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 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 6th Bento

mmmm....sootball onigiri!

I guess sootballs are characters from the Japanese cartoon, My Neighbor Totoro, but I've never seen it myself. I just think they make cute onigiris! I molded the rice by hand (I didn't have a big circle mold) and wrapped with nori. The eyes are havarti and nori. I filled the onigiri with lotus seed bean paste, but BF said they would have been better with a big piece of fish inside so now I know for next time.

I made beef and asparagus rolls, using the same recipe as last time, but I used shorter pieces of beef this time (about 2") to make a tighter roll. They were a bit tricky to make this small. I generally hold them together with toothpicks as they cook, so that they keep their shape. There are three pieces of asparagus for filling. I let the florette part of the asparagus stick out of the end to make a couple of prettier bites (near the top of the bento).

There are three gyoza (I steamed them today instead of frying), and some sesame fried bok choy filler at the top. On the bottom there are a couple of pieces of broccoli and some sugar snaps. I fried some plantain stars and cut some flowers out of carrot. There was a little bit of space left, and I thought the bento could use more green, so I included some cucumber slices.

For fruit there is a freaky little thing called a mangostein (I usually try to pick up anything that I haven't tried at the grocery store). It's the white bit in the bottom right. It tasted like a mango but was gooeier (is that a word?). I don't think I would repurchase. Then of course there are strawberries and blueberries, and lastly, a bite of strawberry fudge.