1st Day New Semester Bento!!!

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.

'But the instructions made it sound so easy!'

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!

Friday Pad Thai with Substitutions

At 5 this morning I decided to make Pad Thai for Jan's bento. Here's my thought process lying in bed in the dark:

"What goes into pad thai? I have some noodles, shrimp, chili sauce, blah blah...I bet I could make that this morning! I'll get a recipe on the internet!"

Looking up a recipe I had to realize what I did not have on hand, so my 'pad thai' is pretty unorthodox. No rice noodles, substitute soba. No fresh coriander, sub in fresh cilantro. No tamarind, but apparently this is a common plight for cooks because I got about 100 hits searching for "don't have tamarind?" Lime juice with brown sugar is the standard fallback.

Anyhoo it was fun to make and too easy so I think I might have come across a nonstandard recipe with shortcuts. Oh well! It smells great.

Jan also has: a salad, some cucumber slices with ume plum vinegar, and King Peep in all his glory. TGIF bento babes!!

Red-Egg Bento: Fun with Food Colors

Coloring eggs is so much fun it should not be confined to Easter and the outsides of eggs. I am just beginning to have these weird bento color desires. The (peeled, hard-boiled) egg floated all night in a sinister red solution of (true confession) food coloring. Real bento people use all-natural dye like water that beets have been boiled in. I will get there.

This bento above was one of my favorites ever. It had a little mini-bagel burger, sesame red chard, the great Red Egg (half), yams with sesame seeds on top, cucumber slices, and a little bunny of ume plum vinegar for the yam. I looooove plum vinegar!

Jan's bento was related:


Mini-burger with chips and a little container of ketchup; coleslaw with green onions and Red Egg (half); yam slices, veggies and soybean green olive hummus; an yogurt with blackberries and agave nectar.

My struggle with Jan's meals is always that he wants low carbs but I believe almost religiously in the importance of yellow vegetables such as yams, energy carbs such as rice, and of course DESSERT the most civilizing food category of the planet. He has ordered a low-carb cookbook so maybe we'll get some more ideas there.