BentoBabe

Mr. Bento for the Soup Win Again!!

2010-01-14T06:11:00.000-08:00

When you need soup for lunch, nobody does it better than Mr. Bento. The containers never leak, the outer tube is insulated, and miso soup that starts out blazing hot in the morning is still tasty-warm by noon.

I also had some lemongrass ramen with some of the new crop of bean sprouts I grew in my kitchen window, my little winter farm:

They are so snappy and good! They make a very nice addition to a sandwich, omelet, or tortilla wrap.

Everybody bento!

Green Curry and Thai Sprouted Rice

2010-01-11T06:20:00.000-08:00

Green curry is not beautiful. I tried to dress it up with spring onion 'flowers'. But to make up for its humble appearance, this curry is awesomely good. I made it using a small can of curry sauce concentrate that I bought at an Asian grocery in Madison. It requires mixing with a can of coconut milk. It has just the right amount of heat and a wide spectrum of curry flavor. Plus it made my house smell divine for 2 days.

Red Thai sprouted rice goes with it so well.

Jan also has some broccoli lightly steamed, a citrus salad with coconut, and a super-dark Belgian chocolate seashell from Trader Joe's. This will be a good bento for a winter's day.

Sprouted Rice is my New Obsession

2010-01-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

Red Thai Rice, sprouted 5 days

I have always loved growing my own sprouts, but never tried rice until this batch.

In the past my mung bean sprouts and alfalfa sprouts have been grown in old pickle jars, with happy success. This Christmas I bought myself an actual 'sprouting jar' with mesh draining lids of varying density for smaller or larger seeds.

Sprout growing takes me back to my hippie days in Gainesville Florida, where my first-ever health food restaurant meal was a grilled cheese sandwich with alfalfa sprouts and a mango smoothie. Aahhh that was an experience. Because it was in the early days of health food, this sandwich also had fake bacon bits, probably made from petroleum products. But it was awesome. "Far out" even.

I have been reading about sprouted rice and other grains, and at www.sproutpeople.com there is a ton of information and encouragement for home sprouting.

This red Thai rice has a sweet nutty flavor and cooked up beautifully with the little sprouts still attached, in my fuzzy logic rice cooker. It is going to be dinner tonight with green curry and coconut orange salad.

Here's my sprouting jar from the SproutPeople:

It's flat-sided, so it rests nicely in your kitchen window on its side to give the sprouts a large area to air themselves; and it's nice and large so that you can grow a big week's worth batch for bento delights!

I am now soaking mixed beans and grains, also purchased from the SproutPeople and guaranteed to send my health quotient skyrocketing into the New Year!!

Live food, just as Nature intended it....maybe. I don't know about the nutritional magic but fresh sprouts are certainly tasty.

Roasted Yams for the BOMB Challenge!

2010-01-06T04:13:00.001-08:00

"BOMB" equals "Best of the Month Bento" and it's a challenge offered by HapaBento. To enter, you just have to roast something for a bento, and send a link of a photo (or just email a photo) to HapaBento. The winner is selected at random so I have a chance of winning *--*

Today I roasted yam slices and carrots for Jan's and my bentos. To roast yams, which are awesomely sweet when prepared this way:

--Preheat oven to 425 or quite a hot oven
--Scrub and slice yams
--Place slices in bowl and sprinkle with olive oil and salt; stir to lightly coat.
--Spread in one layer on cookie sheet
--Roast for 10-15 minutes or until soft to a fork piercing.

The carrots were done the same way. Orange and yellow vegetables have some awesome nutritional value that I can never remember, but it's important.

To complete the lunch Jan has a sandwich made with Boca-burger (vegetarian) and egg and cheese on a thin low-carb bun, some broccoli, a pickled mild jalapeno, and a chocolate.

Slightly Mexican Bento for a Frigid Tuesday

2010-01-05T05:41:00.000-08:00

We so cold! Minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit this morning. My dogs hate going outside in this and I can't blame them.

Jan's bento has a whole wheat tortilla wrapped around egg, jalapenos, and cheese, lettuce and broccoli, pinto beans mashed into frijoles, sour cream, salsa, and some pretzel pieces. In the carry bag is a clementine and a fortune cookie.

Demonic Survivor of Apple Massacre

2010-01-04T04:58:00.001-08:00

It was a terrible scene. Pieces of murdered apple lay everywhere, and this ghastly icon was the only thing left standing. It just shows that sometimes having an evil expression on your face really does help you survive.

To all of you who can carve apples into lovely bunnies, or checkerboards, or suspension bridges, or harpsichords, my hat is off.

To be more precise, I resent you a lot. In fact when I think of you, I get an expression on my face that is a lot like the demonic apple wedge above. How the h#!! do you do it?

Jan's new panda bento for back-to-work today has ginger pork, sticky rice, spicy green beans, a demonic apple wedge, carrot lime slaw, a clementine, and a ginger caramel.

May the Eye of Mordor not fall upon your lunch today.

Happy Holidays Bento Pals!

2009-12-30T14:11:00.001-08:00

Not much bento activity these holidays; we had 2 feet of snow and spent a lot of time doing this:

(that's me with the snowblower at the end of my driveway)...

...and this:

Santa did bring me a nice new bento box though, so I look forward to many happy-lucky lunches in the New Year!!

Happy New Year to everyone and here's wishing you health, love, happiness, and bento in 2010!! Itedakimasu!!

Super-packed Bento

2009-12-22T08:41:00.000-08:00

Upper level: jasmine rice and umeboshi, broccoli with rice vinegar and mirin, sesame tofu.

Lower level: Kiwi, cherry tomatoes, clementine, baby carrots.

I stir-fried the broccoli in a tiny bit of sesame oil; then for the last 3 minutes of
cooking I poured about 2 teaspoons of rice vinegar and 1 tsp of mirin over the broccoli and just simmered that. It was so good!

I've been wrapping bento box Christmas gifts (share the obsession!) along with copies of Susan Yuen's lovely Hawaii's Bento Box Cookbook for all my friends who have expressed even the tiniest interest in bento. I hope that in 2010 more of us will be sharing the love of bento!

Darling Clementines!

2009-12-21T04:09:00.000-08:00

Is there anything better on this earth? These sweet and tasty naturally bento-sized fruit are packed with nutrients and enzymes for health.

Something about winter and snow makes me yearn for citrus. When I was 4 years old, I used to ride my tricycle to my grandfather's house every morning. I think I was a little pest. But Grampie always welcomed me with a smile and he always made us each a glass of fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice. I can still see his old man's gnarly hands and the green ceramic juice thingy. And his sweet smile.

Food, love, memory.

Love the Salad Rolls!

2009-12-16T04:04:00.000-08:00

Jan's bento today has: fresh veggie-tofu salad rolls, carrots and broccoli, a few rounds of roasted golden yam with cheese stars in between them, spinach and lettuce lining the bento box, and skewers of fresh shrimp. Kitty holds spicy peanut sauce, and another little container of wasabi mayonnaise is included for the shrimp. In top of the furoshiki I added a clementine and a mini-Snickers bar.

When I first was learning to cook, I followed recipes slavishly. I was even one of those fools who would go out and buy the specific brand of baking soda recommended by the baking soda company who were presenting the recipe, in a magazine say. I was so literal!

Now I finally have the courage to change things around and sometimes it doesn't work, but it is much more fun. These salad rolls are a little wacky:

I used soba noodles instead of rice noodles, because soba is better for Jan's diabetes. I had no mung bean sprouts so that (actually my favorite ingredient!) is absent. I used a food processor to shred the veggies, which resulted in too finely chopped cabbage tending to fall out of the roll unless you exercise extreme care. I added radishes for color and spice. And I cut little tofu planks to lay along inside each roll. But they taste wonderful!! I tested them thoroughly last night. *-*

Breakfast Bento and a Pomegranate Tip

2009-12-13T07:24:00.001-08:00

Friday I had to get to work extremely early so I brought a breakfast bento.

In the top container, yogurt, blueberries, and some nuts.
In the bottom container, a toasted mini-bagel with peanut butter, a clementine, and some pomegranate seeds.

Now here's a neat way to get your pomegranate seeds out & separated without producing a bloody mess on your counter.

Slice just barely through the pomegranate skin from the outside, in quarters, like this:

Then peel the skin down gently along the slices, to reveal the seeds in all their glorious little compartments:

The seeds can then easily be removed and you don't smash them, as you would when cutting the whole fruit in sections first.

Usually when I make a great discovery like this, it turns out that everybody knew it already...so forgive me if this tip is already general knowledge!

My New Favorite Bento Seller on EBay

2009-12-10T08:28:00.000-08:00

Oh my...I have been browsing unnecessary bento boxes on EBay and I found a new favorite seller: priesjapan. They are located in Japan but have pretty reasonable shipping, and a 'new buyer' offer of two shippings for the price of one.

I feel a bit guilty in telling you about their bento boxes because...they are so cute!!
And their descriptions in killer-cute Engrish are even better. I just bought the one above. Here is part of the information from their ad:

And there's more, about size of bento boxes:

"Most failure at the purchase of a lunch box is size differences.
Even if size is describing numerically, you should not have feelings.
If this is seen, you can realize a size, as it had a lunch box in the hand.
Your failure is defended!"

I feel much better.

"A Lunch Box is a casket of lunch.
All the menus are settled in one.
A full-course lunch starts at the moment of opening a Lunch Box.
Let's enjoy Japanese Lunch Box Menu using this Lunch Box!"

OK!! I'm in. Even if you aren't shopping for bento boxes, go look at their collection. They are the real thing!

I admit I also bought this one, even though it was a bit $$$:

I could not resist the inscription" The sheep is saying, "WHY AM I FEELING SO COLD?" Haha; too perfect for this frigid winter day.

Soba Bento

2009-12-10T04:51:00.000-08:00

O how I love soba noodles!

Did you know soba are lower in carbohydrates than most other types of noodle? Important for diabetics and dieters. These lovely buckwheat noodles stand up to a sauce, keep their texture, and are very satisfying in a bento lunch. They always get a high score on the NHAB Scale: Not Hungry Again Bento.

So today, in the midst of a cold snap (it's 1 degree F. outside as I write!), my bento has:

Spinach sauteed briefly in olive oil, sesame soba, carrots and 'egg rolls' (flat omelet rolled and sliced); then in the other tier, sugar snap peas, clementine, and blueberries.

Stay warm everyone!

"How Have You Been?"

2009-12-07T03:39:00.000-08:00

I love it when my lunch talks to me.

Especially in a helfpul, slightly enabling manner.

This little bento is willing to bring me anything, anything! I could ask it for rubies, or a horse property in Kentucky. A new saddle! Or maybe this bento box has magic powers and could make it not be Monday.

As it is, it is bringing me 3 fat umeboshi and black sesame onigiri, soy sauce in the bunny, ginger pork meatballs, and veggies, with a nice pear tied up in the furoshiki.

What more could I want really?!

NQBR: "Densha Otoku: Train Man" You must seee!!

2009-12-02T13:15:00.000-08:00

Continuing my digression about movies, you have got to see "Densha Otoku: Train Man" right now!!!

Don't delay. Just rent it, buy it, find it on NetFlix, whatever you have to do. Watch this movie as soon as possible.

You will love it I guarantee and I stand behind my guarantee 100%.

"Train Man" is a geeky young Japanese man who has never had a girlfriend in his 22 years of life. A random encounter with a belligerent drunk on a train causes him to come to the aid of a pretty lady, and the movie unfolds from this situation.

But this does not begin to describe the cuteness of this movie. Train Man is a member of some online community, and the film flips back and forth from his online advisors, many of them as geeky and inexperienced as he is, to his actual situation: seeking advice about what to do with a prospective date.

Train Man changes his appearance on their advice: haircut, new clothes, shaving, etc.

A trio of hysterically funny online friends who happen to be the geekiest men in the universe completely captivate you and make you want to date all of them. "NAAAHH!!! She is inviting him to her house!!!! It's the ultimate defeat for all of us!!"

Absurdly comic scenes involving them are the most crazy/cute moments of the film.

As here they are depicted involved in a fantasy trench warfare situation. They may be gaming or they may just be thinking about their crazy online lives without dates.

The female lead looks a bit older than the male lead and I found this refreshing. Nothing in the film addresses it. She just is who she is: a youngish woman still living with her parents, no boyfriend until Train Man comes along.

The film has so much cute detail and so much visual beauty that you will certainly enjoy it. And without giving too much away I hope I can say: it looks like happily ever after is what's promised at the end.

Anime Fun!! "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds"

2009-11-24T05:26:00.000-08:00

It doesn't usually take me 20 years to see a movie but with this one, it did.

OK I am little behind the cultural trends. "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds" was released by Studio Ghibli in 1984, based on a manga series that ran from 1982-1990. I got it from NetFlix with special features including a history of Studio Ghibli that was...not terribly exciting, except that it showed how many cigarettes Japanese men can smoke in a day - the overflowing ashtrays, the guys talking with cigarettes dangling from their lower lip, it was apparently a very smoky era for the anime movie.

Nausicaa is a great role model for girls, except for the fact that she appears to have given up wearing underwear.

She talks to trees and animals, she is utterly fearless, she collects botanical samples, she hates violence, she flies a glider with the skill of Luke Skywalker, and she saves the world.

The creature with the multiple eyes up above is called an Om, and when angered its eyes glow blood-red. The Oms on the march in this movie are visually stunning, as indeed is everything else about it. It is old-style drawn animation and has a peaceful beauty about it that digital animation lacks.

Set in a post-nuclear world like so many other films, this one shows a fragile culture kept non-toxic by the gracious winds which sweep in from the sea, and by a forest of trees who are hard at work cleansing the earth of toxins. The forest is misunderstood and feared by everyone except Nausicaa, who finally discovers its secret and thereby the key to saving human civilization.

There's a sad quality to the film: Nausicaa is battling against the inherent violence and aggression of humanity, and she almost loses the fight. We get a sense that another time, it might have gone differently, and we would all drown in a toxic sea of hatred and environmental poisons of our own creation.

Very pretty movie though and the award-winning sound track of ghostly themes and haunting songs is lovely too.

Studio Ghibli (pronounced zhee-blee, as they carefully explain, because "Gibbly sounds like a noise your stomach makes!") also produced many other blockbuster anime films in the 1990's including "My Neighbor Totoro", "Princess Mononoke", and more.

Years ago my younger son went through an anime phase and "Princess Mononoke" came and went through our lives but I paid no attention. What was I thinking? I missed a great chance to connect over Japanese films and lady heroes.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! May you have many anime days.

Hello Kitty Hello Sandwich!

2009-11-21T06:29:00.000-08:00

It seems that packing a bento in a single-section container has its own challenges, more difficult than the two level containers with dividers. I'm slowly figuring out that if you really pack i.e. place everything right up against something else, the food arrives at noon in better condition - not shaken up and falling apart.

Here I made Jan a sandwich out of kalamata olive flat omelet, lunch meat, and cheese; then I stuffed a fresh sweet pepper with green olives and stashed that in the lower level. Granny Smith apple with peanut butter in the center, a pack of mystery snacks from the Asian grocery, sugar snap peas, mustard Kitty, and a small white chocolate pudding topped with chocolate chips. I put wooden picks through the sandwich layers to hold them together in transit.

My goal was to have the pudding arrive upright and sandwich still holding together and: Mission Accomplished.

Here's a photo of the types of picks I use. Jan is particularly amused by the somewhat phallic koala bear. The long slender ones are great for sandwich integrity.

These are all either from EBay sellers or J-List and are quite inexpensive.

Bento Invades Dinner!!

2009-11-20T03:25:00.001-08:00

Help! Bento is taking over my life.

Here you see yesterday's dinner, which I decided to put in the sectional flat bento boxes I haven't otherwise used much. I got home from work early and started making small amounts of: steamed broccoli splashed with mirin, winter Delicata squash with a bit of rice vinegar, sticky rice cylinders, shrimp quick-fried in hot chili oil, shoyu tamago, and (packaged, microwaved) yakisoba.

It was really a fun supper. Unfortunately we watched the news while eating it, which I hate doing because nothing ruins a good meal faster than world news.

Here's Jan's lunch from 2 days ago:

The top container has folded flat omelet, sugar snap peas, and cold sesame soba noodles; the lower container has a mini-pepper stuffed with feta cheese, cherry tomatoes, grapes, and a tiny white chocolate pudding with a gummy octopus attacking it. Apparently the octopus was outmatched, because some ingredient in the (sugar-free fat-free) pudding began dissolving the poor guy before lunch time arrived.

BLT Bento

2009-11-17T14:52:00.000-08:00

This year my friend Laura and I attended the Harvest Festival in our town. We wandered around the food booth until we came to a beautiful family: mother with blond braid down to her waist, holding a beautiful blond apple-cheeked baby; 3 other blond children all radiantly eating dried apricots, and quiet blond dad. These were the owners of a local dairy that was selling cheeses and hog shares.

Laura and I are both increasingly worried about our contaminated food supply, so we circled back to the family again and read their hog share pamphlet. Finally we broke down and reserved a hog share (40 pounds of assorted chops, steaks, bacon, roast, ham, etc.) each.

The pamphlet described blissfully happy hogs, who wander in sunny pastures all day long and dine on whey "The Perfect Food for Hogs" left over from the cheese-making process. It was a little strange to think of our hog, so happy in the autumn sun, blissfully not knowing about his upcoming trip to the butcher in St. Cloud and eventual fate in our freezers. I named our hog "Socrates", after John Stuart Mill's claim that:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

Philosophers debate whether the pleasures of a pig are equal in value to the pleasures of a human, and Mill says no. Our hog Socrates might have disagreed.

Anyway even though it sounds weird, this little hog-share venture has so far paid off in the best-tasting bacon in the universe. So I made BLT's for our bentos on Monday.

I do have mixed feelings about meat eating. I've spent several years being a vegetarian off and on throughout my life. Currently I think there's a place in the moral universe for humanely raised meat animals. A short life on a farm eating whey among pretty children in sunny pastures might be life enough. I don't know...

Bento with Carrot-Tangerine Salad

2009-11-15T19:37:00.000-08:00

This bento for my husband was a little high in carbs on the right-hand side: sticky rice, curried black beans and lentils, octo-dogs, pickled sweet peppers, jello-jigler in cup and gummy octopus...so I wanted something for the left side that would be light and veggie-nourishing.

I invented this super good salad:

Carrot-Tangerine-Coconut Coleslaw with Blood-Orange Infused Olive Oil Dressing

The name is almost longer than the recipe!!

Grate two raw carrots. Peel, seed, and chop one medium tangerine. Toss together with a generous sprinkling of grated coconut. Drizzle with the olive oil and if you don't have the blood-orange infused kind, which I stumbled upon in Madison, just use plain olive oil and a squeeze of orange or lime juice. Toss together and refrigerate for a bit. Pack into bento and go!

This was so good; the coconut balanced the sharpness of the blood orange flavor and the tangerine, and altogether it was a very awakening lunch side dish.

Bento of my SuperEasy Noodle Sauce

2009-11-10T17:08:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a lot of noodle recipes and cookbooks lately, and it seems there is a very easy, common, basic noodle sauce that everyone can make in about 30 seconds which tastes glorious. It is the common denominator at the bottom of many fancier more elaborate noodle sauces.

Here's how it goes:

SOBA WITH SUPER-EASY NOODLE SAUCE

Cook up your soba according to package directions, as much as you like. (Or use some other noodle of preference.) Soba often come bundled in individual servings wrapped in a paper band.

When soba is cooked, pour it into a colander to drain. Do not rinse the saucepan you cooked it in!

Instead, while it's warm and your stove burner is still hot, put the pot back on the burner and pour in (assuming one serving of noodles):

1/8 cup soy sauce
1/8 cup rice vinegar
1/8 cup mirin
1 Tablespoon sesame oil

Let this warm and stir it a bit to blend. Then return the noodles to the same pan still with no extra heat under it, and toss the noodles in the blended sauce ingredients. Voila! It tastes divine. And how easy does it get??!

You can then add: chopped green onion, fresh snow peas, cooked shrimp, water chestnuts, bean sprouts, cooked chicken, cooked omelet sliced, radishes, spinach, anything!!!

In today's bento I had the basic soba with sauce plus I threw in some frozen peas for the last few cooking seconds, added some green onion and sliced 1-egg omelet, and loved it!

Plus there was spinach salad with blood-orange infused olive oil and pomegranate seeds. Yummy lunch with a 6.5 on the NHAB "Not Hungry Again Bento" Scale.

Strawberry Chocolates from Germany

2009-11-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

This bento for Jan included sticky rice, curry, beets, shoyu tamago somewhat beaten up in the peeling process, carrots, tomato, dill pickle slices, and (Ta-Da!!) strawberry chocolates from Germany.

These were an impulse purchase at the checkout line in the ritzier grocery store in my neighborhood, a store I try to avoid because:

(a) it is frequented by senior citizens who drive around randomly in the parking lot with murder on their minds;

(b) It is pricey;

(c) I am worried about it because the owners invested so heavily in becoming 'upscale' on their last remodel that I smell fear on the managers who walk around smiling and greeting customers.

BUT they do have some good stuff and I highly recommend these Casali Schoko-Erdbeeren which are "extra-fruchtig mit Erdbeerstuckchen: "Extra-fruity with little pieces of strawberry". Claim confirmed! They have real lumps of strawberry inside.

German candy especially chocolate is so good. In fact (random story alert!):

I hosted a German exchange student, high school level, once for a month. On his first night in my house this young man emerged from his room bearing a big bag of mixed candies: chocolates, gummies, mints, etc. He handed it to me proudly saying,

"My mother sends this to you - she says candy in the U.S. is terrible!"

This was my first little inkling that our guest was going to be very honest.

His honesty continued throughout the visit.

"This soup is very bad! I'll have my mother send you some recipes." His way of saying these things was so frank and so innocent that it was impossible to get mad.

"You aren't such the housekeeper, are you?"

"Didn't you sleep well? You look all...beaten up."

I was making a little video about my horse, and he was allowed to use my computer and viewed it.

"Your movie is so emotion, it makes me want to vomit!" That was just about over the line, but even that didn't cause me to explode at him. That required this comment:

"Your son is very...irritable."

The bento of enormous dessert

2009-11-06T03:50:00.001-08:00

Part of it is my creative photo angling, but part is due to the sheer size of my chocolate pudding here. I was thrilled to see it made it to lunch without becoming indissolubly bonded to the paper cupcake cup I put it in. This is diet pudding - no fat, only the milk calories you make it with, and it tastes amazingly good. 15 minutes later, I want to eat more pudding, but that could just be me.

This lunch also had a cheese omelette burrito in a whole wheat tortilla wrap, apple slices, and carrot coins. It was good! I realize I have an interior score contest going, for the bentos that get me to dinner without getting hungry. This was one.

So on an NHAB (Not Hungry Again Bento) scale of 1-10 ranging from "I felt like I had not eaten yet" to "I wasn't even hungry at 6 p.m.", this one gets a NHAB SCORE of: 7.

My Dogs' Fortune!!

2009-11-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

When we get Chinese take-out, the dogs get the fortune cookies. I always read them their fortune and this one was highly appropriate.

They do like to chew power cords.

Curry - It is So Good!

2009-10-30T17:31:00.001-07:00

Today my bento had pinto bean and tart apple curry, sticky rice with almonds, and cilantro and Savoy cabbage coleslaw with several fat delectable umeboshi on top.

It was completely yum and so satisfying that even though I ate it at 11:30 a.m., I was still not hungry by 6 when I got home from work.

Curry curry curry; it makes the house smell divine, it satisfies all the senses, it brings me home to my soul. And apparently it is very good for you as well, since curry powder has been shown to be beneficial for the processing of trace minerals and iron in the body. So everybody eat curry like crazy!

Here's my own personally-invented recipe for the bean and apple curry above:

Pinto Bean and Tart Apple Curry

1 cup of dry pinto beans or other beans you like
2 medium tart apples such as Granny Smith or other; chop in 1" pieces and core but do not peel
one small onion
one or two small sweet peppers, sliced into nice bento size chunks
curry powder, fresh as you can get it
3 tablespoons canola oil

Rinse dry beans, checking them carefully for pebbles (I found 4 rocks in one cup from my co-op! I am shocked!!)

Soak them for an hour or a day or overnight, whatever; this step is very forgiving.

Bring beans to boil in 3 cups of water; boil for about 40 minutes or until almost done (not too done or they'll be mushy).

Drain beans and put aside.

In a big saucepan or skillet, heat the canola oil and fry up the onion until it appears pearly (about 2 minutes); add the sweet pepper, apple pieces, curry powder, and as much water as you like for a saucy but not watery consistency. Cook for about 3 minutes over medium heat; don't toast the curry powder too hot or it gets bitter.

Finally mix in the cooked beans and simmer for just awhile; turn off the heat and let the flavors chat for awhile. Eat and enjoy!!! Super cheap supper and boy is it good.

Fishy Fishy but Egg Salad!

2009-10-29T14:13:00.001-07:00

This little double-decker koi bento is one of my favorites but quite challenging to pack, for some reason.

In this one for Jan, I put egg salad - one of my ultimate comfort foods; when I am on my deathbed, bring me some egg salad with capers and Kewpie mayo and I will die quietly I promise! -- and a few slices of Cure 81 ham, plus sugar snap peas and Persian cucumber pickles I made hastily and they're so good.

Just as some bento boxes seem to take in way more food than you'd expect, some others take in less, and that's my feeling about little koi. It's killer cute, but you need to be strategic. Employ strategery. That kind of thing.

Salad Rolls!

2009-10-27T05:34:00.001-07:00

I just love Thai salad rolls with lots of yummy cilantro and whatever fresh veggie ingredients are on hand. I am slooooowly getting better at working with the papery wraps they require: not burning my fingers in the water so much, for example and not breaking them in the rolling process.

My goal is to get to the point where I can just whip up 4-5 rolls for a dinner without making a big nervous production of it. The wraps store well in the frig and even come in a container meant to reclose...

So our lunches yesterday were these. Jan's at the top had the rolls, then in the bottom container spicy shrimp and sweet pepper fry-up, with part of my massive tomato harvest on top. The tomatoes are those little spheroid objects in pale red and green. Ha ha Mother Nature, you are a comedian. These tomatoes grew on the back deck to a certain point and then froze in time, neither reddening nor becoming larger. "That's it for us!", they cried in little squeaky tomato voices.

My bento:

has also some of these jokers, all of them green. We both have no-bake oatmeal fudge cookies as our treat, made from my mom's handwritten recipe which I will keep forever.

Friday!!!! Bento

2009-10-23T03:59:00.000-07:00

Sticky rice, sesame tofu with green onion, Persian cucumber and tomato with ume vinegar and a few olives.

And Public Service Announcement: If you have black sesame seeds in your furikake for lunch, check your teeth before going to your next meeting!! Don't ask me why I am thinking about this today.

Rain Sleet Snowblobs and Bento

2009-10-22T05:35:00.000-07:00

Winter is upon us here in northern Minnesota. Yesterday it snowed large wet blobs of icy stuff that was most unpleasant to feel upon the face and hands. My dogs were horrified to walk out on the deck and feel it slippery with ice.

My bento for today has nice fresh sticky rice and three beautiful umeboshi from my Madison Asian grocery haul; Persian cucumbers from Trader Joe's in Madison also, a rather flat omelet, yogurt, ginger jam and sunflower seeds for topping the yogurt, and a Snickers mini.

Here's the little peanut gallery that watches me prepare bentos every morning; they are hoping I will drop down some rice or crumbs:

My Trip to Madison Wisconsin

2009-10-19T15:26:00.000-07:00

With my trusty doggy companions, I visited my second Number 1 Son in Madison this past weekend, and had some fun bento-related times.

First of all, I was able to salvage his damaged rice cooker. This lovely Zojirushi rice cooker with 'smart' brains had been left with some rice inside until it rotted and became too terrifying to deal with. So son and friend moved it from their previous abode, onto the back deck of their present abode, but did not deal with it any further. It was there last June, and there it remained this October.

I got it cleaned up and ran a load of rice through. There were strange pincher-backed bugs inside it who rushed out when it began to heat. But the rice was cooked to perfection. All Hail Zojirushi, who make a rice cooker that can withstand several months in the sun and rain with rotting rice inside and an interior bug colony, and still cook up perfect rice!!!!!

OK, that was gross.

We did have some more positive food-related times. But first here's aphoto of my son the geneticist:

Oh my am I proud of this dude. Yes he trashed his rice cooker, but he is working on a genetic cure for eye diseases which might have a spin-off for Alzheimer's. He manipulates DNA all day long. He is awesome.

So back to our food in Madison: we had great sushi

at a place where the waitress was so cold she was like an angry relative. But the sushi was divine and the green tea was like dynamite to the brain.

And the next night we went to the Flat Top Grill where you select your ingredients and then they are grilled for you on a giant grill surface:

This was most educational because it showed how easy it is to make awesome Asian grilled dinners. We chose rice or noodles, veggie ingredients, sauces, and meat or tofu, then at the end you could put a pick into your bowl to indicate what extras you wanted: egg, flat bread, shrimp skewer, etc.

It was all then thrown into the grill and brought to your table when done. I had noodles and veggies and a coconut curry sauce with hotness; it was divine.

My dogs indicate their support of the Wisconsin Badgers here but alas! the Badgers lost their homecoming game this same weekend -- an event we noted mainly as it caused ghastly traffic problems as we went about our business.

Noodle Mania

2009-10-14T19:13:00.000-07:00

I loooove noodles. So imagine my joy when Amazon sent me a message that this book had been published. How nice that Amazon.com has such psychic powers. I try to resist these little ad placements but....in this case it was kismet. I literally could eat noodles every day at least once.

The author, Corinne Trang, has eaten noodles in all parts of the world and has the equivalent of a Ph.D. in Noodleology; she grew up with several different kinds of Asian grannies and aunties making their own noodles and fighting over the best combos of toppings and broths.

Trang sets our minds at ease by saying that any noodle can be used in any dish. There are better and worse choices but no catastrophes with this divine ingredient. The book has great recipes like this one:

Somen noodles with spicy shrimp curry and peas!! I need to make this asap; what a great winter lunch or supper. There are tons more great looking recipes for all the types of noodles, and explanations of the way these types came to be.

It also has great general cooking tips including a section on what you need to have in your kitchen (both foods and tools) in order to make great Asian recipes of all kinds. She is very economical and practical, and I plan to buy a copy of this book for both my sons when they get a bit more settled in their adult lives.

Today's bentos reflected the noodle influence:

Soba with the basic noodle sauce consisting of a splash of mirin, a splash of rice vinegar, a splash of soy sauce, and a few drops of sesame oil to make it all stick. Into the soba went some previously barbecued pork, and some sweet red pepper rings. Shoyu tamago (soy-soaked hard boiled egg) with black sesame and fluffy salt furikake.

There is also another attempt at carrot kinpira, not a rousing success (tasted like salty carrot slaw). Need to look around for a better recipe. And some tomatoes from the frantic harvest prior to frost.

So noodles for everyday and everyone! is my new motto. Noodle up!

Smash that Bento!

2009-10-14T04:06:00.000-07:00

1. I'm continually amazed at how much food can fit in a regular-size bento box. After the burrito went into one there was a little empty corner, so I started putting sliced carrots in that spot and the entire good-sized carrot disappeared into that little space!

2. Nevertheless the burrito was a little too fat for the parallel placement you see here and there was no other way so it was Smash Your Food time. This actually worked out OK because it gave the burrito halves a nice solid consistency by lunch.

This is Jan's bento with an egg and cheese burrito, carrots and olives, Fritos chips and a sidecar of yummy salsa he made on Sunday night.

Mr. Bento for the Soup Win!!

2009-10-13T04:19:00.001-07:00

It was a Christmas gift of Mr. Bento's food tube lunch system that got me into bentos last year, and to Mr. Bento I return when it is a question of a good-sized lunch including something liquidy like soup or chili. This capacious set of containers designed for the hungry salary man is just the best way to bring your soup to work, I think. The one container with the soup in it does not leak, can be easily microwaved, and is cute in a somber sort of way...

Above is Jan's Mr. Bento lunch with vegetarian chili, cheese stars, a carrot-cabbage slaw with mandarin oranges that was so good I could not believe I made it (recipe below), octo-dogs with one leftover take-out dumpling and plum sauce over all, and the cracker and candy container.

My lunch:

...had the dubious last of some leftover chicken wild rice soup, the leftover cheese from Jan's stars, the carrot-cabbage slaw, and a giant fruit salad which made me extremely happy at around 4:00 at work. I love fruit salad!!! And I put some sweet shredded coconut in this one so it was almost a dessert. My Mr.Bento only has 3 inner containers and one is sizeable; I am still working on dividing this container as I have seen in photos: sometimes there is a stew or curry under a sealing layer of rice. Either way, Mr. Bento means a substantial lunch and sometimes that is what you need.

Yesterday I worked out on the elliptical watching (junky TV plus) a light snowfall out the huge plate glass windows, over the football field, where a lone young man in t-shirt and shorts practiced stunts on a short bicycle. Mosshing up several seasons into one is a Minnesota custom.

Carrot-Cabbage Mandarin Slaw

1/4 head of cabbage grated or chopped
2 big sweet carrots grated
15-oz. can of mandarin oranges drained, or one large fresh Mandarin peeled and chopped in chunks

Dressing: 1/8 cup rice vinegar, 1 teaspoon fine sugar, 1 tablespoon olive oil, salt and pepper to taste

Combine the salad ingredients; shake up the dressing ingredients until the sugar is dissolved. Pour over and allow to rest in the fridge for at least one hour.

If you bring this salad to work it will meld all morning and produce the most lovely sunny-tasting flavor by lunch time!!! Low in fat and high in good nutrition including anti-oxidants!! Yum yum...

Zucchini Lasagna Bento for Thursday

2009-10-08T08:17:00.000-07:00

Had some big submarine-size zucchini this week and found this recipe. It turned out really well!!

There was a lot of liquid "tomato soup' around the edges of the dish when it was done, and this scared me; but the instructions say to let it set up for 20 minutes after it comes out of the oven. During this time the liquid completely disappeared leaving nummy cake-like lasagna with just the right amounts of ricotta and parmesan and sauce. Definitely a keeper recipe! And: very low in carbs.

Jan also has in this bento a steak and tomato salad, so there's tomato in everything, a bento no-no. But here it is the season of bringing in tomatoes to save them from the frost, so one of Jan's co-workers brought in a huge box of heirloom tomatoes grown by his mom. I want to know where she lives because my own tomato harvest consists of 3 cherry-sized orbs that are jade-green and hard as granite. It's been a cool summer...

Bentos a Little Bit Picnic

2009-10-07T03:54:00.000-07:00

With fall drawing in and cooler weather, I still have a picnic going inside my head and the bentos of this week are in line with that.

Here is my bento on the left in blue, and Jan's on the right in red rabbit usagi:

Fried rice made with brown basmati, a two-colors-of-tomatoes salad heavy on the cilantro, and Jan has some steak strips on crab picks and a hard boiled egg for manly protein (and to reduce the amount of rice in his lunch, due to its being so carby).

Jan's bento for today has egg salad, coleslaw left over from last night, cheese and salami hearts, cold sesame noodle with cilantro and sweet red pepper rings, and 3 Three Musketeers bars, highly recommended by a friend.

Gym Snack Bento

2009-10-06T03:52:00.000-07:00

Feta cheese and Ak-Mak whole wheat crackers; roasted zucchini, tomato, olives, and hard-boiled egg with nanami togarashi on top.

This was so welcome after a hard hour on the elliptical watching some bizarre TV show about a Hispanic high school girls' volleyball team. During their games they had a DJ who did the record-scritching thing, and also a team of young male dancers. The show followed their season from:

(a) initial humiliating loss, which caused their coach to force them to sit on the locker room floor and hold hands for team building; through

(b) a subsequent unbroken string of victories set to rousing hip-hop music, to

(c) a fatal night when they drugged each other pre-game in boyfriend jealousy, and staggered around the court like pole-axed cattle; to

(d) an ending that I missed. I am guessing that ending would be

(e) Happy!! They all worked it out, the coach drew a moral, and one or more of them got scholarship offers, while hip-hop music blared over it all and the credits began to roll.

"Hallelujah I'm a Bum!"

2009-10-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

NQBR but it occurred to me this morning that dogs are bums.

I mean bums in the old sense of living on handouts, doing no real work, imposing on people and generally being a drain on society.

I took my dogs with me to the barn this morning and they did their best to shed out their entire summer coats in my car while I rode.

Then I brought them home and Rufus continued his only mode of useful work which consists of staring at me relentlessly the whole time I'm home.

Everywhere I go I turn around and see him sitting and staring at me. I believe he expects me to explode, and wants to be there as an eye-witness.

Bums. Why do we adore them so??!

Protein Bentos

2009-09-30T04:05:00.001-07:00

And:

Since last spring I have been working out at the gym religiously (with one interruption for a hurt knee that came from stupidly jumping down from a pickup truck bed in a hurry).

My workout has come to be enjoyable!! I spend one hour on the elliptical machine, marching through space while unbelievable junk TV (like "Dance Your Ass Off")plays itself out before my eyes and commercials try to sell me sleep, and acne-free skin, and innovative forms of birth control.

Then I go to the weight room and mystify myself with settings and numbers and postures oh my, for 1/2 hour. Then I stretch in the designated stretching room, where I am in grave danger of falling asleep on the floor.

But all this means I must have some significant protein within a half hour or...who knows what might happen. Nothing, is my guess. But whatever helps me take the whole workout thing seriously is good. So today's bentos take account of that, along with the fact that Jan is recovering from a cold and feels poorly so gets a bigger bento than usual.

Top bento is Jan's: hard-boiled egg, candies, and Greek salad; with turkey pastrami roll-up sandwich and carrots & wheat chips.

Lower bento is mine: leftover veggie stir-fry and brown rice; fried tofu with black sesame seeds, hard-boiled egg, carrots.

To your good health!!! Uff da.

Bentos Every Day, and Hard-Partying Barbie

2009-09-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

That is my goal and so far I am doing pretty darn well making bento lunches every day of the new semester.

Above we have the re-invasion of the octo-dogs; I tried to get them to hold hands but octo-dogs are more into fighting than making nice. They are resting on a bed of pinto beans, and there's a container of mixed Sriracha sauce and hoisin, which was the best octo-dog dipping sauce we have tried.

Jan's lunch on the same day continued the theme, but instead of strawberries he got a tier of mixed stir-fried veggies into which I added some rice vinegar and mirin for the last few minutes at a slightly lower temperature. They picked up a nice flavor! Jan has to watch the carbs so the vegetables are the better choice for him.

And this last bento had pasta with pesto sauce and fresh sweet pepper rings on top, a container of Parmesan, and a salad; Hello Kitty sidecar of Ak-Mak whole wheat crackers. Jan loved this one!

And for the pathos of it, I include here a photo I took at a birthday party today, after what was called "Barbie Wars" had been played by all the 467 kids present:

What is it that happens to poor Barbie's hair after the passage of indefinite time and hard use? I say nothing of her trampish belly tattoo.

Cilantro Salad: Great Bento Filler

2009-09-15T16:30:00.001-07:00

If you love cilantro, or often get a big beautiful bunch of it in your farm share like I do, you may sometimes come up against the old "How to use this up?" question. You can only eat so much salsa, only eat Thai noodles and spring rolls so often (well, pretty often!!).

So here's the solution: cilantro salad. The recipe can be found in my new favorite cookbook DONBURI MANIA by my guy Kentaro Kobayashi, also the author of my last new favorite cookbook BENTO LOVE.

DONBURI MANIA is what the title suggests, but also more, since Kobayashi also includes some donburi sides like soups and salads.

Cilantro coarsely chopped, fresh ginger and garlic, sesame oil, soy sauce, lemon or lime juice (I used lime and loved it), and a tad of sugar. Mix it up and let it sit for awhile, then stuff it into your bento next to some beautiful rice and voila.

Speaking of rice: Kobayashi loves him some rice. Listen to this verdict on what's really important in a good donburi:

"Can't get enough rice? That's the sign of a properly prepared donburi. Sure, the stuff on top takes a lot more time and preparation, but all of that, really, is meant to enhance the rice.It just serves to make the rice more delectable."

And his philosophy of donburi is this: "The goal of donburi is to create a dish that enhances the innate sweetness of rice".

How do you like that little paradigm shift? I love this guy.

Here's Jan's bento from yesterday, which has only one slightly unusual thing and it isn't the panda lid:

On the left: cheeses, Triscuits, Hello Kitty strawberry filled cookies, and a chocolate (Hello junk food; I was in a hurry); on the right, roast potatoes, cherry tomatoes, chicken, and -- the unusual thing -- Thai basil pesto. This recipe calls for fish sauce, rice vinegar, and few other non-traditional pesto ingredients and it is awesome!! I had scored a huge bunch of Thai basil at the Harvest Festival Saturday and this pesto kind of called my name as a noodle adornment.

Fun fun fun!

Here's the cover of Kobayashi's book: You have to love a cookbook named after mental dysfunction.

Szechuan Green Beans at 5 a.m. and "Tool Academy"

2009-09-11T03:09:00.000-07:00

The fragrance of them in your kitchen is so delightful! So why not cook them at 5 a.m.?

Getting up very early this term and so far it is working out well. The gym is not at all crowded, and the sun comes up over the lake out the big plate glass windows while I am marching in the air on the elliptical and watching "Tool Academy"* or some such cultural enrichment program.

In this bento I had leftover shiitake mushroom and steak stir fry, white rice, and the fresh Szechuan green beans, along with a mandarin and some blueberries & two chocolates.

In this second bento I had a salad but I have to report bad behavior on the part of Hello Kitty:

Kitty has little snap closers on each side, and something in my bag flipped one of the closers in transit so Kitty spilled her guts all inside my bag. This is not a great design! It adversely affected my mood to find olive oil and green pepper chunks all over the Iliad. But I got most of it back into Kitty and the lunch was good. Lesson learned.

*"Tool Academy" is a reality TV show in which bad boyfriends (the Tools) are sent to boot camp style training to become better. I've only seen it once, on the elliptical, but I stayed longer to see how several of these relationships would turn out. Almost all of the guys seem like contenders for Penitentiary PrimeTime, and their girlfriends have a hard and desperate edge. There's a lot of crying - just like life! - and every guy who succumbs to the exotic dancers, while hidden cameras capture his every lapse, has a million excuses: "They were always making fun of me in school!". Which would of course explain why you must now lick vodka out of a hot girl's navel as your ladyfriend watches in despair.

1st Day New Semester Bento!!!

2009-09-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

Cold sesame soba with green beans, shoyu tamago, rice vinegar pickles, carrots with ume vinegar and sea salt, and a sliced white nectarine.

Honest to Parker this was one of the best bentos I've ever eaten. I am trying to figure out why. Possible explanations:

1. The soba noodles were unusually good. I don't use a recipe any more for the sauce and sometimes it's a little myeh, but this time it was terrific.

2. The pickles were spicy and cold.

3. The carrots got just the right amount ume'd by lunch time.

4. The nectarine was sweet and had that honey fragrance white ones sometimes have.

But most of all: I was starving, because this is day 1 of my new regime: Get up at 4, get to work by 6, hit the gym there at 6:30 when it opens, jump on my favorite elliptical, realize that I have forgotten my earphones so I have to lip-read junky TV for 60 minutes, then go to the weight room and pretend I know what I'm doing with all those machines for 20 minutes, then go to the showers and try to hide my body from the 19 year olds so they don't contract a crippling fear of later life, then be at my desk by 8:15 and start thinking about my bento lunch.

"Hunger is the best sauce"; my mother's saying collection, saying #284.

This shall be my process for T-TH-SAT all this semester, except for Sat when I will come home and take a nap instead of going to work. That's my plan anyway.

Some Regular Bentos

2009-09-06T07:47:00.001-07:00

Nothing very special in my bentos lately, but tasty lunches nevertheless!!

1.
Grilled chicken and grilled zucchini; dill pickle potato salad; cucumber rice vinegar pickles, green beans and tomatoes fresh from the farmshare, a lychee cookie.

2.
Fried egg and cilantro sandwich on Uncle Paul's bread; chips and coconut roll cookies, a Ferrero Roche truffle.

3.
Whole wheat tortilla rollups with scrambled egg and cilantro; hard salami rolls over a Babybel cheese; fresh cucumber and carrot slices; who knew that black sesame seeds on the carrots would look so very much like BUGS?!

4.
Big Kitty has a leftover barbecue steak salad; Little Kitty has an assortment of crackers, cheese, and Asian cookies.

Fun fun fun!! I can hardly remember when lunch was a carton of yogurt and a peanut butter sandwich, day after day...

And just to be crazy, here's a picture of me on my horse John at yesterday's competitive trail event; we had to walk in this river for quite a way, and John was so happy to get his tootsies wet & get a big drink. A nice young woman was taking pictures of all competitors and posted them on Facebook later.

"Kaze Wo Atsumete"

2009-09-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

Neat Japanese song originally by the group Happy End, nicely covered and you can see how this studio artist sets up his looping background:

Here's the refrain translated:

"That's why I want to gather the wind (under my wings)
Gather the wind (under my wings)
And run across the blue sky."

It seems like a song about the changes in Japanese cities, and how a quieter way of life is still detectable under the urban crowding and modernization. But I'm not sure of the meaning; I just love the soft melody.

Barbecue Bento

2009-09-01T05:31:00.000-07:00

Is there anything better in a bento than leftover barbecued meat??! Well probably there is. But.

Jan's bento is big today because these days just before classes start are some of his busiest. I thought he might enjoy a feast including leftover bratwurst and steak, stir-fried sesame noodles, fresh strawberries and some Asian sweets of indeterminate nature.

Sriracha in the HK container! I love this stuff. My older son eats steamed jasmine rice with sriracha on it every night for dinner in his little messy dorm room. While this sounds a little heart-breaking, he says it is perfect. He has always been one to glom onto something he likes and stick with it through thick and thin. "The bullheaded one."

"OH! Mikey!": Japanese TV

2009-08-20T18:58:00.000-07:00

Other cultures always look a bit strange from the outside. How do Americans look to Japanese people? Well, here's one answer: unbelievably wack and bizarre, prone to weird fits of raucous laughter, and clueless about the most important things in life (like: how to enjoy a picnic).

A Japanese late-night TV show spawned a series of skits called "OH! Mikey!", involving mannequin 'actors' who represent an American family living in Japan. The central character is a boy named Mikey; his mother and dad always smile huge American smiles even when they are fussing at Mikey or quarreling with each other - because Americans smile too much. Or because mannequins can't change their expressions. Or perhaps both.

Here's a sample; in the first episode, you will see the Fuccon family (yes, that is their name) at their picnic. They eat leek sandwiches and leek-stuffed musubi, which is the mother's idea of a proper 'bento' and which causes the dad and Mikey to complain. In the end they will decide that picnics are stupid and they can eat lunch and quarrel at home.

Pretty strange stuff, but after all....AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

BENTO LOVE: New Cookbook

2009-08-19T04:40:00.001-07:00

RATING: ***** 5 Stars on the BENTOMETER!!

Bento Love: Easy Japanese Cooking, by Kentaro Kobayashi, just came out and I had pre-ordered a copy from Amazon for $17.50. It looks like it will really help me move up to the next level in my Japanese cooking, because it is really a "how-to" cookbook rather than just a list of recipes and ingredients.

For example, take this paragraph on how to prepare a chicken thigh for cooking:

"Keep in mind: chicken cooks slowly. So don't forget to cover it and let it cook through. Enjoy the flavor of yakitori-style chicken for lunch!...

Take a single chicken thigh and poke about a dozen holes through the skin with a knife for even cooking and to prevent skin from shriveling up. Remove fat with cooking scissors and slice the surface of the meat repeatedly to break up tendons. Rub a very generous amount of salt (about 1 Tbsp) into both sides and sprinkle with pepper. Now you're ready to cook..."

Did you know all these tricks? The book is full of them. The author loves meat so the bento suggestions are often meat plus rice plus a small amount of veg.

Here's a look at the table of contents so you can see if you're interested:

I'm sorry that blogger's photo uploader is deciding these pics must be sideways; I can't figure out how to short-circuit that.

Here's one bento I plan to try to replicate very soon; the idea of yummy salted turnip greens over rice is just calling my name:

But almost every bento looks so good I think I'll have some terrific ideas and know-how to make the coming academic year really SUPERBENTO!!

The book is not purely Japanese food either, though its American and European influenced bento menus have the neat touch of strangeness that characterizes Planet Bento in my mind. So we get one lunch that consists of two small sub sandwiches: one with an avocado omelet in it, the other with a sausage. You see what I mean.

The only disappointment I had with the book was this: Mr. Kobayashi appears to be unaware of the essential food group known as dessert. If we want sweets in our bento or on the side, we are on our own. I went confidently to the back of the book, that ghetto where desserts usually reside in our cookbooks, and lo there was nothing but an explanation of common ingredients. No cute rice puddings, no home-made Pocky, no cute moshi. it's as if dessert did not even exist.

Well Mr. Kobayashi, man does not live by meat and rice alone.

However this is a small thing and a true sweets-hound like myself does not really need much help to figure out ways to stuff those crucial calories into a corner of a bento box.

I think you'll like this book if you are not an expert cook of Japanese food already, and if you want some ideas to refine your preparation process. If you have sometimes had the thought, "This just ought to taste better!" about some of your Japanese cooking, as I have, this book will definitely bridge the gap in many areas.

Berry Bento for a Monday

2009-08-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

Getting back into bento-packin, since fall semester is almost here.

Today we have egg salad with fresh dill, sugar snap peas from my farmshare box, carrots and romaine from same; then blueberries, strawberry-jam-fail-sauce, plain yogurt with a watermelon heart, and some wheat crackers.

In addition to buying a farmshare of veggies every summer, I also buy a flower share from a different farmer. She delivers a bunch of flowers to your back door every week for 8 or 10 weeks depending, along with an essay about the names and attributes of all the flowers.

Here's my divided bouquet from last week:

1. The blue and white flowers I put in the window.

2. The orange and yellow flowers I put inside where I like their colors against wood:

I am a firm believer in buying flowers for yourself!! Yes, it's nicer when some handsome swain buys them, but the swains are a little sparse on the ground these days so I go to plan B and they are still just as beautiful.

"My Neighbor Totoro"

2009-08-07T16:44:00.000-07:00

I know most everyone has already seen this 1988 film, but I just watched it for the first time and loved it!

I could not stand the dubbed over version I started out with - a very young Dakota Fanning and her sister (younger still?) with a sharp toned flat California way of saying "TOAD-aro"....switched to Japanese with subtitles: much better.

The story has a poignant realism rare for Disney subsidized projects (Disney bought the rights for American distribution and made the changes). A family in which the mother is seriously ill and in a convalescent home, the father is an absent-minded professor and kind but a bit distant, and the two girls are feeling the effects of a sudden move to the countryside & life without mom.

The house they are renting is dilapidated and full of 'soot sprites', odd little black asterisk looking supernatural beings who leave at once as soon as the family gives signs of happiness - laughing together.

Enter Totoro, whose name is the mispronounced Japanese word for 'troll', since the littlest daughter can barely talk yet - even though dad lets her wander around unsupervised all day and she gets badly lost twice during the film. She wanders off and meets Totoro asleep under a gigantic camphor tree.

She falls asleep on his big soft belly, and is not missed until her sister comes home from school and goes looking for her. Sis had made them all bento lunches that morning!

Totoro gradually becomes a friend to the family, at least to the two girls. In gratitude for the gift of an umbrella,

...Totoro gives the girls a small bag of seeds. There's a wonderful magic dream sequence in which Totoro dances and along with the girls, causes the seeds to grow into a giant oak tree overnight. When the dreaming daughter awakens, the seeds have indeed sprouted.

The countryside is beautiful in a truly dreamlike way. One night scene finds Totoro atop his camphor tree playing a strange round flute in the moonlight. Eerie and magical.

The younger daughter decides to walk to the hospital to visit mom, and becomes completely lost. Totoro to the rescue, and with the help of a strangely psychedelic giant cat bus, the girls are able to visit mother in the hospital and hope for the future is established.

The seriousness of the mother's illness is never questioned, and given the 1950's time setting I had to wonder if it was war-related. My husband was shocked beyond belief at one scene where dad and both daughters are in a soaking tub naked together. The dad is very sweet but he is really letting the girls take care of themselves; hard to say whether this is a cultural difference of the time or a peculiar fact about their individual family.

The movie has a lovely air about it, a soft touch of magic and sorrow and hope that I really liked. It is left open whether Totoro might just be a comforting fantasy; but his kindness is real enough and makes you know these two little girls are going to be all right no matter what.

It left me with a strong desire to learn some conversational Japanese; what a beautiful language it is.

ADDED NOTE: Since this movie is old and was popular you can watch it online at numerous sites. Here's one nice quality version with good sound, Japanese dialogue with English subtitles; enjoy!!!:

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/entertainment/watch/v6367837FNdKB6JZ

Bento of Leftover Chinese

2009-07-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

You know it will please,
like a fresh summer breeze;
it's a bento of smiling
Leftover Chinese.

Jan got: crispy fried wonton, garlic shrimp and scallops, white rice, wonton in spicy peanut sauce, grapes, wasabi peas in Hello Kitty container, cute mushroom cookies, and a Ferrero Rocher dark chocolate truffle.

Chinese takeout is the gift that almost always gives at least two meals if not three. I almost always order egg foo yung and this goes me for 3 meals, each one better than the previous. How great is that??!

I only wish the rice was a little less sad...but that is a minor quibble. Long live Chinese takeout!!

Jammin'! NQBR

2009-07-25T16:32:00.000-07:00

NQBR (Not Quite Bento Related):

I picked strawberries this past Thursday at a nearby "U-Pick" farm - they were all really ripe so I had to make jam and such as soon as I could. My jam turned out about as well as my octo-dogs usually do, so I have a lot of strawberry sauce - about enough to drown a Queen Mary sized bowl of ice cream.

It is good!!

I noticed there were several philosophies of picking posture: the kneelers, the backbenders, the sitters, and the changers. I was a changer. As various body parts went to sleep or started to ache, I would move.

It made me think about being a migrant worker who does this all day every day for a meager living. And this gave me a real gestalt shift when walking down the produce aisle in the supermarket -- all the human work hours that lie behind those piles of berries, cherries, tomatoes, heads of lettuce... It's a little scary to contemplate. From one perspective, our food is expensive (prices have gone up). From another angle though, it is far too cheap.

Thai Salad Rolls on a Summer Day

2009-07-21T04:35:00.001-07:00

I just love a cold lunch of Thai salad rolls and spicy peanut sauce, on a hot summer afternoon. I'm slowly getting better at rolling them. My first efforts a few months back tended to be very loose and they would flatten rather than being round cylinders.

In this bento you also see the crab sausage I made in Avie's crab sausage maker!! I used hot dogs and they are tougher than vienna sausages so I got some crab leg breakage. My mom hated vienna sausages so much that she made my dad go sit in the backyard to eat them. I can picture him still, sitting in a lawn chair with a can of Budweiser in the grass, extracting vienna sausages from the can with a fork. But since Avie's crab thingy is going to work better with them, I will buy some viennas soon - sorry mom.

I learned a useful trick from a waiter in a local Thai restaurant: Take a dry wrap from the package and cut it in half, then use this half inside a whole wrap, right in the middle where the main ingredient weight is going to be.

This helps prevent the wraps, which are very fragile, from bursting and enables you to roll tighter.

And here's my last bento using the NeonVegas umeboshi onigiri I made: it also has pork gyoza, a shoyu tamago with mixed red pepper, sugar snap peas stuffed in around the onigiri, cherry tomatoes, and a Ferrero Rocher chocolate hazelnut delight.

Nummy times!! We are going to go out and pick strawberries tomorrow at a local farm, weather and berries permitting. Strawberry pie!!

Gummi Octopus!!!! Can't Stop Dancing!!

2009-07-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

Look what I found in the bulk candy bins at Cub Foods!!

They come in several pretty alarming colors, and they taste...sort of permanent, if you know what I mean. I was still tasting today's Gummi Octopus hours later. But how cute is it??! Can you imagine a bento presenting a battle between Octodogs and OctoGummis? The Octodogs would have a size advantage, but the Gummis would be so creepy and techy that they might just win. I will work on this awesome concept.

Meanwhile here was today's bento:

Pork gyoza, roast chicken with nanami togarashi sprinkled over it (this was yum), and a spinach tamagoyaki which I learned about on Cooking with Dog. Fruits in the extra dish.

I love these Cooking With Dog videos for many reasons:

1. You get great cooking tips: like with the spinach tamagoyaki, the cook boils the spinach just for awhile, lets it cool, and then wrings it out like a wet sock. Thus bypassing the problem of soggy spinach leaking through your dish.

2. The narrator: he is so charming! He's a little bit of a worrywort, and will give lots of cautions "Careful not to cut yourself! Uncooked gyoza filling will quickly go bad!" etc. He's also mysterious; the gimmick is that it's like the dog is talking, but who is the guy really? The cook's son? The cook's alter-ego?

3. The dog! He's so well-behaved. He just sits there on the stool while foods pass by his nose, cooking smells waft up, he never lunges for the bowl. In a few videos, he will discreetly drool a little, or whine when the cook chows down on the finished dish.

Here's the episode about making Taiyaki, and it has some terrific tips about cooking dry beans, even if one is not seriously considering the heartbreak of attempting to make a fish shaped bean filled cake inside a teensy little fishy waffle iron ("What Could Go Wrong?" hollow laugh):

Octo-Dog Jim's Flamingo Vegas Gogo

2009-07-13T05:15:00.000-07:00

(Props to Avie for naming the bento below!!)

Yesterday I wanted to make pink onigiri so I did my research on the internet. Found JustBento's description of how to color rice naturally and saw that it was good.

However I didn't think I could get the red cabbage grated fine enough to 'disappear' in the rice, and JustBento uses an implement I don't own - a kind of grating stick that really pulverizes the thing being grated. Looks like a great kitchen tool.

BUT: I went prospecting in the cupboard and found some 1000-year old red food coloring that must hark back to some elementary school project my boys did...I don't have the slightest recollection of buying it.

The result, from using too much of this probably radioactive chemical, is these hot-pink onigiri that remind me of Vegas showgirl costumes. Each of these excessively fat onigiri (I keep overstuffing the molds) has a lovely salty red umeboshi in its middle.

Here's the little Kitty Bento I made this morning:

Vegas onigiri, pork gyoza (also made yesterday), two little octodogs in space wondering how they ended up in Vegas hungover, cherry tomatoes, furikake for Vegas in the little pink bear? container, dipping sauce for the gyoza in Little Kitty, a green-tea mochi in the heart, a Lindor chocolate truffle, and a can of pink guava juice.

This particular brand of guava juice, or this lot perhaps, tastes a little like a high school locker room smells, much as I try to pretend otherwise because the can is so cute. It's an effort to drink it, but I manage because I am a mindslave to cuteness.

Strawberries!!

2009-07-09T04:48:00.000-07:00

Is there anything better? Good for you, no calories or fat, taste like heaven. I got these at a roadside stand yesterday and they had such a fragrance. The guy selling them seemed depressed; I guess they were so ripe they could hardly last out the day, and it must be sad to stand there and watch your strawberries go over to the dark side, while people drive by talking on their cell phones and eating fast food out of styrofoam cartons...

Anyway I froze a bunch of these, gave some to my neighbor, and had a little strawberry festival all to myself.

Jan's bento on Wednesday looked like this:

Brown basmati rice, pork stir fry, tamagoyaki, turkey sausage rounds with a sauce container of Sriracha to dip them in, a few grape tomatoes, dark sweet cherries, a babybel cheese, a few peanut butter pretzels, and a vanilla mousse chocolate wafer.

Kind of too much protein, but for Jan's diabetes the rice has to be kept to a minimum - rice really makes his blood sugar go sky high. It's too bad because so much good & cute bento stuff is rice based. Kind of too much sweets too! This wasn't a very well planned lunch. Optimal for him is protein and vegetables, a small bit of carbs, that kind of thing.

A Few Summer Bentos

2009-07-03T09:09:00.001-07:00

Dill pickle potato salad, broccoli salad with toasted sunflower seeds, a little roll of turkey pastrami, golden tomatoes, Queen Anne and dark cherries, and a chocolate truffle. I loved this lunch!

This was Jan's bento on the same day; different only on having Pocky in the lid, and more meat.

These bentos featured spinach quiche, and rhubarb crisp. Yumbly yum.

And finally here is the little deer who stared into my eyes for the longest time yesterday; we met on the dog walk, as she was about to make a suicide run across a busy street.

Deer are so weird. I don't much care for them because they eat everyone's plants and flowers, but they have a certain mysterious quality: that animal mystery.

I won the Lottery (cherries anyway)

2009-06-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

!!!!!!!

3 3-stemmed cherries in one little batch of these delicious Queen Annes!

I am sure there is a truck full of money somewhere, just driving around,looking for my address. Soon to be unbelievably rich my friends! Dozens of bentos for everyone! I'll fly everyone to Minneapolis and we can dine at Sakura, the best Japanese restaurant in the cities. Then we'll go online and order the kyootest bentos we can find.

Or heck, let's just all fly to Tokyo and shop in person!!

I can dream...

Meanwhile here's my Friday bento of enormous spinach:

I stir-fried a huge amount of sesame spinach and thought we'd have leftovers for dinner. But by cramming, I managed to fit it all in my bento. It became like a spinach brick. I used the partition to compress it and this got all the water out too, a big plus. Just one little problem, which was, that it all came out at once on my desk at work when I went to eat it. Splop. Hello spinach on my papers!

It was good though. This bento also had pinto bean salad, my last pandan cake, sugar snap peas and a fresh apricot.

What lies ahead for the week??! Making porketta roast in the crockpot today. I think porketta roast is a regional meat; it is rolled out, heavily spiced, then rolled up and tied before sale at supermarkets.

When we first moved to the midwest, we had not heard of it, and in a supermarket we saw "Porketta! Great midnight snack!' and we laughed thinking of people eating pork at midnight, gnawing away like Pleistocene cavemen. Well years later, it's true; great midnight snack. Addictive.

Bean Salad Bento

2009-06-25T01:44:00.000-07:00

FrenchBento made a pinto bean salad that gave me this idea, although typically, hers was fancy with roasted and ground hazelnuts and various other things. I took away just the idea that pinto beans would make a nice salad base; I added chopped carrot, green onion, olive oil and lemon juice. It was really nice on a hot day at work. It's resting on a bed of baby greens from my very first farm-share box of the summer!! Woo hoo; organic veggies commence.

Next to it is a chicken andouille sausage which I quick-fried for a few minutes, and then added champagne-dill mustard mixed with a little water to simmer for a bit. This was really great! I love mustard and we want to visit the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum some day - it isn't very far away. And: I just like the idea of there being a mustard museum.

In the other half is a fresh organic apricot, some cherry tomatoes, a babybel cheddar, two heart shaped jello jigglers, and a Vietnamese black coffee candy which was dynamite.

Every year I plant a few flowers around in the yard and see what manages not to die. This year the chicken planter really took off:

My gardening is very random. Hope your summer is going well and your flowers are all blooming!!

2 Summer Bentos of Leftovers!

2009-06-23T04:22:00.001-07:00

Jan's bento has the leftover shrimp ceviche from Sunday dinner, along with two rice balls, a fresh apricot sliced, a heart shaped jello jiggler made with no-cal jello, and underneath the juggler is a chocolate in foil.

The shrimp ceviche was a first for me and it was super! it's a cross between a salad and a seafood cocktail, and the spin is supposed to be that the seafood is not actually cooked but just marinates in lime (or other citrus) juice for several hours in the fridge. Not being very brave about raw, I used cooked shrimp and cut the marinating time. Next time I want to try scallops as well.

There are many different ceviches, as many as the Caribbean islands they come from; some add tomato juice and make them almost soupy, some use a fresh tomato sauce, some entirely leave out tomato. Other ingredients are: cucumber, cilantro, a little olive oil, serrano chiles, crispy sweet banana pepper, daikon or white radish, salt and pepper, halved grape tomatoes. Yum, what a cool and low-fat summer dish!

My bento also had leftovers:

A salad with baby greens and blue cheese crumbles, sesame rice balls, apricot, tomatoes and broccoli. This bento had too little protein and I was hungry in two hours. I went rummaging around my office for Anything Edible and found a 2 year old package of pistachios which a student had brought me from a Greece trip. Well, they were still pretty darn good!!

Hail to leftovers!! I find I am planning on them now and making extra - makes the mornings much easier.

過ぎる Hello Kitteh Overload?!

2009-06-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

Is there such a thing as too much Hello Kitty junk? What are the symptoms? Because I should be manifesting them right about now.

These pretty bird stamps:

...were on my package from:

...which contained:

...and

I cannot wait to cute-overload this HK bento with a little HK sauce container and place it in the HK carry bag and wig out. My co-workers would be so jealous if they only knew how cute and cool this is! Alas they just think I have entered into some senile second childhood and they smirk. The lummoxes; all guys. But they have asked me to make gyoza for a brunch they're having! So I guess I am somewhat cool or maybe just a tool.

Anyway the set of HK boxes is so cute, and I am tempted to say right out that the biggest one is for dessert...but maybe I'll try to sneak that one by.

The Ebay seller for these desirable items is 'HongKong Outlet' which has a special Hello Kitty store and is very terrific to deal with - cheery polite messages and fast reasonable shipping, automatic combined shipping, just a pleasure and great prices.

And just for fun: our college dean resigned after settting the college in some turmoil, and her secretary posted this sign on the dean's door:

...which I think shows moxie. What do you think?

Getting the Proportions Right

2009-06-17T04:15:00.001-07:00

I think I am getting a little better at the proportions of bento lunches. My tendency is to make the protein and sweet parts too large, short changing the vegetable/fruit and carb/rice parts. In this one I think I almost got it 4-3-2-1 just right!

And maybe this one too:

Two little workday bentos for summer. The cherries are fantastic this year! Hope everyone is enjoying the fruit abundance of the season.

Summer Delights! Rhubarb Riot NQBR

2009-06-14T19:41:00.000-07:00

Not Quite Bento Related:

The rhubarb has been incredible this summer; it tastes like heaven. Today I made a rhubarb custard cake, very easy and super tasty:

Rhubarb Custard Cake

1 package yellow cake mix
4 cups fresh rhubarb chopped in small pieces
1 pint whipping cream
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 tsp cinnamon

350 oven. Prepare the cake as package directs except also add vanilla. and pour into greased 13x9 pan. Sprinkle rhubarb on top of batter. Mix sugar and cinnamon, pour on top of rhubarb. Finally, pour the cream over all.

Bake for 55-60 minutes. Let cool and then refrigerate. This cool puddingy cake will disappear out of the pan! We put whipped cream on top because it wasn't fattening enough yet har har.

I had dinner with my next door neighbors on their deck, and we had fun complaining about our university (she works there too). Good times! while her little grandson 6 months old scooted around in his wheelie-bob and scared my dogs. Gabe and Rufus could just about take the baby, but they were unnerved when the baby became a babyscooter.

Now they are recovering from the shock to their nerves:

This Little Bento...

2009-06-11T04:36:00.001-07:00

...in the "black sheep shopping trip" bento box, was so nice. It was satisfying but still I was able to go work out at the gym about 45 minutes after I ate it. It had two of my black sesame ume onigiri with sugar snap peas tucked around them, sesame kale, part of a chicken andouille sausage, home grown spicy sprouts, cherry tomatoes and a babybel cheese.

No dessert though, and I was feelin the need. I'm going to have to invent the 3-layer bento box with dedicated dessert compartment. Or maybe I could become less of a greedy sweet tooth!!

Mr. Bento's Babe Again Today!

2009-06-09T04:10:00.000-07:00

It is a miso soup day so Mr. Bento to the rescue! There's no better way to bring soup to work. I got this beee-yootiful miso that I was so craving yesterday, so today my wish is granted.

I not only started teaching summer class yesterday but I also started an exercise class on campus at noon. This exercise class now! I knew I was in trouble when a nice lady asked me if I'd ever been to this class before, and when I said No, she proceeded to give me extensive advice about how to avoid injuring myself.

These people are hard core. It is called "Cardio Blast" and it requires stepping up on little plastic platforms, hopping over them, skipping around trying not to crash into the lady behind you, etc. then performing acrobatics on a big plastic ball like a trained seal, then privately dying inside.

So after this ordeal I was needing miso soup. What is it about miso that is so wonderful and comforting? It always brings a glow to my life.

In Mr. Bento besides soup I have: fried rice with cilantro, a veggie cup with spicy sprouts, cucumber-ginger tsukemono, a coupel tomatoes and a couple of olives, and a pandan cake.

These green Vietnamese Twinkies are so good! They are actually far better than Twinkies: very slim cream layer, a little crust of sugar on the outside, a flavor like pineapple and coconut combined. Pandan is a weird looking fruit I had never heard of before; I got these in Madison and wish I'd bought a case. How many exercise classes would that represent?!

Message from a Bento Box

2009-06-08T03:51:00.001-07:00

Several of my bento boxes have little speeches on them, and today's bento is an example:

This somewhat co-dependent sounding message made me wonder: Who is talking here?

How would the Japanese schoolchild, for whom this box was probably intended, interpret the speaker of this message?

Would it be Mom, offering to bring things? A generic 'friend' being helpful and solicitous? The offer invites someone to "write and tell me", so we can infer they are at some distance. It is also odd because -- who writes when they can pick up a cell phone?

Today I am bringing one of my umeboshi filled onigiri, mushroom cookies, grapes, peach, 2 blackberries, some sugar snap peas and a sliced up white radish. Kind of weird but I am facing a weird day: my summer class starts this morning (Philosophy of Religion! one of my favorites) and I have a meeting with an administrator who is going to ask me a big favor, and I want to say no, but am not good at that, not at all. So, grrr, a little nerve-wracked. I should ask my bento-person to bring me some courage.

Inarizushi or...??

2009-06-06T03:48:00.001-07:00

5 a.m. this morning found me making my first attempt at inarizushi, those little pillows of goodness which have fascinated me since I first saw them on someone's bento blog.

I had purchased 'fried tofu pouches' in Madison WI at Brian's graduation, and froze them. Now they were thawed and ready. First I read a bunch of recipes on the internet and developed a sort of average idea from all the variations, mostly in sauce ingredients.

The tofu pockets first get rinsed in boiling water to wash the oil off, then poached in a flavoring sauce of soy, mirin, sugar, salt, broth, etc. Here is where a lot of differences come in.

Then they are drained and dried, then stuffed with sushi rice and whatever else you like.

So first off, my tofu pouches were more like blocks, so I think I bought the wrong thing. They had to be cut open with a knife, whereas the recipes all say "gently press open with your fingers", and there would have been no way to "fold over the end like an envelope after filling"; these brickies would just have broken.

However! I had fun toasting black sesame seeds for the first time - they pop like crazy!! and I also used my onigiri press for the first time.

This works really swell, especially if you remember to dip it in water between uses. I made some really honkin onigiri, each one having an ume plum in its middle; maybe they are too fat really - you might need a nap after eating one of these for lunch.

Black sesame tastes great but does present that dental hazard: the smile of black spots! That would really liven up my office hours. "Hello!" (big smile)-- Student leaves in a hurry...

Hello Salad Kitty!

2009-06-05T05:19:00.001-07:00

This salad bento features home-grown sprouts, carrot flowers, white radish bundled into the carrot flower cutout rings, a babybel cheese with the flower cutout, walnuts, plum vinegar bunny, cucumber pickle, sesame tofu, and Andy the Axe-Murderer (hard boiled egg).

I don't know why making a simple friendly egg face always gets me this type of scary result.

This furoshiki with little rabbits frolicking or staring at the moon is my favorite. Why do rabbits frolic in the moonlight on so many Japanese art works? Is there a rabbit mythology?

There's a "moon viewing festival" in Japan and there's a rabbit on the moon:

"O-tsukimi:

The festival of 'O-tsukimi' is the moon viewing festival based on the Japanese Folk Tale of 'The rabbit in the Moon'. From this Folk Tale the Japanese people have believed since long ago, that rabbits lived on the moon. Even today in Japan, the moon is pictured with the scene of a rabbit or rabbits making mochi (pounded rice cakes).

During this time the moon has a special name 'Chuushuu-no-meigetsu' which in English means 'the picturesque moon of mid-autumn'. This moon occurs during July, August and September in Japan on the lunar calendar. During the months of September and October, the weather in Japan is clear with few clouds and the moon is all the more beautiful, perfect for 'Otsukimi'.

The Japanese people celebrate 'O-tsukimi' by making 'Moon viewing rice balls' and collecting 'Aki-no-nan' which are the typical flowering grasses of autumn. These are bush clover, pampas grass, arrowroot, fringed pink, patrinia palmata, agueweed and Chinese bellflower. After the rice balls are made, and the 'Aki-no-nan' collected, they are offered to the gods to pray for a good harvest on their crops for a year.

The story of 'The rabbit in the Moon' is a story about the Old-Man-of-the-Moon who one day looked down into a big forest on Earth and saw three friends sitting together around a fire. These three were a rabbit, a monkey and a fox. On deciding to find out which of the three is the kindest, he goes down to Earth and changes himself into a beggar. He asks the three friends to help him and that he is very hungry, on hearing this they all run of to find him some food. The monkey brought back a lot of fruit to the man and the fox brought back a big fish. However, the rabbit is unable to find any food for the man, and so asks the monkey to gather some firewood and the fox to build a big fire with the wood. Once the fire was burning very brightly, the rabbit explained to the beggar that he didn't have anything to give him, so he will put himself in the fire and when he is cooked the beggar could eat him. Just before the rabbit jumped into the fire the beggar turned back into the Old-Man-of-the-Moon and told the rabbit that he was very kind, and that he shouldn't do anything to harm himself. Because he decides that the rabbit is the kindest of the three, he takes him back to the moon to live with him.

That is why the Japanese people believe that if they look carefully at the moon when it is shining brightly, they can see the rabbit there, where the old man put him so very long ago."

(This info comes from Latrobe University Australia's website, from what looks to be a student project on Japanese folk tales. Thanks Elisha Brooks and yay for student mythology projects!!)

So maybe these little bunnies are celebrating Otsukimi!

Or maybe they're just happy that It's Friday!! YAAAAY!!

Hasty Bento for a Thursday

2009-06-04T05:01:00.000-07:00

Jan's bento for today had to be fast, because we were up late at his birthday dinner and watching "Flatliners" to celebrate. How appropriate for his X0'th birthday, to watch a movie about people visiting the afterlife! That didn't occur to me until this morning...

Anyway I had wanted to make inari zushi but that is going to have to wait. (I bought some ready made tofu pockets in Madison and froze them; we'll see how they do after freezing.)

Anyway one of my favorite hurry-up bentos involves tortilla wraps in whatever way. today they have cream cheese, soy vegetarian "taco filling" which is amazingly good, and spicy sprouts. I stuffed little sugar snap peas in amongst the pinwheels, and added a container of hot chili sauce.

I also made him some white peach and lime salsa which smells heavenly, and put in some celery for dipping. Peanut butter pretzels with a few recreational wasabi peas, in the lid of bear bento and he is ready for the day!!

Which Bento Boxes are Microwave Safe?

2009-06-03T06:28:00.001-07:00

OnceUponAnEquine wondered about bentos and the microwave.

All these bento boxes are microwave safe to 140 degrees centigrade, which seems to be a common threshold -- that applies to the container and not the lid. Most lids are not recommended for microwaving; Hello Kitty in the picture has an inner seal around the edge of the lid that shouldn't be heated, some of the other lids have inlay, painted designs, or a lacquery finish that shouldn't go into the micro.

So my bento for today:

has a non-microwaveable outer and inner lid but can otherwise be heated. I love this little blue bento! It has a lift-out divided compartment for small amounts of something wet; today I put ginger jam and honey chestnuts in that, and yogurt beside it. The big section has chili hot beans, jasmine rice, tofu stripes, and miso zucchini.

The top of this box has the most wonderful little slogan:

"SO MUCH, IT REACHED THE POINT WHERE YOU CAN SWIM!"

This applies to many life situations, such as academia, where I work, and where the BS factor often suits this slogan; or happiness, which sometimes just floats up around us that much...the little seal and fishies are slightly 3-D and the texture of this box is satiny.

Finally here is a photo of my 2 exhausted poochies, after their morning constitutional today:

Poor Gabey is trying to hold onto his favorite chair, but Rufus is trying to butt him out; very typical.

June is Spa Month at Casa Mia

2009-06-02T06:54:00.000-07:00

So I have declared June to be a month of health and exercise and right eating, in which bentos will play a major role. It's spa month! I'm going to start every day with a juice of the raw things pictured above: carrots, a small apple, fresh ginger, a small lemon, and some rhubarb. this is very tasty - I'm always surprised how much sweetness that one little apple contributes.

Then I have a few other "include" resolutions, such as dark green leafy vegetables as in today's bento:

Kale sauteed in sesame oil, a chicken andouille sausage with dill pickle sections on lobster skewers, some neat hot sauce in the little container, cute mochi, pink grapefruit, and wasabi peas.

Sriracha hot chili sauce is my latest craving; I wake up thinking about it. It's great on greens, chips, meat, celery, eggs, you name it. Not firy hot, and very flavorful.

And then there's:

My new exercise coach Jillian... 30 Days of Shred! At the end she says 'You have just been shredded". Jillian is just sinister enough to be intimidating, as in "Don't you dare think about taking a break!" I love it. There are 3 levels and I will probably content myself with level 1 for quite a time; it is enough.

Also plan to take the dogs for a one hour walk 4 days a week. Plan already being implemented; doggies exhausted the rest of the day.

Daily bento, some cooking experiments, and drink lots of water.

So that's my June Spa Month plan. Hope I stick to it.

"Bento for My Horses!"

2009-05-30T11:52:00.002-07:00

This is not as crazy as it sounds. Today I packed a bento box lunch for my horse. Well I guess that is actually pretty crazy. But:

On a longer trail ride I like to bring a few treats for my horse. His faves are: granola bars, grapes, and carrots. So the usual thing is: stuff the snacks in the saddle bag, drag them out all crushed and broken hours later, feed him mushed grapes and broken up granola bar, etc. End up with wadded plastic bag that might or might not get taken out of the saddle bag at trail's end and if not, end up with moldy mush a few weeks later.

Today I was going out for a 2 hour ride so I packed him a bento snack box.

Here it is:

I also packed myself a bento so that I could skip breakfast and have a bento brunch out on the trail:

Yummy organic pink grapefruit, fried basmati rice, and peanut butter pretzels.

As always with horses, the question, "What could go wrong?" is not rhetorical. I had no sooner stopped for lunch and placed the bentos on a log:

...than my horse John decided that red thing was interesting.

He was merely following the #1 Commandment of The Horse:

If It Looketh Interesting, Thou Shalt Try to Eat It.

Faster than I could say NO, JOHN!, he had the bento belt off, the compartments separated, the contents available and half of them eaten.

By this time I was thinking bento box rescue, so I dived in and did an intervention between his moochy lips and the container. He was unable to open the granola bar HA HA NO OPPOSABLE THUMBS!! and so I was able to defer this much of his gratification at least.

It then devolved upon me to help him get the carrot bits out of the brushy ground cover and offer them up to His Highness;

That took care of his snack, with a bit more drama than I'd expected. Now it was time for me to eat my own bento brunch.

This was tricky as I had brought one tiny slippery pair of chopsticks, and I had to hold his lead rope while eating. Plus, John decided that fried rice was something he had not yet enjoyed in life and that was a crime against equinedom.

Why did I not tie him to a tree, you may well ask?

Well that was because I had put his cute bear bells on his neck today, and I knew that if he had a tree to rub on he would follow Equine Commandment #2:

If Possible, Thou Shalt Break It.

So I juggled horse, chopsticks, and bento container as he alternately munched grass and loomed his big face into my space to beg for fried rice.

I gave up on the grapefruit sections and they are sitting in the fridge even as I write, a snack for a later more peaceful time. The peanut butter pretzels melted in the saddle bag:

..although you can see I ate one of them anyway, big mistake as the scent of peanut butter makes John revert to Hungry-Hungry-Caterpillar mode.

I think that horse bentos are a thing that needs some work. I believe I am a person who can take on that work. The ideal sequence of events may be: tie horse, eat one's own bento while horse noshes on grass, then feed horse his bento.

"What Could Go Wrong?"

2009-05-30T11:52:00.001-07:00

Shop Till You Drop (some cash) in Madison Asian Groceries!!!!

2009-05-17T17:02:00.000-07:00

Well heavens be praised: my second #1 son graduated from college this past Saturday. This being a general occasion for happiness and celebrating and getting choked up with tears frequently, it also provided me with the chance to revisit Asian groceries in Madison Wisconsin, the scene of much past hilarity and overspending on way-too-good Asian grocery items I cannot find at home.

Here are some of my favorite finds:

Clockwise from left: Dried shiitake at a bargain price, nori, curries green and red, and coconut milk & cream, Mama and Mami noodle soup mixes, and panko bread crumbs - I've never found these before and can't wait to cook some really kick-a$$ fried shrimp with the famous delicate crumb coating that everyone dies for...

And then...

Alluhz my sauzes: Again clockwise from back, Thai hot chili sauce, smoky dark soy sauce, mushroom flavored soy sauce, wasabi mayonnaise in a Kewpie mayo squeeze bottle!!; in the blue bottle, black sesame salt (like furikake?), nanami togarashi (my favorite delicate Japanese red chili peppers ground), prepared plum sauce - bet it will be better than my prune stuff!, and black pepper corns.

And then:

My sweet tooth indulgences:

Sweet layer cakes in pandan flavor??, black coffee candies?, almond Pocky!, crazy good chocolate mushroom cookies, chocolate filled Hello Panda! cookies, and coconut rolled cookies you can just barely see - like Pirouline cookies made in England if you know these. Most of these came from a Vietnamese dominated store that had a verrry dark seafood freezer cabinet, kind of scary.

And last but actually first:

Because one of Avie's video blogs stressed the importance of having a little travel Bento spoon-fork-chopsticks combo, I had to buy this Cinnomoroll one in pink. If Avie told me to jump off a bridge I probably would, assuming there would be some cool reward.

Anyway a wonderful coffee atmosphere exists in Madison so here's two last photos of a terrific coffee and cookie experience from a very emotional weekend:

More Happy Salad Rolls!!

2009-05-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

I love Thai Salad Rolls so much that I wake up thinking about them: all those fresh veggies, the spicy peanut sauce, the cool nomminess of them.

I got up at 5 a.m. the other morning and remembered I had half a pack of salad roll wraps in the fridge, so I got to work. I used this recipe but changed up the filling ingredients. I used red cabbage and lots more carrots than called for, and reduced the rice noodle content by about half, added a huge handful of cilantro, and omitted the peanuts.

This makes them even more nutritious and quite a bit lower in carbs.

I have to say though: my salad rolls are too floppy and loosely packed. I struggle with getting them firmer like the nice ones in Thai restaurants; if there's a trick, I don't know it. I suspect it takes practice. So I'll keep at it. This is a perfect summer bento item...

NQBR: Cool Hearse I Saw!

2009-05-09T03:27:00.000-07:00

Coming home yesterday I was passed by this huge old Detroit boat of a hearse, painted a lovely shade of purple and with this vanity plate on the back:

1ONICE Ha! When I'm dead I would like to be driven around in a purple hearse with a funny license plate. I wonder who owns this gas-guzzling monster and what possessed them to make it such a show-stopper. Don't you just love how crazy people can be??!

'But the instructions made it sound so easy!'

2009-05-07T06:06:00.001-07:00

Things we won't be trying again soon: making egg flowers for bento.

This sorry mess, the massacre of an innocent egg, was the result. Beneath the shards of my dignity there are nice cold sesame noodles, and the other half of Mr. Koi has raw carrots splashed with plum vinegar and couple of nice crisp olives. The vinegar will caress these carrots all morning and by noon they will be fragrant and salty and tangy...yum.

Jan is getting the koi bento today; mine has the same contents minus the axe-murdered egg, but plus Hello Kitty cookies in the lid:

And speaking of koi: the new place where I am boarding my horse John has a pond with actual koi in it!! They are orange, white, and orange-and-white, very pretty and mystical. Somehow fish create an alternate reality of quiet under the surface of the everyday. I love watching them!

"Hello Kitty" has a whole family??

2009-05-06T05:18:00.000-07:00

Who knew?? These characters are on the side of a pack of Kitty crackers Avie sent me in my box-o-treats. Who are they all? Does each one have bento boxes and must I own them all??

Today Jan and I have almost identical lunches which include a strange mango that never would ripen properly: it sat and sat, then finally I gave up and cut it this morning. Tastes fine but not quite the right texture, too crunchy.

Fried rice with spinach, chicken andouille sausage chunks on skewers, raw carrots, and mango with a fruit pick; then Jan also has Kitty crackers and a few jelly beans for cheerfulness. And I get mango nectar in my Scribble-Pig thermos. Not shown: my O-YES! choco-cake, the last one from our Madison shopping extravaganza awhile back.

Mango memory: When I was a little girl my dad rode the mail trains all the length of the eastern seaboard of Florida. They handed out mailbags at each little town and sometimes got handed back in a present. A typical present was an entire grocery bag filled with ripe mangoes. He would bring home dozens of them and we would feast like kings, the juice dripping down our skinny arms, oh it was heavenly.

Hello Grilling!!

2009-05-05T04:45:00.000-07:00

Jan got a new grill and ladies, you know what that means. He is particularly excited that it has a smokestack. This is a functional item that allows the griller to....ermmm...adjust the smoke? I don't know.

But we will definitely have more grilled things now since our old one was a freebie Weber kettle from my friend Laura and was missing some venting parts.

Today's bento is a Hello Kitty salad with leftover grilled shrimp and steak strips:

I've been pretty busy with horse transactions (sold Montana, equine dentist visit, etc.) so the bento aspect of life has been on hiatus. Horses can take up as much time (and money!) as you have to offer, I have discovered. But the feeling of freedom is quite well worth it:

This summer I am looking forward to testing my bento-packing skills with the ultimate horseback bento lunch. Anything that can stand up to that much jiggling will be a sturdy lunch indeed.

Wednesday Bento of Delights

2009-04-29T06:28:00.000-07:00

Jan's bento for today includes (left) fruits, pickles, and wasabi peas mixed with M&M's; (right) a baked spring roll, a couple of sushi rice balls, shrimp quick-fried in hot chili oil on skewers, placed on a bed of lacinato kale seared in sesame oil, with a soy bunny and a plum sauce container stuffed in the sides.

I love these little crab and lobster skewers:

They were marketed as "cocktail spears" but they screamed BENTO to me!! The lobsters and crabs have kyoot widdle eyeballs!!!

Baked Spring Rolls: The Movie!

2009-04-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

Well today I made baked spring rolls and I also made a little movie about the process. I was trying to avoid uploading 12 separate photos of my process. The spring rolls are awesome! Except I could not find fresh plums so I made the plum sauce with prunes. It turned out well, with a nice creamy consistency. But would for sure have been better if I'd had nice juicy plums.

Here's my movie:

For the filling I had chopped cabbage, carrot, and green onion, diced up firm tofu, and ginger. I fried all this in a tiny amount of sesame oil.

And then I was able to send some home with these two angels:

My son Brian and his girlfriend Carly, who headed back to Madison just an hour ago.

I also gave Carly a bento box filled with road snacks!! They have great Asian groceries in Madison...

Getting along with Sushi Rice

2009-04-25T02:53:00.000-07:00

I've made some progress in my quest for good sticky shapeable sushi rice technique. At first I almost gave up: I would get it too dry, too wet, not properly cooked, you name it.

There was a moment of decision in the grocery store: buy a 10-pound bag of Tokyo Rose short grain rice and just keep experimenting until I get it, or give up?

At this personal Rubicon, I crossed into Rome and dragged home the giant amount of rice.

As of yesterday (knock on wood), I think I have become able to tell when the rice is 'ready' for each stage of its progress: when it has been rinsed enough, when it has soaked enough, when it's cooked, steamed, and most important: when it has enough of the tasty rice vinegar liquid added back to make it just right for shaping. This is a huge victory for me!! there have been numerous defeats and some rice has fallen by the wayside...

My favorite way to bring rice in my bento lunches is just these small plain shapes with no stuffing inside: little cylinders and little spheres. A little sesame on top maybe and furikake to shake over at the last minute.

I got a whole pan of little shapes out of one cup of rice, and was able to serve them to my younger son and his lovely girlfriend who showed up unexpectedly from Wisconsin for a weekend visit. I also thawed some gyoza for them (note to self: don't freeze gyoza all in a lump and you won't have to cry trying to get them apart when they're thawing), made soba noodles with sauce, Wasabi Roasted Vegetables*, meatballs dipped in hoisin, and gunpowder bancha tea. My younger son is a Japanophile from way back and so getting to serve him some of my new bento-directed creations was a long-anticipated pleasure. (He taught himself conversational Japanese to an impressive degree and has been there twice for extended visits! I loved showing him my bento stuff and especially Avie's crab hotdog cutter!)

Wasabi Roasted Vegetables

Heat oven to 425.
Rinse and cut a pound or pound and a half of any vegetables into bite-size pieces: I used carrots, spring onions, and asparagus; anything will work though and green beans and zucchini would be terrific.
In a cup, whisk together 1-2 TB water, 1 TB soy sauce, 1 TB sesame oil and your estimated tasty amount of wasabi powder - I used about 3/4 TSP.
Arrange veggies on a cookie sheet, pour wasabi mixture over to coat evenly.
Roast in oven for about 12 minutes, longer if your vegetable pieces are large.
Enjoy!

These would travel in bento really well and they were super-tasty, sweet, with just a hint of wasabi-ness.

Yummy Cream Cookies from Avie

2009-04-24T04:51:00.000-07:00

These little bear cookies were so good! They had a chocolate cream filling, and each little bear-shaped cookie was stamped with a picture of a bear doing something different: dancing, eating honey, sleeping...in all they were so fun I hated to eat them except for the nomminess. Thanks Avie!

This bento was an idea I got from Honey She's Twisted: to make anything more nutritious, just add spinach or greens. I had this lovely lacinato kale, and some leftover basmati rice, so I just stirfried some green onion and ginger in sesame oil, threw in the chopped kale for a few minutes, threw in the rice and some soy sauce, then made the little cave in the middle of the wok and cooked up two eggs in the cave, then mixed it all together.

It was dynamite! Great tip Honey. I'll be doing this a lot. I love greens like spinach and kale and chard, but sometimes a great pile of them on a plate is daunting.

Bentos of Spring

2009-04-23T03:43:00.000-07:00

This one I threw together really fast using the wild rice cranberry bread I got on Sunday in my Co-op foray and just a bunch of raw things. It was great for the day: sunny, warm, t-shirt weather as we say here in the frozen north. The only cooked thing is the baby zucchini I quick-fried and stuffed in next to the peanut butter sandwich.

This bento was an island in a hectic day of meetings. Meetings! Wouldn't the working world be a better place without them? If someone enacted a ban on meetings, what would we miss? Not the sad little 'bars' that no one really wants but almost everyone will eat if they are set out on a plastic tray. Not the terrible coffee. And we could use all that time to....shop for bento!

How Bento Changed my Dinner Habits

2009-04-22T03:43:00.001-07:00

Before I got into making bento lunches, I never really thought about the colors of food. Oh I must have noticed them sometimes but now I am obsessed with color and texture. This dinner started out as the square of egg casserole and a ?? about what else to add. It ended up with beautiful green kale sauteed in sesame oil, cherry tomatoes, a baby zucchini I threw in the skillet after the kale and made just barely tender, cute little olives, and two lovely radishes. Woot.

Benefits of bento just keep on coming! This morning before work I am going to ride a horse and walk the dogs. It's finally getting warm enough so that these activities don't sound like torture!

Happy Wednesday to you!!

YAY!! Avie's Treat Box Arrived!! NomNom Nom

2009-04-21T03:40:00.000-07:00

A magical mystery package arrived yesterday and it was filled with delights! I won Avie's bento giveaway by whining about my birthday, which made me feel guilty later but what a lovely outcome. This gorgeous collection of nommy and fragrant treats will give us great joyluck and happiness:

We haz little candies:

We haz little cakes:

We haz this little dude who appears to be wearing a cookpot on his head:

And we haz bubble tea in several varieties:

A device for turning a hot dog into a crab (I think):

which I cannot wait to try.

What a barrel of fun!! Avie, I've said it before and I'll say it again; You are Simply the Best!

Now I need to pay it forward and have a giveaway myself! And by the way, do you think Tina Turner has such great legs because she eats bento?

Monday Morning Bento Factory

2009-04-20T05:29:00.001-07:00

Today's bentos show the results of a terrific Co-op shopping trip yesterday morning early.

Our co-op gets crowded at times so I try to sneak in before the mob of organic moms and Birkenstock dads and vitamin-chomping robust seniors and super-articulate kids flood the aisles (how many stereotypes can I get in before 8 a.m.?). Seriously, yesterday one little toddler said to his mother: "If I behave cooperatively all the way home, what will I get?" He could not have been talking for more than 6 months and he can use 6-syllable words? His mom said, "We have already had this conversation." And he then shut up. Miracle.

Anyway my biggest score was the curry lentil stuff that is the anchor of today's lunch. You literally just pour boiling water over it and you have your curry lentil dish. This would be such great horse-camping food. It tastes fantastic.

So I made some fresh sweet basmati rice this morning to go with it, and then realized I couldn't give Jan both lentils and rice - too carby for him - so I am the only rice bento today.

Otherwise we have snappy little green Castelvetano olives (never heard of them but they are dynamite), teensy organic tangerines that just made me think BENTO when I spotted them, ribbon-cut raw carrots, gorgeous radishes that are so cool and sweet, strawberries that were on sale but still not cheap, cheese, Jan gets half a hard-boiled egg, I get walnuts, Pocky in our lids thanks to Avie who pointed out this handy substitute for chopsticks!

Happy Monday to everyone!

Hello Salad!!

2009-04-17T04:34:00.001-07:00

Hello Kitty bento is great for a salad on a warm spring morning. I was surprised today when I went to let the dogs out - it wasn't cold!! Nobody will be in class today - we always have mass absences on these first few nice days. The students will drag heavy furniture out onto their rental lawns and drink beverages while waving at passers-by. No thoughts of calculus or chemistry will be allowed!

Today I also have put peach nectar in the little "Scribble Pig!" thermos. It says in French: "Scribble on an aluminum thermos!" Very self-referential and even....existential I think.

The only thing even remotely Asian about this bento is the rice vinegar in the salad dressing; otherwise it's just a big ole American salad for a warm spring day.

Weekend incoming!! Hope it's great for you!!

Thursday Throw-Together Bento

2009-04-16T05:24:00.001-07:00

I wasn't even going to make a bento for today - short work day, department heads meeting this afternoon cancelled WOO HOO one less morose discussion of budget cuts! But I threw this together thinking I might get hungry...must take care of baby.

It has: an Easter egg filled with nuts and mints, pink grapefruit sections, hard boiled egg, umeboshi onigiri, Thai coleslaw, and a chocolate in the lid. Lookit my new penguin bento belt:

How cheerful is that???

Kitty Bento Packing

2009-04-15T05:08:00.000-07:00

I seem to be addicted to sending Jan's lunches in Hello Kitty these days. One of the co-workers said he would not be willing to carry this kyoot pink lunch box around the halls of our employment, "unless maybe it was black".

Is there a black version of Hello Kitty??

Anyway one thing I love about this single-space container with its domed face lid, is that you can really pack a lot of oddly assorted shapes into it and it's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

Today Jan has a bratwurst in a bun, cajun smoked cheese slices, celery and carrot strips, a nice big green onion, a container of ketchup, two frozen brownie bites, and another container of wasabi peas.

It's supposed to reach 50+ degrees here today and sunny - so I am going to try to sneak in a ride before I go to work. One of the joys of living in a harsh seasonal climate is watching everyone including myself go bonkers when the weather gets nice.

Easter Leftovers Bento

2009-04-14T03:35:00.001-07:00

Jan got Easter leftovers yesterday. On the right: grilled brats, Thai coleslaw, asparagus and strawberry salad; on the left, 7-layer salad, olives, and a mixture of jelly beans and wasabi peas.

Today he is getting:

Hello Kitty with chicken-bacon salad, good bread our neighbors brought to dinner Sunday, fresh veggies, a dill pickle, a few Triscuits in the rosemary flavor Jan likes, and a marshmallow bunny.

I'm still debating whether to top off our bentos with cupcakes. OK debate over, cupcakes are in.

Krazy Easter Kupkakes

2009-04-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

NQBR (not quite bento-related) but I enjoyed making these cupcakes based on Bakerella's recipe and instructions. The cupcake recipe itself turned out really well: a nice straightforward chocolate cake made with baking cocoa. And the buttercream frosting was nice on the not too sweet chocolate. Then of course loading the tops with extra candies etc. was a blast.

Hope everyone got their fill of marshmallow Peeps and other good things to celebrate spring! I also gave the dogs a bath this morning (Easter dog bath, old pagan custom?) and they smell like lavendar for the moment.

Here you see young Rufus has moved his nylabone chewing operation into Gabey's sunny spot, and poor Gabe has parked himself behind Rufus in futile protest. Life is so unfair. But seconds after this photo was taken, someone moved Rufus's hiney right out of there and Gabe moved up into his accustomed position.

Proving that all things come to those who wait.

Easter Kitty Bento!

2009-04-10T05:27:00.000-07:00

Hello Kitty Bento did not get Jan killed yesterday so she is going back today. Actually Kitty helped solve a few work-related problems during Jan's lunch yesterday as in "What Would Kitty Say?" (WWKS). So I am optimistic she will become part of Jan's IT team if she keeps on task.

Jan has: (from right) Cornmeal crusted chicken, daikon chickies and bunbuns, a sauce container for the Thai salad roll (buried), lots of raw veggies, a plastic Easter egg filled with egg salad, and two Peep bunbuns. I had meant to include the feathery green onion but decided it would make everything including the marshmallow bunnies smell like onion by lunchtime - it was a strong little dude. So onion is not going to work today.

Hey it's Easter weekend so everybody eat Peeps and Cadbury eggs, get a sugar high, and go bento shopping!!

"Hello Sailor!" Kitty goes with Jan today

2009-04-09T04:43:00.000-07:00

At the risk of getting Jan teased by his co-workers at lunch, I am sending Hello Kitty bento with him today.

My 'concept' was right for this bento space and I could not make myself force it into any other box. I wanted to have a black bean and soy meat burrito resting in amongst fresh veggies, a sour cream alien, and a marshmallow peep on top. I can't wait to hear the reaction - from Jan OR his lunch friends. This could be the last time Kitty goes to ITSS lunch room.

My own bento is in rabbit usagi:

Edamame and Uncle Paul's bread; grape tomatoes, home-grown mung bean sprouts, egg salad, fresh kale and a few kalamata olives.

Mmmm Leftover Chinese Takeout!!

2009-04-08T06:05:00.001-07:00

Is there anything better?

1. It's free! You already paid for it anyway.

2. It got better overnight! The flavors sang little songs to each other all night long in your fridge.

3. It has no calories!

Jan's bento has some of his "Happy Family" entree, some of my pork egg foo yung, some fried rice that I actually made fresh this morning so that I could add some protein (the egg) and ginger, my special delight invention: SuperEasy Thai Salad (recipe below), a marshmallow peep, and a Korean cookie.

SuperEasy Thai Salad:

packaged coleslaw mix
Fresh cilantro, rinsed, dried, and chopped fine
green onion chopped
olive oil
fresh lime juice

Combine and enjoy! The cilantro and lime really give this salad a nice Thai kick and you can make it in 3 minutes or less. If you are a hot pepper person, adding one of these would really send it over the moon. I use a lot of cilantro, almost one part coleslaw mix, one part cilantro. It's very healthful and so good.

And: because I will probably never have 24 yellow roses in my kitchen again, here's a photo of the roses I gave the Mortar Board students on Monday:

This was so much fun and the students really responded well: all the class would burst into applause for the tapped one. I walked miles though -- from one end of the campus to the other all day long -- and my feet were really sore afterwards. Next year the students will do their own tapping in the way they see fit - I kinda hope it does not involve me walking 46 miles with an armload of roses.

Thai Salad Rolls for Monday

2009-04-06T03:52:00.001-07:00

We got some really pretty fresh cilantro at the Co-op yesterday so i decided the time had come to make Thai salad rolls for the first time ever. I'd found the wraps some time back and I was pretty scared about them; they had the consistency of plastic, and a basket-weave pattern on them. I thought they might be wonky to work with but: they were really cooperative! The soak time in hot water is crucial; too long and they turn to a little squiggle of wet mess, too short and they crack. But it was easy to tell when they were 'just right'. I filled them with a mixture of carrot, cucumber, green onion, cilantro, and rice noodles plus a sauce of soy, Sambal Oelek (red pepper sauce), hoisin, peanut butter, and fresh lime juice. The rest of the sauce goes for dipping after you make the rolls.

My bento for today has two salad rolls and a sauce container, cherry tomatoes, pink grapefruit, baby cheese and a brownie bite.

Jan has:

One salad roll (they are high in carbs), veggies, and cottage cheese with edamame; then a salad with bacon crumbles and kalamata olives, more veggies, and a corner of lemon cake.

Big day at work today as we are 'tapping' the new student members of Mortar Board; I have to go all their classes dressed in an academic gown, hand them a yellow rose and a scroll, and pronounce a magic spell over them to make them Mortar Board people. 22 class visits, 22 magic spells; the logistics are mind-boggling. I will need my bento to survive!

"Hel-LOH KITTEH!" Part 2

2009-04-05T05:47:00.000-07:00

NQBR (not quite bento-related!) but I couldn't resist posting this photo of my horse John with Orangey the barn cat. Orangey just showed up one day and he has had an adventurous career - he got lured into a crate, hauled off the vet and neutered; he got lured into a crate again and vetted for a cold or something, he got a fleece blankie made for him by my friend Kathy, he disappears for days on end and then suddenly he's back, and he loves certain horses.

This picture is from Saturday morning early when the barn was quiet, that is before the onslaught of young girls who make it a zoo on weekends. I made myself a Saturday bento so that when I came home all hungry from horsey fun, I would not just grab random food items:

There's a piece of roast chicken, two gyoza, carrots, snow peas, and radish; then sweet pickles, a babybel cheese, nuts, and a brownie bite. It was grand.

Bento for my Baby Boy!!

2009-04-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

My oldest baby boy came home for a surprise visit Friday! He practically gave me a heart attack showing up at my work office with no advance warning and having spread disinformation "No I can't come home this break - too busy!". I flashed through so many emotions seeing his beloved self appear around the corner: shock, fear (has he quit med school or something?!), joy, worry (I have work to do), on & on the emotional roller coaster that is loving someone absolutely and having a hostage to Fortune.

I made him a snack bento to take back to St. Louis:

This means that my 'healing of nature' bento is gone south temporarily - I'll maybe retrieve it.

But like all true fanatics, I tried to convert my son to the bento obsession. I told him to bring it to the lab with him, "just put rice in one layer and carrots in the other; you'll be glad you did! No plastic bags, no mess, great food."

I wonder if he will. I'm guessing, probably not. But I could be wrong.

He and Gabey (dog in above photo) are best friends and champion nap takers-together. So both dudes had a great visit involving some z's. Good times.

Thursday Snack Bento; Jan Gets None

2009-04-02T03:59:00.000-07:00

Today Jan has to eat his bento from yesterday because he went out to lunch with his group of lunch buddies yesterday. I hope his crackers aren't stale after sitting in the fridge at work all night.

My bento in the extraterrestrial ghost rabbit box from China is just a snack because I have a short day today. It's a good size snack though!

Mini-corn muffins, egg salad, a radish wall between them; carrots, walnuts, and grapes.

Our employer offers us $60 to fill out an online "Wellness Assessment" every year (and I'm sure they hope we'll be horrified into getting weller and using less health insurance). I was glad to see that the general addition of bento into our diet has resulted in more raw vegetables and fruit consumed, less meat, some weight loss from last year same time, and a complete lack of desire to share my inmost thoughts with some faceless 'wellness' corporation. "Do you experience anxiety in the workplace?" I ain't sayin.

But $60 will buy about 4 bento boxes!!!!!! No I'm quitting that; I have plenty. Famous last words.

Hel-LO KITTEH!

2009-04-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

Hello Kitty! bento arrived from China yesterday. I had to order two of these because my dog Rufus is giving one to a friend's cat as a gift. I had been uncertain about Kitty's size and thought it might be tiny, but as you see it is pretty big (it's next to my standard size bento box for comparison in the picture above). And the lid or Kitty's face domes up so there's even extra room.

"Hello Kitty" is a strange phenomenon; raging fad from Japan that has lasted for years and finally become a mass production commodity in the U.S. You can now buy Hello Kitty pajamas at Target. What does it mean? The strange little expressionless cat face stares back at us from a mysterious distance.

Kitty has: egg salad, raw veggies, grapes, babybel cheese, a brownie bite, and a slice of raisin toast.

Jan's bento is similar:

but also has salami-cheese rollups and the Ak-Mak crackers he likes, along with some wasabi peas for crunch.

We got an extra 6 inches of snow yesterday and that's no April Fool. I hope winter is almost finished with us; we are getting cranky.

Return of the Emo-Octodogs

2009-03-31T04:03:00.001-07:00

Jan's bento for today features some of my pride-and-joy gyoza, and also the return of the octodog - that terrifying Japanese snack consisting of a hot dog with facial features and eight legs. I made one face smiling and the other threatening an axe murder. This is good. Life should include both aspects don't you think?

In addition I carved a hard-boiled egg into a 'design', and included a chickie pick with cajun smoked cheese cubes. Then there's a rice salad with kalamata olives and sweet peppers, and a brownie bite to add the sweet conclusion. What a mixed up lunch. It's snowing and sleeting as I write, and that's mixed up too since it is supposed to be spring I think...