Thai Salad Rolls on a Summer Day

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!!

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

(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.

Return of the Emo-Octodogs

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...

Spring Sunshine Bento

I see Blogger has decided this image should appear sideways. Can't figure out what to do about that so...

Yesterday the sun came out fiercely for awhile, and even though it was still frakkin cold (BSG technical term here), some students around campus wore a touch of summer. I saw: young lady in flip flops and a down jacket; young lady in Ugg boots, shorts, and a full length wool coat; young man barefoot and in shorts, with goose bumps and slightly blue knees.

This is a time honored ritual in northern Minnesota: Welcome Spring! We are uncomfortable in these summer duds but we are bull headed and dang it we are wearing them regardless.

My sideways bento has: gyoza which I made myself!, umeboshi onigiri, broccoli, home-made yogurt with also home-made cranberry topping yumty yum, and a nice big orange in the sunshine. In bento lid: a Fig Newton. Good times for a Monday!!

Karaoke Recovery Gyoza

Last night we went to a birthday party at which extremely loud karaoke singing was the big event, or the only event really, because no conversation was remotely possible.

Now karaoke. Who invented it and What Were They Thinking? Did it seem like a good idea to invite people to massacre other people's favorite songs? I guess it was marketable anyway since karaoke shortly conquered the world.

At last night's event, the 'funniest thing' was this: if you don't know the song, just squawk the lyrics in loud 'funny' voice as the words light up. I came home with my ears ringing and regretting the conversations I could maybe have had. Call me an old grumpus, but I had awful karaoke nightmares all night long.

So this morning to recover I made gyoza for the first time. I had bought some 'pot sticker wraps' last week, hoping they would work in the little gyoza squeezer I named "Jaws". Sure enough they were perfect. I chopped up Savoy cabbage, pork roast leftovers, ginger, and green onion; added a splash of mirin and one of soy sauce; pepper and a tad of corn starch.

I made a 'sealing paint' of one tablespoon corn starch, one tablespoon water. Then I went to work making little pillows of goodness! What fun. Here's is my pile of gyoza fresh from Jaws:

By sheer luck, I had almost exactly the right amount of filling for this pack of wraps. Since this will never happen to me again as long as I live, I took a picture:

I froze half and cooked up the other half for today's lunch or dinner. Really I just wanted to cook them & see how they tasted! They are terrific.

As you can see I got carried away frying them and some are too dark. These will be the first to go!

Success; I almost can't hear the ghastly karaoke caterwauling any more. When the song "YMCA" came up, everyone sang and danced. The host of the party had a philosophical moment: "Isn't this an interesting statement about human nature? The stupidest song is the one that makes everyone happy". That song does have some strange power over people, myself included.

Happy weekend everyone!

Food Coloring

I'm pretty happy with how colorful Jan's bento is today, partially thanks to the violent-red marshmallow Peep - heavens I love these things! I think they are filled with secret vitamins. I'm glad they are just seasonal though. If I could eat them all the time I would come to resemble one.

Jan is getting: gyoza and pork roast, broccoli, grapes, a little whaley full of soy/mirin sauce for the gyoza, cherry tomato and sweet pepper 'flowers', and Mr. Peep in all his glory surrounded by Easter colored M&M's.

Happy Monday and Happy Bento!

Wootiwoot woot New Bentos!!

The killer-cute Koi bento and its little friend the Black Sheep Shinzi Kato arrived yesterday from the EBay seller TokyoSamurai, located in Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan. I highly recommend this seller because after I ordered these items TokyoSamurai refunded a chunk of my shipping because the online shipping calculator had overcharged me. It was a small amount and I would never have noticed, but I admired their attention to detail.

The Black Sheep fascinates me. A group of white sheep are near the top of the design, and one black sheep right and lower down. A caption reads,

It's a nice day!
Where are you going
Such Beautiful day?

Is this the black sheep talking to the group or vice versa? All around the edge of the top a line of text runs: "How about we go shopping today? We'll buy delicious fruits. How about you? Do you want to come? Sounds good! I will go to shopping!"

I love the endlessly looping shopping plans, and I love worrying about the black sheep: if she is making a friendly overture, will the white sheep really go shopping with her or will they ditch her in a cruel manner? Like, lose her in the mall?

In all it is an open ended story, my favorite kind. Anything could happen!

Today's bentos:

Jan has sushi I made last night (you have to imagine the cursing and swearing as I acquire this skill through painful epic failures one after another) with quail eggs jammed in there too, a ribbon of ginger and a froggy soy bottle; gyoza (frozen from the Asian market); salad, and a brownie.



I have an onigiri (plain, with an umeboshi on top), some sushi, gyoza, cucumber wedges, soy quail eggs, and red pepper strips. Me and the black sheep have a date later, maybe go shopping; it's a beautiful day.