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 24th Bento + Last Night's Cupcakes

Wow!! My blog has had 5000 hits!! That didn't take long at all!

I didn't have a plan this morning, but I think the bentos turned out pretty nice regardless and it was particularly tasty. I think I'm getting better at on-the-fly bento lunches.
I wasn't feeling like rice so I decided to boil up some soba noodles (they take two or three minutes). I already had dipping sauce for them in the fridge, so I just filled up a small container of sauce and tucked it in a silicone muffin cup, under the noodles. One of the tiny tomatoes is perched in the center of the noodles (it's smaller than a raspberry!). I really liked the way this sort of looked like a cupcake with a cherry on top (it's a little hard to tell from this angle, but the soba noodles were piled up, resembling frosting), so I put it in the top right of the bento where I usually put the dessert.

For protein there is a bacon wrapped chicken breast that BF baked up last night, cut into eight bite sized pieces, and the onigiri under it has ground chicken and hoisin sauce filling. There are a few cubes of cheddar cheese beneath the noodles as well.

For veggies, there are the standard asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and yellow zucchini slices as well as some steamed red swiss chard. This was the first time I tried red swiss chard, and it was yummy. Tastes a lot like beet greens.

For fruit there is half of a fig (I think these are so gorgeous!), raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and some locally grown strawberries (these were much more juicy and tasty than the ones we usually get, but they were more expensive). I also included two of these freaky little fruits called langsats. They look similar to lychees, but they divide naturally into wedges. I don't care a whole lot for the taste, but BF likes them. There is a truffle for dessert.

And here are some cupcakes I made last night by special request from BF. They were made from scratch (!!!) and were vanilla flavoured loaded with raspberries. The frosting was a plain buttercream and the letters and stars were made from fondant. I ran out of fondant decorations so I put candy coated chocolate sprinkles on a few of them.