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 4th Bento Lunch

Messy bento!
I tried a couple of new things today. The first was an attempt to duplicate the gorgeous onigiri that Lyvvie from Obento Baby made back in May. To make the onigiri I first soaked 2 Tbsp of forbidden rice (black rice) for about an hour in order to pull out some of the colour so that it didn't completely overpower the white rice. I put it in the rice cooker with enough white rice to make 1 cup and then formed the onigiri as usual, using bonito flakes and soy sauce as a filling and sprinkling with white sesame seeds. I do like the way they turned out, but the colours didn't turn out as bright as Lyvvies!

The second new thing I tried was the rolled omelette in the top left corner. Instead of doing a rolled omelette in layers, this time I made one thick layer and then laid a sheet of nori on top (I need to get a tamagoyaki pan!!!). I then rolled the omelette using a sushi mat and sliced it to get the spiral pieces in the bento. I'm really pleased with how this turned out. Next time I might try using a larger pan and a thinner omelette to see how that looks. For some reason I absolutely love rolled foods in bento lunches. I always get really excited when I find or think of a new roll I can make.

For protein there are some leftover pork bites from last night's supper, covered with a few parsley leaves. For veggies there are asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps, zuchinni slices and raw red pepper strips.

For fruit there are a couple of slices of yellow tomato, a few chunks of a fruit called a cactus pear (it actually comes from a cactus! The peel is spiny and can irritate your skin), a lychee and some berries. I included the last of the chocolate banana cupcakes for dessert.

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!)