garlic pieces and make it smooth.

The duck is roasted in the oven at 425 degrees for a further 35 minutes in order to crisp up the outside. The glaze is brushed on and then it is roasted another 5 minutes, followed by another coat of glaze and another 5 minutes of roasting time.

The dipping sauce is made by reheating the leftover glaze and mixing in some hoisin sauce for added thickness and sweetness. (There's a container of dipping sauce hidden under the kumquat slices).

I also made lotus root kinpara this morning by peeling and slicing about 2" of lotus root which is then soaked in cold water. Drain and saute in a bit of canola oil for a couple of minutes. Add a mixture of 1 Tbsp soy sauce, 2 Tbsp sugar and 2 Tbsp mirin and cook for three more minutes, then drain.

I like the sweet crunch of this dish. I think lotus root goes well with a small serving of rice like the one in this bento, because with the lotus root's starchy, potato-like texture, the two foods together make up the main carb component of the lunch.

I included two gyoza with a bottle of dipping sauce tucked underneath. For veggies, there are steamed asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and snow peas. For fruit, I included some honey kiwi flowers and of course, blueberries.

Yummy!

September 4th Bento Lunch

BF was pretty grumpy this morning, so I decided to break out the big guns for his bento today - unagi nigiri sushi.

Unagi is Japanese for eel. You can buy it from the freezer section of your Asian grocer already barbecued with kabayaki sauce (similar to teriyaki sauce. I'm not actually sure what the difference is). It just needs to be toasted in the oven to reheat it and then cut into slices. And it's BF's favorite food.

Unagi is one of the few traditional types of sushi I'm comfortable putting in a bento lunch because the meat is cooked. Other types include tamago (egg), avocado and any fruit or veggie roll. I'm not comfortable using raw fish in a meal that sits at room temperature all morning (and BF has been known to get too busy to eat until even later in the day) both for health reasons and because raw fish should be served fresh, anything else doesn't do it justice.

I tucked a foil cup of pickled ginger in the top left corner and a restaurant pack of soy sauce on the side (this bento box doesn't have a little shelf on the top to hide things like that). I couldn't think of a way to include wasabi that didn't take up much space or make a mess. Does anyone have any ideas?

Below the sushi there are three gyoza and some steamed sugar snaps. I like to include dumplings with sushi because both contain a combination of carbs and protein. I like to either have one main carb and one main protein, or two items that have both, and sushi and dumplings are a perfect combination!

Above the sushi there is some steamed gai lon with dried cranberries, as well as some carrot flowers that I boiled for two minutes, just enough to soften the outside.

Beneath the sushi there are a few piece of steamed asparagus and three thin slices of kumquat to add a bit of bite. For fruit there was only room for berries today, strawberries and blueberries.

June 12th Bento Lunches

His and hers bento lunches...

BF's been on vacation all week, but I've been making him bento lunches anyway. Its just as easy to make one bento as to make two, and in some ways it's actually easier. For example, I wanted a few bites of plum in mine today. If I was only making one, then I can either include the whole plum or else the rest of the plum winds up in the fridge, needing to be used up quickly. This way I can use the whole thing but we still get lots of variety in our bentos.

Today we have (on the bottom tiers) strips of beef, leftover chicken curry from the Vietnamese restaurant we went to last night (it's a sweet, curry made with coconut milk - so delcious!), gyoza, steamed broccoli, sugar snaps and asparagus.

On the top tier are a few bites of plum, a container of pomegranate seeds and the usual assortment of berries. BF's bento is a little bit bigger than mine so I also included a chunk of cheddar (hiding under the strawberries) and a couple of daifuku.

June 10th Bento

Have I mentioned that I love banana leaves? BF used them last night on the barbecue and it was phenomenal. For supper he made some sort of coconut milk-curry-ginger-cayenne rice in banana leaf packets with bites of seasoned lamb. We made a couple of little ones for the bentos as well of course (it's in the top center). You can't really tell from the picture but the rice was crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside and all stuck together sort of like rice loaf. I wasn't sure I would like crunchy rice because I thought it would just taste like uncooked rice, but it wasn't like that at all. The texture was actually really nice.

I also got to try out a recipe from a Vietnamese cookbook I ordered from Amazon a couple weeks ago, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen (Highly recommend!! I added it to the carousel in the left panel of the blog). It's called Chuoi Nuong and the basic idea is you take a chunk of banana and wrap it in some coconut rice mixed with shredded coconut. Wrap the whole thing in a banana leaf and fire up the grill. As you can see, the banana leaf gets kind of brittle on the barbecue, so I removed it before putting this and the curry rice in the bento.

No joke, Chuoi Nuong is quite possibly my new favorite food now (if only I knew how to say it). It was unbelievably delicious and I will be very sad when I can no longer get banana leaves because I want to eat this every day.

Both of the rice dishes were made the night before and kept overnight in the refrigerator, covered with plastic wrap. In the morning I removed the banana leaf and put them straight into the bento and the texture of the rice was still perfect by lunch time.

For a little bit more meat, there are three homemade pork shu mai, and just the standard veggies (I was running out of room!), although I did manage to sneak some steamed gai lon under the curry rice.

For fruit there are raspberries (red and white), cherries, strawberries (buried in there somewhere), some apricot bites, a couple of slices of kumquat along the bottom wall and a container of pomegranate seeds. I was just going to use a few of the pomegranate seeds to decorate the bento, but then I ate one and remembered just how much I love them, so it ended up being a whole dish full. Dessert is a (store bought) daifuku filled with red bean paste.

As far as lunches go, this was definitely one of the yummiest yet!!

June 3rd Bento

About a month ago, I tried to make a symmetric bento with little success. Today I pulled it off and I didn't even plan to!

Today's theme was Bunnies in Love
We have two bunny onigiri with a ground chicken/hoisin sauce filling and sesame seed eyes. The heart is made of rolled omelette (tamagoyaki) and steamed spinach. There are three pork shu mai (I had to cut one in half and stack it to make it fit) and some silly pasta pieces (tossed in balsamic vinegar and olive oil). The veggies are broccoli, edamame skewers, snow peas and asparagus. The fruit was mostly berries (blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries and can you spot the blackberries?) with a couple slices of kumquat.

For dessert, I tried something new and exciting - dessert sushi! Basically, I made it like regular sushi, but with a lot of substitutions. Instead of normal rice, I used coconut rice. I used lime juice and sugar instead of sushi vinegar and soy paper (mamenori) instead of nori. The filling is peach slices sprinkled with ginger.

I had a hard time getting it to stick together (mamenori is not very sticky to begin with and the coconut rice made it even harder to work with). BF had the brilliant idea to tie it closed with strips peeled from a stalk of rhubarb and it worked perfectly. I tied six strings around it, one to hold together each piece once it was cut.
It held up perfectly in the bento and was absolutely delicious. There were so many different flavours going on in each bite, I will definitely make this again!

May 27th Bento

Today I started with a diamond in the center and then filled in the corners. I think it turned out pretty nice and it was definitely yummy.

I tested out my rice cuber for the first time. The yellow rice is coloured with tumeric, the purple rice is flavored with shiso furikake and the white rice is plain with salt. I purchased the cuber from this ebay seller along with some other rice molds a few weeks ago.

In the top right corner there are a couple of gyoza. Bottom right is breaded pork cutlet pieces and asparagus bites. The other corners are foods that are in season here, fiddleheads and rhubarb.

To make the rhubarb, I took 1 chopped stalk of rhubarb, and 1 chopped strawberry, chopped and simmered them in a pot with about 2 Tbsp water until everything was soft and mushy. Then I added 2 Tbsp sugar, stirred until dissolved, removed from heat, and finally added about 1/2 tsp cornstarch dissolved in a little water to thicken it up. Rhubarb to me is just one of those tastes that brings me home, I love it.

There are also some sugar snaps, carrot flowers and broccoli floating around in there.

For fruit, there are a few slices of fresh pineapple, raspberries, blueberries, a little more strawberry, and a couple of slices of kumquat. The kumquat was so tart and tangy, it's a great way to cleanse your palate between bites. Dessert was a date square.