2 Summer Bentos of Leftovers!

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.

Getting along with Sushi Rice

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.

Mr. Bento's International Incident

Today's Mr. Bento lunch was international to an almost alarming degree. Last night I made sushi rice rolls with sesame seeds on top, using a gizmo that crushes rice into roll shapes. Nifty! Much better than wearing sticky rice mittens the way I did last time. So this was the Japan element, along with Mr. Bento himself of course.

To that I added some shrimp and a tiny bottle of soy sauce with a bunny shaped head from "Mama's Assist".

I can tell you that Mama needs assist in getting soy sauce into that little bottle opening; a teensy funnel was provided but I recommend you have a full cup of coffee and put on your glasses before trying this at home.

Also in today's lunch: Minnesota-baked pita quarters with Egyptian hummus inside, a Greek salad, and an orange from Mexico. How many continents are represented in this photo?! What a world we live in. In the olden days you'd have to have been a Roman Caesar to eat such a world-cafe of ingredients, as in "thrushes' tongues from Persia and honey from Africa" etc. Now it is all at our fingertips.

My husband eats lunch with a somewhat rowdy crowd of co-workers, who are a bit fascinated with his Bento lunches now. Today one of them said, "What did you do last night??" I think it was the sushi rolls.