bento friday: steak, round 2

mmmmm... colors

So!  Last week I talked about conquering my steak-cooking phobia.  It turns out that when you slice meat super thinly and eat it with tons of veggies and starch, it goes a rather long way.  I'd reserved a pretty standard-looking chunk of meat, but only wound up using about a third of it for our two bento that first day, so back into the freezer it went!  

Enter the next week's feature: more steak with stuff!  

I should probably confess that I don't actually plan my bento.  They usually serve the purpose of 'OMG there are veggies languishing in the drawer that we forgot to eat quick do something!', which I suppose is a feature unto itself.  

I don't really have a plan for sauces any more, either.  After sautéeing whatever stuff is going into the meal, I toss some assortment of stuff into the pan to reduce, and call it food.  This week's random-stuff-sauce was actually remarkably tasty; I think it involved ginger, garlic, soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, and Laos chili paste.  You never know!

Anyway, this week we had a lonely red bell pepper, and some green beans.  Add noodles and meat, and you have yourself a darn decent lunch.  This stuff ain't rocket science, and it doesn't have to be intimidating at all.  That's one of my favorite things about Maki, my bento heroine.  She takes the fear out of bento making, unlike all the Must Get It Perfect kyaraben images that float around the internet, that must have taken a professional artist eight hours to assemble into a perfect likeness of Hello Kitty made from kelp or something.  Nope.  Cook things.  Put in box.  Eat at lunch.  

This is my kind of cooking.