July 10th Bento

This has been a pretty busy week so far. It was snack bentos mostly and they were nothing special, so I didn't bother posting them.

This morning I actually managed to get up and make a proper bento. Nothing new today, just all foods that I love!
I made two rolls of chicken teriyaki sushi (one for BF and one for me). I made a two egg and spinach omelette, which makes exactly enough to put to hearts in each bento. I fried up some gyoza and some plantain hearts together to save time. For veggies there is asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and sesame fried baby bok choy.

I used all kinds of different fruits today. There is half an apricot, cut into slices, two lychees, some satsuma wedges, cherries, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.

Simple but yummy, with lots of variety!

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!

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 2nd Bento

Last night, I ate the best steak of my life. BF cooked it on the barbecue and it was so juicy and perfect. And it was huge! Big enough to feed the two of us and still have more than enough left over for bento. I ended up making it into rice paper rolls.
To make the steak rolls, I cut the steak into strips, cut some lettuce strips, julienned some carrot and grated a little cheddar cheese and then followed the same method as in my turkey roll recipe. They were so delicious!

Below the steak rolls I managed to squeeze in a few pieces of asparagus. On the left there is broccoli, sugar snaps, some steamed miso spinach, yellow zucchini, red pepper strips, a red bean onigiri and a boiled quail egg.

On the right there is the last mini cupcake from the batch I made on the weekend, a whole lot of berries (they were really cheap this weekend so I bought a ton - strawberries, blueberries, cherries, raspberries and blackberries), a few bites of fresh pineapple and half of a sliced apricot.

One of the things I love most about bento is that if you want to have unhealthy food (like steak and cupcakes!), it's really easy to build a healthy lunch around that and still indulge yourself. The tiny, controlled portions mean that you can enjoy a few treats without the mindless eating and overindulgence that comes with large portion sizes.

May 16th Bento

This morning was one of those mornings where I wished my bento boxes were just a little bit bigger. I wanted to fit so much more in here than there was room for.

We got take out sushi last night because I was feeling lazy and we wanted a sushi late night snack. So there is some avocado maki, sweet potato tempura maki and a couple of unagi (eel) maki. Generally I'm nervous about putting fish sushi in a bento, but but the eel in unagi sushi is actually cooked, so it's not quite as scary.

The main protein in the bento is a chicken 'tournedo' (basically bacon wrapped chicken thigh) that BF cooked up last night. There are two homemade gyoza sitting on top of some asparagus pieces. For veggies there is some sesame fried bok choy, sauteed red pepper slices, steamed snow peas, carrot flowers and broccoli, all tucked into the various nooks and crannies.

For fruit there are blueberries and strawberries, the last of the cherries and half of an apricot. Dessert is a small piece of homemade whole wheat and walnut baklava (I made a batch last night to use up the rest of the phyllo from when I made spanakopita last week or whenever it was).

May 8th Bento

Last night I was all set to make exciting sushi. I bought a frozen eel filet and was going to make unagi sushi because it's BF's favorite. It was going to have the unagi wrapped on the outside (because I haven't tried to do that yet) and avocado on the inside and it was going to be really pretty.

I cooked the unagi according to the directions on the package and when it came out of the oven, I brought BF into the kitchen to try a bite (I don't like the taste of fish). According to him it was pretty bad. Unsalvageable even. So we had to toss it.

He assures me that it just tasted like a low grade of meat, and had nothing to do with my cooking skills (this was the first time I've ever tried to cook fish). He's so sweet.

Yeah, so we had plain old avocado sushi for bento today :)
As you can see, my lettuce wall building skills are improving a little. I tried using kale this time because it's firmer (although not as delicious as whatever lettuce I was using before).

There is some avocado sushi, some pork bites underneath that, three home made gyoza (there's a bottle of dipping sauce hiding under them), slices of lotus root cooked in vinegar and water (finally, I made a bento where you can see the pretty holes in it!), and asparagus. Fillers are the standard broccoli and sugar snaps.

For fruit there are a couple of cherry tomatoes, a hidden gooseberry, slices of apricot, strawberries and blueberries. Dessert is some kind of truffle (I bought a mixed box and now I can't remember what any of them are!)