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 19th Bento

I didn't intend for today's bento to turn out so cutesy...it just kind of happened!

I found some mini sweet potato pies in the freezer from a batch I made a few weeks ago, so I thought they would be nice in today's bento. I decorated this one with mozzarella and cheddar flowers.

The onigiris are from last week's frozen batch. The bunny is plain, the tiger was coloured with tumeric and rice vinegar, and the elephant was coloured with purple yam powder and rice vinegar. Accents are nori and ham. There's also a heart shaped onigiri made with coconut rice and a nori accent. It was nice to have so many different onigiris because it adds some different flavours to the bento.

Underneath the onigiris are slices of a stuffed pork loin. The onigiris are really short, so they need to sit on something to elevate them, and that allows me to fit even more types of food into the bento!

In the bottom left corner there is some steamed spinach with miso and ground sesame seeds. Other veggies include yellow and green zucchini, fiddleheads and broccoli space fillers (all steamed).

There wasn't much room left for fruit so we have some blueberries, strawberries and blackberries.

Yesterday I made cupcakes, and I ended up having some leftover batter, so I made a batch of mini cupcakes as well that turned out small enough for a bento box! It's a chocolate cupcake with red bean filling. The frosting is buttercream with some matcha green tea powder, and the cupcake is topped with a small ball of mochi. It was sooo decadent! I put the cupcake in a foil muffin cup in addition to the muffin cup it was baked in, so that none of the moisture from the fruit soaked into it.

May 12th Bento

BF is taking a couple of days off work, so you get to see my bento instead of his today and tomorrow!

I tried out my new nori punches and mini onigiri molds today.

On the bottom there are three onigiri. The elephant is coloured with purple yam powder mixed with vinegar, the pink heart is a coconut onigiri from the batch in the freezer and the bunny is plain with salt. None of them are filled. There are a few lamb bites in there (from a skewer from this weekend's barbecue), asparagus, broccoli and edamame.

On the top there are three gyoza (I made another batch this weekend, we go through it like crazy!), a boiled quail egg, more edamame and broccoli, star shaped coconut onigiri, persimmon bites, a fried plantain flower, strawberries and blueberries.

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.