August 26th Bento & Rice Cooker Chicken Curry Rice Recipe

My computer caught a trojan virus last week. The trojan was then kind enough to download a bunch of other viruses to the point that my computer was unusable for about a week. But, now here we are about twenty virus scans and two hard drive reformats later and I am back up and running! So all's well that ends well. Mostly anyway. I lost all of my iTunes purchased songs, so I emailed Apple to see if they can let me download them again. *crosses fingers*

In other news, I am in love. Now I know that's a pretty strong word to use in reference to a rice cooker, but I mean it for realsies, no exaggeration. I picked up this rice cooker from The Shopping Channel (since Amazon.com won't ship appliances to Canada), and it finally arrived on Sunday. I used it for the first time last night and it's amazingly better than my four year old $30 Wal-Mart rice cooker I had been using up to this point.

To break it in, I made chicken curry rice (recipe below) for last night's supper (and there was enough left over for today's bento lunch). I used the keep warm function for three hours last night and put the rice back in the cooker to reheat this morning and even after all that, it didn't burn a single grain of rice. My old rice cooker always had a layer of burnt rice at the bottom, and I always felt wasteful throwing it out. Problem solved!

It has all kinds of features, like different settings for all different kinds of rice (brown rice, sweet rice, sushi rice, etc.) and delayed start so that you can set it the night before and have fresh rice in the morning when you get up to make bento. I shopped around a lot before picking this one up, and it seems to me that this particular model (Sanyo ECJ-D55S) is the best value out there if you don't want to fork out the price of a Zojirushi.

Also, just to explain something I found confusing. It's advertised as a 5.5 cup rice cooker. I thought that meant it had a 5.5 cup capacity, but its actually much larger. The 5.5 cup measurement is how much uncooked rice you can put in it, not how much cooked rice it can hold.

I definitely recommend this rice cooker to anyone in the market for a higher end computerized rice cooker. It's fabulous! (I'm not affiliated, by the way)

Ok! On to today's bento! It was slim pickin's in the fridge today because I was away all weekend and didn't get a chance to get groceries (I played outside a ton this weekend. If you ever have a chance to do Tree-Go, do it!!!).
On the left is chicken curry rice with onions, dates and tomato and an apple heart on top (I love apple with curry). On the right there are four pork shumai that have been steamed and then pan fried, pressing down with a spatula after every flip. There's a little cup of Asian cucumber pickles (flavoured with shiso and sesame rather than dill) on the bottom, and a boiled quail egg at the top. For veggies there is some steamed cauliflower sitting on top of carrot slices, broccoli, sugar snaps and green zucchini. For fruit there are tomato wedges, blueberries and watermelon slices. I prefer personal sized watermelons for bento because the rind is much thinner.

Here is the recipe for the curry rice. Note that this recipe makes a lot (around 4 to 5 cups), so you may want to scale it back if you're just making it for bento.

Recipe: Chicken Curry Rice made in a rice cooker

Ingredients

2 cups short grain white rice

2.5 cups water

1 large chicken breast or two small chicken breasts, cut into very small pieces (uncooked)

2 cloves garlic

1/4 inch section of ginger, peeled and roughly chopped

1 shallot, peeled and roughly chopped

Red chili flakes to taste (two pinches is medium spicy)

1/2 cup plain yogurt

1 Tbsp curry powder

1 tsp salt

1 white onion, sliced

1 tomato, cut into wedges

1/4 cup dates, chopped

1 small can coconut milk (5.6oz/165ml)

2 Tbsp honey

Combine yogurt, honey, curry powder, shallot, garlic, ginger, chili flakes and salt in a blender and blend until smooth.

Place curry mixture along with all of the other ingredients into the rice cooker and stir well. Let the rice cooker do its thing (Use 'mixed rice' setting if available on your rice cooker). Stir before serving.

Easy!!

August 11th Bento Lunch

I've been watching a lot of Iron Chef on YouTube. Omg what a fun show! It's kind of renewed my zest for trying new Japanese recipes and cooking techniques so I've been incorporating a lot more Japanese food in my non-bento meals. I'm discovering all kinds of wonderful food combinations. Loving it! Since I'm not working at the moment, it's a lot more important to me to make sure that I'm preparing lots of healthy, well balanced meals so that BF and I are well fed. I figured it's the least I can do.

I took today's picture in natural light instead of with flash in the kitchen and I think it washed out the colours a bit. Everything didn't look so white in real life! Well at least I know for next time.
BF had some disappointing seafood udon at a restaurant yesterday, so I had planned to make some delicious yakiudon (fried noodles) for bento today to make up for it. To my dismay however, I realized this morning that I'm completely out of udon noodles. So I used somen noodles instead (yakisomen?). They're a smaller, flat noodle, so I fried them for a much shorter time and it still turned out pretty yummy.

To make them, I fried up some chunks of chicken breast in a little canola with salt and pepper while boiling the noodles for three minutes. Then I added another tablespoon or so of canola oil to the chicken (to keep the noodles from sticking together) and threw in chives, red pepper pieces and the somen noodles. Once it had fried for about a minute I added about 1 Tbsp each of sake and soy sauce (my favorite seasonings for fried noodles) and fried for about a minute more.

At the very top of the bento is some sauteed gobo (burdock root) and carrot julienne. For gobo, you want to first peel it and soak it in cold water for a bit, and then drain before you use it. I sauteed the gobo and carrot in a bit of sesame oil and then added some mirin and soy sauce. It turned out a bit too salty for my taste (the gobo really sucks up the flavor!) so next time I will use less soy sauce.

Keeping with the soy theme, I also made some soy quail eggs. To make them, I first hard boiled the eggs (three and a half minutes) and then put them in a ziplock bag along with a mixture of two parts soy sauce, one part rice vinegar and one part sugar for about an hour (BF is working the night shift this week so I don't have to have the bentos ready until late in the morning). I made four eggs, but I only used one in this bento lunch, sliced in half with a small dot of cream cheese on the yolk. They are sharp and salty and really yummy!

There are three home made gyoza as well from a batch I made last week.

I balanced all of these sharp flavours with lots of fresh fruit and lightly steamed veggies. The vegetables are broccoli, cauliflower and sugar snaps. The fruit are strawberries, blueberries, honey tangerine segments and yellow kiwi flowers. There is a chocolate seashell for dessert.

July 19th Bento Lunches

I've been pretty sick all week, so I haven't spent too much time in the kitchen. That's why I haven't been posting. Today I've completely lost my voice so I guess I'll be sick for a while yet :P

All I've really done this week was to make a couple of snack bentos, and I made a batch of chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter buttercream that disappeared faster than I could take a picture of them.

BF and my sister's bf scuba dive together mostly every week, and this week my sister and I went with them (to hang out and watch, not to dive). I wasn't going to make bentos because I still wasn't feeling well, but then at the last minute I changed my mind.

So I rushed together four bento lunches with zero prep work or planning. They're messy and the picture isn't great because everything was so rushed. I'm more posting it because I'm just impressed with myself that I pulled this off. Making four bento lunches is a tonne of work as it turns out.
They're mainly veggie because we also had a barbecue so we cooked meat on that, plus my sister is a vegetarian so her bento didn't have any meat at all (bottom right).

In each bento there are four bites of inside out chicken teriyaki sushi and four pieces of avocado maki made with soy wrapper instead of nori. BF gave me a lot of help making the sushi to save time. There are two pork shu mai 'burgers' (leek dumplings for my sister. Thank goodness for my well stocked freezer!). For added protein there is a quail egg and two bites of cheese in each.

For veggies there are sesame fried carrots, steamed miso spinach, boiled edamame and sweet potato flowers, steamed asparagus, broccoli and snow peas, and some homemade daikon pickles.

For fruit there are nectarine bites, cherries, blueberries and strawberries.

I thought it would be really challenging to fill so much space but I actually ended up with more food than I could fit in them. I only wish I had more time to pretty them up.

June 23rd Snack Bentos

My apologies for the lack of posts. I was on vacation last week and I didn't make a single bento. I truly meant to make bento lunches for BF all week but somehow I managed to sleep in every single day. And I ended up not having time to go for groceries over the weekend, so this morning when I got up to make bento I was pretty short on options and ingredients. Which is how we ended up with snack bentos instead of bento lunches.
I grabbed some onigiris from the fridge and put some faces on them. There are gyoza from a batch I made this weekend and a boiled quail egg for some added protein. For veggies there are edamame (frozen), sweet potato sakuras (I love sweet potatos, they last forever), the last two stalks of asparagus and some sugar snaps. I used a few black sesame seeds to decorate the sakuras and I think they turned out really cute. For fruit there are just two cherries in each and a few blueberries.
I used my Cinnamoroll snack bento box and BF used his blue polka dot snack bento box. From the picture it looks like mine is much larger, but they're actually about the same size, BF's is just deeper. I kind of enjoy the fact that they are different shapes because I like the mental exercise of figuring out two different layouts. It's a good little puzzle to help me wake up in the morning.

We managed to get out for groceries tonight, so it should be back to business as usual. My favorite thing that we picked up was the tiniest bunch of vine tomatoes that I have ever seen in my life. They are so small!! And so pretty still on the vine. I put a quarter next to them so you can get a feel for the size. In the back of the bunch there is the tiniest one of all, it's my favorite.

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 28th Snack Bento

Work provided lunch today, so I thought it was a great day to test out a new snack bento. The challenge was to see how many different foods I could fit into this tiny thing. It's only about 2.5 inches square! (the picture is bigger than the actual bento was)

I managed to fit in two pieces of pork shumai (homemade), one heart shaped onigiri filled with red bean paste, a quail egg, three bites of asparagus, three broccoli florets, two sugar snaps, two fiddleheads, three fried plantain stars, two tangerine wedges, two bites of fresh pineapple, a strawberry cut into small pieces, four blueberries and two raspberries.

I think I did pretty well! And it was a perfect, delicious and well balanced snack. Here it is with the lid on.

May 21st Bento

Every morning so far this week, I would get close to finishing the bentos, and then look at the clock only to find that I was twenty minutes behind schedule. I couldn't figure out why my bentos were taking so long.

Then this morning, I realized one of my alarms was turned off (I need two to wake up on time) and I actually was sleeping in every morning and not realizing it.

So, I really rushed through today's bento because I woke up so late. It was yummy but not pretty.
I had a sort of greek theme going today, with fried marinated lamb pieces, spanakopita (top left), a little tub of tabouli (premade), tomatoes and cucumbers, baklava for dessert.

But because I was up so late, I didn't really do the theme it justice. I just threw in a lot of random fruits and vegetables. There are fiddleheads (we bought a tonne of these, I'm not sure how I'm ever going to use them up), broccoli, sugar snaps, yellow zucchini and asparagus. If I had planned it better, I probably would have made falafel and some kind of rice dish.

There's a boiled quail egg, a couple of red bean filled onigiris, and then for fruit there are some tangerine slices, blackberries, gooseberries, strawberries and blueberries.

This was one of those mornings where I was really grateful to have a well stocked freezer. It took about five minutes to steam the veggies and fry the lamb, another two to cut the fruit and three and half minutes for the quail egg. The rest was already waiting for me in the freezer.

Where I'm trying to lose weight right now, skipping making bento is not an option. I can't get anything close to this healthy, fresh and filling in the restaurants near my work, so no matter how tired I am, I make sure that it gets done. And it's definitely worth it. Today I wore a pair of pants that I haven't fit into since last March, and they're great pants so I'm pretty stoked about 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.

Quail Eggs

Sorry about the lack of posts over the past couple of days. I didn't make bentos on Friday because BF had the day off work so we ended up going out for lunch together instead. He's off tomorrow too, so I haven't decided if I'm going to make bentos tomorrow or not.

I did however, want to post a picture of my most exciting bento find of the week:

Quail eggs!!!!!

They are so tiny and so cute! And you get 18 in a box! I found them at the Asian grocery store near my home. I had assumed they were imported, but upon closer inspection of the carton, they're actually farmed in Ontario. Here's the front of the box:

So now I need to figure out some different ways to prepare them and how long it takes to boil them because they're so tiny. As an example of how small they are, according to the nutritional information on the back, 5 eggs have 80 calories total. For normal eggs, 1 egg has 80 calories.

Other fun stuff I found: aburage (tofu puffs) for making inari sushi, daifuku (little cakes filled with red bean), little tiny snack packs of rice crackers, green tea flavoured Pocky.