bento friday: adorable heart edition

For this friday's bento feature, I made good use of my heart-shaped silicone muffin cups.  Those things are dang useful for containing all sorts of stuff.  However, they're only one size, so the teriyaki sausage and bell pepper stir fry is split between two of them.  Oh well.

And yes, that's an onigiri.  I'm pseudo-paleo, and rice is tasty sometimes.  Whatevs.

Underneath: miso-ginger zucchini and broccoli.

Have I told you the magic thing about fresh ginger?  I adore fresh ginger, but was always buying a piece, stashing it in the fridge, and using maybe a third of it before it got either all moldy or desiccated.  Sadface.

Then I learned a thing!  Here's the secret: you can grate frozen ginger. 

Now I keep my ginger in a baggie in the freezer, and just pull it out and grate it directly into whatever I'm making.  No need to remember to defrost, no more food waste, and no more "I totally have ginger, no prob... oh, it's a ball of mold.  Oops."

BOOM.

bento friday, because reasons

Going back through the archives, it looks like I used to post bento things on Fridays.  Maybe I should start doing that again. Oh hey, it's Friday!  I should write a thing.

Look at me being all grown-up and stuff.

SO.

First off, I've talked about these zucchini noodles (adorably called 'zoodles').  They're... well, they're not noodles.  Because they, well, have the texture of zucchini.  But they are long and skinny and fun to slurp, so they largely serve the same purpose.  Good enough for me.

Zoodles!

Also, can we take a moment to appreciate the gloriousness that is a big pile of fresh shiitake mushrooms?  There's a sort of international market that sells these at a tiny fraction of the price you get from fancy grocery stores.  They are amazing.  They are my world.  Mmm.

Mmm.  Yes.

Anyway, assembled into bento form, we have this lovely creation below.

Left: broccoli and beef stir fry over zoodles.

Right: teriyaki shiitake mushrooms, and a soy-sauce-coated hard-boiled egg.

Tasty.

another bento, because I don't know what else to say yet

This bento is made of lazy.

So my life has been super weird for a while.  Transitioning back into desk-job-land can be a little disorienting after a prolonged period wherein my existence was mostly made up of binge-watching Babylon 5 and eating Nutella with a spoon while naked. 

Hey, don't judge.

Anyway, I floundered around a little bit.  I'm now re-embracing my white-collar reality, and part of that means realizing just how dang expensive my coworkers' habit of going out to eat every single day for lunch gets to be.  On top of that, the whole dietary limitation thing means there's... maybe one or two things I can order at a given restaurant, and friends, that gets boring. 

So.  Prepping real lunches suddenly makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.  Last week I made a frightfully general pronouncement of the "I'm gonna do this now!" variety, but hadn't really, like, planned or anything.  So last week was a little haphazard.  But being the obsessive planner that I am, this week, by golly, there's strategy.  With shopping in advance and everything.  See me adulting all over the place?

So this morning I got up with the alarm instead of dawdling in a warm bed, and made this delicious creation.  It took about 20 minutes and took up only two pans and one spatula, making it totally manageable.  This one also neatly illustrates two of the most often used tools in my bento cooking toolbox. 

Simple Veg Stir Fry
The idea is simple: cut up whatever veg you have languishing in the fridge, saute it a bit, and top with whatever sauce sounds tasty.

In this case, that looked like:

1.  zucchini slices and canned bamboo shoots sauteed in sunflower oil, with bottled Szechuan sauce and red pepper flakes stirred in (note: this one wasn't mine, cuz I shouldn't have the red pepper.  I forgot to snap a shot of my bento today); and
2. weird little mushrooms I got from an ethnic market sauteed in butter, with fresh spinach, mirin, and soy sauce (you can't really see this one, as it's under the steak).

But the basic model is remarkably versatile.  Instant side dish, foundation on which to layer something fancier, or bento filler.  Add something proteiny and you could  make a meal out of just stir-fried stuff, though for bento I like making multiple little dishes.  While my bento are super-boring by some standards and I'm neither cool enough nor motivated enough to get into kyaraben, I do feel that having several dishes in the box makes it somehow fancier and less like leftovers.

Teriyaki <insert meat here>
So at the store, I was poking around and found a ridiculously gorgeous looking steak.  I didn't recognize the type of cut, but it was deep red and beautiful, so I took a chance and bought it.  I kinda know nothing about meat; it's a bit of a skills gap.  Must fix that someday.

Last night it was sliced up super-thin (across the grain, of course!) and tossed in a baggie with some soy sauce, mirin, and brown sugar to marinate.  Normally I'd use some sake as well, but we appear to be out at the moment so whatever.  This morning I fried it in some sesame oil for like two minutes (cast iron over high heat gives the most satisfying browning without overcooking), added a little extra of the sauce ingredients, and topped with sesame seeds.  Super easy!

This model (slice meat, marinate overnight, fry up) is a good one, and seriously takes maybe five minutes in the morning.  Chicken and steak are great for this.  Delicious and so trivial to do. 



The combination of these two generic "recipes" facilitates a lot of not having to think in the morning, but still winding up with a tasty lunch.  And I appreciate that rather a  lot.

a return, a complicated, and a bento

It's been a while.

A lot of life has happened.  A LOT.  And we'll get to that.  For now let's say that my life was turned upside down for a while, but that I've gotten back on track and it's all starting to make sense.  Honestly, it's pretty awesome now.

Frankly, I've been a little intimidated with the idea of coming back to blogging, because of the sheer enormity of what's happened, and how intense it would be to try to explain everything satisfactorily.  But you know what?  Maybe it's better to write a thing, rather than waiting to write the perfect, all-encompassing thing.

So instead of delving into my personal drama... have a bento!  That's right -- after a long hiatus for the above-mentioned chaos, bento is once again a thing in my life!  It's a little more complicated now, because:

1. I went paleo-ish about a year and a half ago, so am avoiding most grains and starches, and
2. I'm currently on a low-to-no-acid diet as ordered by the medical establishment.  That means no tomatoes, vinegar, caffeine, citrus, most fruits, carbonated stuff, or chocolate. Also no spicy things, like chile.  Graaaaaarrrrgh.

So the intersection in the Venn diagram of the above situations is... rather limited.

But by golly, I'm gonna figure it out. Assisted rather significantly by this epic collection of paleo lunches. 

Meatball Bento!

A few days ago, I made a big batch of ginger-teriyaki meatballs based very loosely on these ones.  I used carrots instead of sweet potato, dumped in a crapload (that's a technical measurement, there) of fresh chopped ginger, and some random teriyaki sauce that was in the fridge.  I omitted the cilantro because I hate that stuff, the tomato paste because I can't have that anymore, and... okay, so I didn't follow the recipe at all.  But it gave me the idea, damn it!

Anyway, I made a batch of those and froze 'em, because dudes, I am lazy in the mornings.  This morning I had a plan to make cracklin' chicken, because it sounds awesome, but then morning happened and somehow dealing with raw meat just didn't seem like a thing to do.  So voila!  Magical pre-made freezer meatballs to the rescue. I'm a genius.

We have:

• Some broccoli and bell pepper, fry-steamed an then tossed with soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, and powdered ginger.  Topped with black sesame seeds. 
• Magical pre-made freezer meatballs of the ginger-teriyaki variety, fried a bit to thaw and warm, and dressed with some Szechuan stir-fry sauce that was in the fridge.
• Under the meatballs: a few handfuls of spinach, quickly sauteed in the pan used for the other veg, with toasted sesame oil.
• Under the spinach: zucchini and carrot "noodles," made with a julienne peeler (kinda like this one).  These things are awesome.  They turn veg into remarkably noodle-like strands.  For today, I mixed zucchini and carrot, and boiled them super-briefly (like maybe 2 minutes) before topping them with the other stuff.  You can't really see them under the stuff, but trust me, they're there. 
  
  Zucchini "noodles" have been an awesome tool to have for paleo cooking in general.  I've topped them with tomato sauce, fried eggs, pesto... it's magical.  Okay, so they don't actually taste like noodles, because they're all busy tasting like zucchini, but it does provide one with a spaghettiesque eating experience of slurping up long skinny things covered in sauce.  And that's good enough for me.
  
  I also learned recently that in some circles these things are referred to as "zoodles."  That is freaking adorable.  
  

 So... it's a bento!  And it's paleo, and it's my-weird-diet-restrictions-friendly, and it'll probably be reasonably tasty.  Win. 

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.  

bento friday: brave new attempts

I was raised largely health-nut-vegetarian-hippie-style.  I jokingly refer to myself as a 'recovering vegetarian.'  I kind of tend to eat very little meat out of preference (just never developed much of a taste for the stuff, I guess), but have to get some occasionally for health reasons.  

Then I went and married a dyed-in-the-wool, huntin', grillin', steak-gnoshin' carnivore.  

Life is funny like that.  

Anyway, my upbringing meant that I never really got a lot of training in meat-cooking, and have always been kind of squicked out by raw meat.  I have to *touch* that?  Ew. 

I've gotten a lot better about that, and can at least handle the stuff now.  I can make chicken and dumplings.  I can grill sausages.  I'm making progress, here.   But cooking cow-meat still terrifies me; there are all these super-specific amounts of cooking (WTF does medium-well actually mean, anyway?), and it's apparently really important to get it exactly right for each person.  What, you've never cooked a steak before?  Better get it perfect!  But no pressure!

Eek.  But!  I am a grown-up now, and can conquer this silly steak-phobia.  A while back I set aside a chunk of steak when portioning a grocery store family-pack, and tossed it in the freezer for bento purposes.  It got a little freezer-burned while sitting in there being ignored, but finally I thawed the damn thing and made a bento.  And it wasn't half bad!  

a bento testament to bravery: steak!

The steak was sliced super-thin (thanks, Husband, for your fabulous knife-sharpening skills), tossed in a skillet with hot sesame oil, and cooked for like 15 seconds on a side, and then covered with sesame seeds.  

I was utterly terrified.  But hey!  It kinda worked!  I ain't claiming this is some sort of pinnacle of worldwide culinary achievement, but it was downright edible and non-rubbery.  I call that a win.  

steak bento, packed all snuggled in together

Some stir-fried random-veggies-that-were-languishing-in-the-fridge accompanied the steak, and there's some brown rice under there somewhere.  

Overall, I declare victory over my cow-cooking phobia.  Booyah!

bento friday: impatience

a, um, kind of half-eaten bento

Yeah... so I totally forgot to snap a picture before I started digging in.  Oops. 

Anyway, this is one of the most stupid-simple (yet tasty!) bento I've ever made.  Plain brown rice, microwave-steamed broccoli, and sesame chicken.  It took like ten minutes, and most of that was waiting for the chicken to cook through, during which time I was also making breakfast.  Bento really doesn't have to take much time or effort once you get the hang of it; it's an almost seamless integration into our schedule.  Low-stress is the name of the game!

The sesame chicken was made by taking pieces of chicken thigh, pressing them on a place of black sesame seeds, and then cooking them in a bit of oil.  However, I kind of forgot to put anything else on them, so they were kind of bland.  Needed salt, or soy sauce, or something to add flavor. 

So it was a pretty bland bento, but nutritious and definitely not bad.  Simple wins.  

bento friday: I made gyoza!

 Gyoza (also known as potstickers for very relevant reasons) are delicious.  At their most basic, they're Japanese dumplings of folded pasta filled with, um, stuff.  I had a half-pack of wonton pasta sheets languishing in the freezer and threatening to get freezer burned, so I decided to give it a whirl for a weeknight dinner.

And my goodness, but they're delicious.

mmmmm... gyoza.....

I simply minced up whatever stuff I had around (ginger, garlic, mushrooms, um, random leftover broccoli stems I think, bean sprouts), sautéed it, filled the little wrappers and pretended to know what I was doing about the folding.  Then one fry-steaming session later, voila!  

They were a bit bland (need to add more flavory stuff next time) and a little lumpy and unwieldy.  Apparently chopping the stuff smaller would be a good idea.  But!  Still delicious, and way less intimidating than I'd thought they'd be.  

The picture is from their second round, as leftover bento lunches.  Served with cold sesame noodles topped with more bean sprouts. 

sesame noodles

The cold sesame noodles are loosely based on Pioneer Woman's recipe, and are always remarkably delicious.  I tend to use udon noodles instead of spaghetti, but hey, in her words, whatever makes your skirt fly up.  

bento friday: using-stuff-up edition

Meal planning is a wonderful thing.  You make lists of exactly what your family is going to eat for every meal, coordinating with sales and coupons, and then shop for precisely what's on your list and no more.  Then at the end of the week, there's no waste and everyone's happy.

Does anyone actually manage to do that?  I'd be awfully impressed.  It sounds like a beautiful system, but seems to be marred by human fallibility.  I try sometimes, but inevitably wind up simply buying whatever looks tasty at the market and then having to spontaneously generate meal ideas from what's sitting around.  And something gets forgotten, and then suddenly there's a disturbingly moldy cucumber languishing in the bottom of the crisper.

On the plus side, bento is a singularly spectacular mechanism for dealing with forgotten bits and pieces.  Go some random still-food-but-just-barely lunchmeat?  Chop and add to fried rice*.  Sad greens?  Enough sesame oil covers a multitude of sins.  Borderline slimy mushrooms?  Delicious in everything.

Consider this yellow squash.  After being out of town for a week, I looked through the fridge and realized that while we'd tried to use up perishables before vacating, there was one lonely and slightly shriveled squash in the drawer.  Poor thing.

sad squash gets new life

I summarily chopped it up and sautéed it, along with some fresh broccoli, in chili sesame oil and plenty of Sriracha**, and paired it with rice with some frozen leftover ham and some green onions.  It was downright delicious, if a bit spicier than I'd expected.  But then, one of the beauties of trying different combinations all the time and making up recipes as I go is that we get to experience a big range of flavors in manageable lunch-sized portions.  Experimenting with dinners often results in tubs of leftovers that then must be eaten whether you liked the dish or not.  But a lunch? Even if it's sub-par, so what?  It's just a lunch.  I overcooked the broccoli a little in this one, so it was kinda limp and greyish.  Oops.  Lesson learned, with pretty minimal harm done.

Anyway, the point of this is that bento is a great way to use up random otherwise-perplexing small amounts of just about anything.






* Heating properly to make it bento-safe, of course. 

** Have I mentioned lately that Sriracha is amazing?  Sriracha is amazing. 

bento friday: favorite recipe roundup

This week has been kind of hectic, and I've been sick, so unfortunately I have no bento to share with you.  But!  Instead, I've put together a roundup of some of my favorite bento recipes that I use so so often, in photo essay form.  NOTE: all pictures in this post are taken from justbento.com or justhungry.com, specifically from the recipes linked.  They are used here with permission from Maki.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Maki?  Maki is my hero.  My bento-hero, at least.

One of my favorite quick and delicious bento side dishes is carrot kinpira.  So yum.  

And hey!  Look!  You can make kinpira from other stuff too!  Rock on.

Maki's chicken teriyaki recipe taught me that teriyaki sauce is super easy to make, that it's very tasty, and that it's silly to buy pre-made teriyaki sauce in a bottle.  Apparently Japanese folks think that stuff sold in stores is kind of bizarre.  

Soboro is another super tasty recipe, though it does require prep.  It's not something you throw together on a weekday morning; rather, I'll spend some time on an occasional weekend making a big batch (usually from lamb), and then freeze small portions to use later as filling in onigiri.  

Bored of teriyaki?  Lemon chicken nuggets are a tasty alternative.

Tamagoyaki is a now-and-forever staple of my bento-making.  There's a bit of a learning curve to its construction, but once you've messed up a few it'll work out fine.  Super tasty, good reheated or at room temp, veggie-friendly, and Husband loves it.  Win. 

And finally, Maki's spicy lentil snacks get fantastic reviews and are apparently super tasty, but I still haven't gotten around to making the dang things.  I even bought red lentils months ago, and yet.  So I'm putting this one on here to remind me to make the darn things, and then I can tell you how it went!

Happy bentoing!

bento friday: using up leftovers

Our fridge, in general, is full.  Really full.  Do-complicated-three-dimensional-tetris-to-fit-anything-in-full.  So every once in a while we go on a crusade to use up leftovers and clean out all the tupperware in there.

This week I noticed that I had shiitake and some kind of other mushroom (they were from the local Asian grocery store and weren't labeled in English... but hey, they were tasty so who cares) languishing in there.

Enter bento, and voila!  I find that bento is a really easy way to use up whatever veg is starting to get sad in the fridge.  Stir-fry it, add some kind of protein and rice, and it's food.  Once I got a few basic recipes under my belt and stopped feeling intimidated, bento became rather liberating.  You can put almost anything in there and call it lunch.

simple using-up-leftovers bento

For this week's bento, I made a mushroom-and-onion stir fry, and thawed some mini sausages I keep in the freezer (part of my johbisai) for bento protein emergencies.  And brown rice made in my magical rice cooker that is awesome (have I mentioned I love my rice cooker and that it is awesome?).  

All in all, especially for something that took maybe fifteen minutes, this was a mighty tasty lunch, even if it doesn't really photograph well.  And it cleared some space in the fridge!  Win-win. 

mushroom and onion stir fry

• sesame oil

• mushrooms, sliced (whatever you've got)

• onion, cut into chopstickable pieces (a half of an onion worked for two bento)

• soy sauce, sake, rice vinegar, hoisin sauce, Sriracha

• sesame seeds

Sauté the onion in sesame oil until it is nice and browned, with maybe some burned spots (sound familiar?).  Add mushrooms, and toss a little butter in there if the pan looks too dry.  Mushrooms love butter. 

When the mushrooms are cooked, toss in a blob of hoisin sauce (that's totally a unit, right?), a splash of rice vinegar, another splash of sake, some soy sauce, and a really healthy dose of Sriracha because Sriracha is marvelous.  When in doubt, more Sriracha.  Good life advice, there. 

Oh!  And a little sprinkle of cornstarch helps the sauce to thicken up, if it's being stubborn. 

Cook for a bit until it looks and smells like something you want to eat. 

teriyaki sausages

• sausages (mini or cut up, whatever kind really)

• soy sauce, sake, mirin, brown sugar

Sauté the sausages in some kind of oil (I think I used canola; whatever's in the cabinet) until they brown a little bit.  Add the other stuff (I try to follow this ratio, but at this point I just dump stuff in until it looks right), and cook down until syrupy and tasty.  Nom.  

bento friday: not a bento

These week I present... not really a bento.  What?  We had a lot of leftovers to use up, and bento-making just didn't come up.  

I don't consider this at all a bento, because

1. it's made of leftovers,
2. it's decidedly un-Japanese*, and
3. it's totally designed to be refrigerated and nukerowaved.

But it's packed kinda sorta in a bento-like fashion, so hey!  It'll do for a bento friday.  It's only cheating a little, right?

a totally cheating non-bento: leftover ribs and leftover mac and cheese

In other news, eating delicious sauce-covered ribs at a computer desk is a bit of a challenge.

*There's totally an argument to be made that non-Japanese food can still be bento.  I'm just not entirely feeling it, at least in light of the other conditions listed. 

bento friday: one bento, two boxes

Husband's bento: microwaveable Pyrex

This week I threw together a super-simple bento from what happened to by laying about the house.  White rice in the magical rice cooker of AWESOME (I am madly in love with my rice cooker; can you tell?) with some frozen peas dumped in for color, butter-sesame chicken, and some Sriracha-and-saké-glazed carrots.   Simple, tasty, and it used up a lone freakishly enormous carrot that was lounging around in the fridge and the last four shiitake mushrooms.  Even if I did overcook the chicken a bit. 

my bento: cute little tiffin

Butter-sesame chicken
chicken, cut into bite size pieces
shiitake mushrooms
butter
soy sauce
sesame seeds

Sauté the chicken and mushrooms separately in plenty of butter (or on separate sides of a big frypan, like I did).

Mix it all together, add a splash of soy sauce, sprinkle with sesame seeds, and you're good to go.


Sriracha-saké glazed carrots
carrots (or singular carrot, if you've got an Arcturan Mega-Carrot hiding in your crisper)
toasted sesame oil
Sriracha
saké
brown sugar
soy sauce

Heat oil in a frypan, add carrots, then dump in a healthy splash of saké and cover.  This steams the carrots a bit, making cooking go much faster.  It also imparts yummy saké flavor.

Attack with Sriracha, some brown sugar, and a bit of soy.  Stir around to form and thicken the sauce a bit, and then nom.

bento friday: a favorite

A fried rice bento, lamb style

We are fortunate enough to have a source for local organic lamb, so once a year our freezer fills up with the stuff.  On Monday, Husband surprised me with pan-roasted lamb chops, spiced zucchini, and wild rice when I got home from work. 

Tasty. 

Strategically, there were two small lamb chops left over after dinner, so these were set aside for some bento action.  Lamb fried rice is something I've gotten pretty good at, and it's one of his favorites.  Like most of my dishes, it's pretty ad-hoc and not necessarily all that authentic.  But it's yummy.

Lamb Fried Rice

With sesame oil in a big fry pan, stir-fry whatever veggies need using up, diced small.  Onions, carrots, zucchini, peas, mushrooms, ginger, green beans, bean sprouts, bell peppers, cabbage, spinach, garlic... whatever, really. 

Push the veg to the outsides and plunk a pat of butter in the middle.  Scatter day-old rice over the butter and ignore it for a while.  It's really important to use day-old rice, because fresh rice is far too sticky.  Resist the urge to stir.  

Resist, I said!

(I over-stir.  It's a problem.)

When it's gotten a little browned and crunchy, go ahead and stir around a bit.  When you're satisfied with the crunchiness factor, stir everything up together and again push it all to the sides. 

Re-butter the center of the pan, mix an egg up with some soy sauce, and dump it in.  Stir *constantly* with chopsticks as the egg cooks, to make little scrambly bits.  

Little scrambly bits.  That's a technical term.  

Finally, toss in your diced lamb (or whatever meat), let sizzle for a very short amount of time, and mix everything together.  Finish with generous quantities of soy sauce, a healthy squirt of Sriracha, and some more butter.  Sprinkle with sesame seeds. 

Yum. 

bento friday: sesame beef

an experimental bento: sesame beef and soba

This week's bento feature was a bit of a departure for me.  I make a lot of veggie bento, tamagoyaki (egg) bento, with occasional supplements of chicken or sausages.  

But I'm actually kind of phobic of cooking beef. 

Really it's just because I don't have much experience with it, so I tend to drastically overcook it.  This one... wasn't really an exception.  But I'll get better eventually.  I hope.  And in the interest of reproducibility,  I'm going to start writing up general recipes to go with bento!  Yay recipes.  I'm calling this sesame beef, because of the sesame oil and seeds, but the sauce was totally just made up on the spot.  I offer precisely zero guarantee that this is in any way authentically Japanese, but it is yummy.

sesame beef with greens and soba

Boil soba noodles, drain and rinse well with cold water.  Put soba in bento box(es). 

Sauté thin-sliced beef in sesame oil, attempting not to overcook it into leather.  Set aside.  Sauté whatever greens you have (I had snow peas, pak choi, and scallions), and put on top of noodles. 

Dump into pan: garlic, soy sauce, sushi vinegar, pepper flakes, sake, a bit of brown sugar and a sprinkle of cornstarch.  Stir around and reduce a bit, then add beef back to sauce and stir to coat.  Pour beef and sauce over noodles and veg.  Sprinkle with sesame seeds.  

Tasty!

bento friday: lazy stir fry

a lazy bento: basic veg stir fry

Our fridge is full.  I mean really, really, full.  Like, it takes a Tetris master to fit anything into it. 

This happens a lot, admittedly.  It's something we're working on.  

Anyway, veggies take up a lot of space, so this week I made a really simple stir-fry bento from whatever veg I could find in there, in an attempt to clear space (and make a lunch, of course), to serve atop white rice.  That wound up meaning onions, snow peas, shiitake mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, bean sprouts, baby pak choy, and scallions.  I chopped everything up the night before, along with a generous amount of fresh ginger.  

Unfortunately I totally forgot to add the fresh garlic to it in the morning.  Bah.  

The sauce consisted of random things I threw in a mason jar and shook up, reduced down a bit to coat the veggies.  Some combination of soy sauce, mirin, a bit of brown sugar, corn starch for thickening, oyster sauce, stock, and red pepper flake, as I recall.  

Despite the red pepper flake, it turned out disappointingly bland and not spicy at all.  Bah.  I really should have added some Sriracha.  Sriracha makes everything better.  I must get better at sauces.  

But this does go to show that a totally legit bento can totally be thrown together from what's hanging out in the fridge.  There's no need to overthink things. 

bento friday: usuyaki sushi

Bento is a meal (sometimes of Japanese food) packed attractively in a box.  I love making bento, and will be showcasing my current and past creations periodically. 

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an experimental bento: usuyaki-wrapped sushi, broccoli stir-fry, and spicy peppers. 

Usuyaki is a sort of Japanese egg crepe.  In this case, following the guidance of my Just Bento cookbook (have you noticed that I adore Maki?), I wrapped the crepes around simple sushi rice balls.  Sushi, you see, doesn't actually mean raw fish; it just means rice.  So I took vinegared rice, formed them into cubes, and wrapped the crepes around.  They were pretty tasty, if tricky to eat.  

While I wholeheartedly follow Maki's philosophy of taste and color being infinitely more important than cutesy bento details, I do occasionally try to add a little visual flair to my preparations.  This time I used a tiny cookie cutter to cut a star out of the center of each usuyaki, in the hopes that the rice would show through and be subtly pretty.  Unfortunately, cutting through the crepe was difficult, and it tended to tear instead.  Then after wrapping around the sushi, the star was generally kind of distorted and invisible.  So... that kind of failed.  But now I know not to do that again, so there's that. 

For side dishes, I threw together a really simple broccoli-ginger stir fry, along with some remarkably spicy bell pepper.  We had a lonely pepper half floating in the fridge, so I figured it would make an ideal side, fried up with some Laos chili paste gifted to us by a neighbor.  I guess I used a bit more chili paste than I'd thought, because wow those were an adventure.  I alternated bites with the blessedly mild and starchy sushi. 

Okay, so I'm a bit of a wimp. 

bento friday: miso chicken and unreasonably delicious green beans

Bento is a meal (sometimes of Japanese food) packed attractively in a box.  I love making bento, and will be showcasing my current and past creations periodically. 

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a super-tasty bento: miso chicken, broccoli, and green bean/onion stir fry

Now this was an unreservedly successful bento.  It doesn't happen very often that I nail a preparation and there isn't even a single 'blah' side dish, but on this day I lucked out.  My miso-marinated chicken was delicious (and I even got a specific compliment on it from Husband), and the thrown-together green-beans-that-were-languishing-in-the-crisper-drawer-and-onion stir fry was Simply.  Delicious.  I deliberately overcooked the onions a bit so they'd get a browned and soft with a couple of little burned bits, and added plenty of fresh ginger and garlic.  Oh my.  Lick-the-bowl good.  

bento friday: lemon chicken

Bento is a meal (sometimes of Japanese food) packed attractively in a box.  I love making bento, and will be showcasing my current and past creations periodically. 

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Lemon chicken, broccoli, and soba. 

Not shown: teriyaki noodle sauce.

I love soba.  Have I mentioned that?  It's just a simple buckwheat noodle, but it's so delightfully chewy and full of flavor.  Mmmm, soba.  

This bento involved lemon chicken nuggets, soba, and some steamed broccoli.  The very slight cornstarch crust on the nuggets got a bit soggy by lunchtime, which tells me that I need to let the bento cool more thoroughly before closing it in the morning.  But the flavor was excellent.  I also packed a little container of bottled teriyaki sauce to toss on the noodles, as they'd get somewhat soggy themselves if they were left to soak in a sauce all morning.  

On the note of teriyaki, Maki taught me how to make teriyaki sauce.  My goodness, but it's easy.  I'm now somewhat amused by the fact that we Americans actually buy the stuff in jars.  Sure, it takes having a few culturally unusual ingredients around, but they're so versatile in other things that it's really not a problem.  Regretfully, I had purchased a Costco-sized bottle of teriyaki a bit before starting bento, so I'm working on using that up, and that's what went with the soba this day.  

On a side note, regarding teriyaki ingredients, whatever you do, do NOT touch something called 'cooking mirin.'  Holy hell, but that isn't food.  Lesson learned.  

bento friday: a semi-success

Bento is a meal (sometimes of Japanese food) packed attractively in a box.  I love making bento, and will be showcasing my current and past creations periodically. 

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a simple bento: chicken teriyaki, veggies, and soba

This bento was kind of thrown together, and didn't take very long to assemble at all.  I'd set aside a few individual chicken thighs to hang out in the freezer against the day of another teriyaki bento, so that was easy.  Unfortunately I overcooked the chicken a bit (oops), and my hastily-concocted teriyaki sauce somehow lacked balance (double oops).  I thought I kinda dropped the ball on that, but Husband's box came home quite empty so apparently he wasn't too disappointed.

Please ignore the terribly blurry photo.  My dinky little dumb-phone camera appreciates your kindness.  

For veggies, I tossed in some simple steam-fried baby bok choy and some spicy sautéed carrots, all with veg from our sadly-only-once-a-month local farmer's market.  The bok choy was tossed with some fresh ginger, and the carrots were given a liberal coating of schichimi togarashi, a spicy Japanese pepper blend.  Tasty.  Add to that some soba from my stash with green onions and some bottled teriyaki sauce I'm trying to use up, and we're in business. 

Also, this bento marks a new experiment, as it was packed in a 3-cup Pyrex container.   For christmas a few years ago Husband was marvelous and got me some subdivided plastic bento boxes that I fell in love with after Maki's review, and those were great for a while.  Unfortunately the latch on mine broke, and then broke again just to spite the attempted repair with contact cement.  But then I found my little metal tiffin, and all was well again with the world.  Husband's bento are still usually packed in his unbroken plastic box (though I assembled a Frankenbox by using the lid from mine; weirdly, the black lid came with really inane rugby trivia on it.  Ah, the Japanese.).

Bento, largely due to having been developed before refrigeration and easy heating were the norm, are designed so that they'll be safe to sit around at room temperature until lunch time, and then are intended to be eaten at room temperature too.  I do this, but Husband chooses to refrigerate and microwave his, and hey.  I pack his lunch; I sure a heck don't tell him how to eat the thing too.

Anyway.  So far, I'm digging the Pyrex, as the glass is non-plastic (makes the environmentalist/chemical-phobic me happy), microwaveable, and relatively attractive.  I don't mind the extra weight, as it really doesn't add much.  And yeah, the lids are still plastic, but I can only fight so many battles at once.  It seems to be relatively leak-resistant, fairly attractive in a grown-up blank-slate kind of way (as opposed to kawaii), and at least the food itself isn't sitting in plastic all day.  Plus, Pyrex is great for not staining, a feature I greatly enjoy in food containers in general.

Plus it was half off at the store.  So there's that.