May 2008

All the content on this site by month.

Here are some links of interest from bento blogs around the world:

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Bento contents:

Total calories (approx): 460 (how calories are calculated)

Time needed: 10-15 minutes in the morning

Type: Japanese, omnivore (chicken, egg)

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Bento contents:

  • 2 onigiri with salted salmon filling, each onigiri with about 1/2 cup (1 cup = 220ml) white rice (300 cal)
  • 1/2 cup spicy miso marinated asparagus, 40 cal
  • 3/4 cup stir-fried red pepper, onion and zucchini with fried tofu (atsuage), 100 calories
  • A couple of slices of nori seaweed to wrap the onigiri
  • A couple of cherry tomatoes, mainly for color

Total calories (approx): 450 (how calories are calculated)

Time needed: 15-20 minutes in the morning

Type: Japanese, omnivore (salmon, miso, fried tofu)

Bento filler: French green beans with carrot and ginger

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Fresh green beans are available year round, but their real season in the northern hemisphere is the summer to early fall. I count crispy green beans among one of my favorite vegetables, so I enthusiastically eat as much as possible.

There are several kinds of green beans - large and fat, flat and broad, and so on. These are skinny little haricots verts or French beans. They can be rather expensive, so I like to cook them as minimally as possible. Here they are paired with julienned fresh ginger and carrot, stir fried then steam-cooked in a frying pan. The ginger adds some heat and the carrots add sweetness. They are cooked in less than 5 minutes, though allow some extra time to cut the ginger and carrot. You can use fatter green beans if you can't get haricot verts - allow for a couple more minutes of cooking time.

This is great hot or cold, so it's a very good bento vegetable dish. It will hold in the refrigerator for 2 to 3 days, so if you buy a big bag of green beans at the market it's worthwhile to make a batch of this.

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This week's bento box is an example of a type of bento box which is designed to hold onigiri or omusubi (rice balls) securely.

While onigiri are very portable, they can get smashed around if you just carry them loose, and fitting them in a regular flat bento box can be a bit awkward sometimes. This is where the onigiri bento box comes in.

Bento filler: Spicy miso marinated green asparagus

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We're nearing the end of the green asparagus season around here, so I'm trying to eat as much of it as possible. This miso marinated asparagus dish may look very spicy, but it's only mildly so - it just looks rather hot because I used a red miso. The miso marinade does not overwhelm the asparagus flavor, but just enhances it. It is great in a bento since it's salty, a little sweet and spicy all at once.

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Bento contents:

  • 1 cup (1 cup = 220ml) bamboo shoot rice made with sprouted brown rice, 200 cal
  • 1 1/2 cups asparagus, bamboo shoot and snow pea stir-fry, 70 cal
  • 1 wiener cut into fish, 150 cal

Total calories (approx): 420 (how calories are calculated)

Time needed: 10 minutes in the morning

Type: Japanese, omnivore (wieners!)

All natural vegetable based green, pink and orange rice

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Previously, I showed you how to make orange colored carrot rice. The make-in-a-few minutes microwave method was especially popular. So, here's how to make pink (or purple) and green colored rice just as easily. The best thing about them is that they are colored just with vegetables - no hard to pronounce ingredients in sight.

I've used white rice for color clarity, but you could use regular or sprouted brown rice instead. I used leftover rice from the night before; you could also use defrosted frozen rice.

This is not quite bento-related, but I know that a lot of readers buy bento supplies from eBay merchants, so this news may be of interest. eBay has made a number of changes to their feedback policies, but the most significant one for most people is that sellers can no longer leave negative or neutral Feedback for buyers. If you've ever bought anything from eBay or other auction type sites, you know that feedback is a critical part of the trust system, so this is quite a big change.

Noriben, a true Japanese classic

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There are some dishes that are so basic to make that they barely ever get mentioned in cookbooks. Noriben (the word comes from nori and bento mashed together) is one of them. It's a really basic bento, consisting of just 3 or 4 ingredients: rice, nori seaweed, soy sauce, and often dried bonito flakes. It's tasty and inexpensive. It was standby for my mother when there was nothing else in the house except for a few pantry staples, and she had to make bento for two of the kids plus my father.

Whether or not you'd like noriben or not depends on whether you like the sea-taste of nori and soy sauce. It's one of those things that Japanese people tend to think that only a Japanese person could really love. It makes most Japanese people feel very nostalgic.

For the sake of nutritional balance you might want to have other, not too salty things in your bento box with noriben, such as steamed vegetables, chicken, fried tofu, or a piece of grilled fish.

Animal sausage magnets!

Just how ubiquitous are decoratively cut wiener sausages in Japan? Well recently, Suntory, the Japanese distributor for Pepsi, included some plastic magnets made to look like wieners (specifically ones from Nippon Ham Co.) made into cute animal shapes as giveaways with 1.5 liter bottles of Pepsi NEX (aka Pepsi Zero).

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The animal sausage magnets are 2.3 cm - 3.9 cm in size (around 1 to 1.5 inches), and they come in 8 shapes: elephant, lion, octopus (with a headband), sheep, bird, seal, hippo and penguin. Each one came with instructions for making the same animal out of a real wiener.

I'm not sure if these were aimed at kids or at their kawaii-things mothers, but judging from the blog reactions in Japan they seem to have been a big hit with the mothers in any case. This blog entry has photos of all 8 figures and how they come packaged. (The Silvania bunnies are there to demonstrate the goods.)

The figures are already showing up on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and such.

In response to the picnic bento I posted yesterday, Zoé asked:

Really cute! Hey, I read on your blog that you aren’t keen in cute cooking…was it a joke ;)

Good question! I thought I'd qualify what I meant when I said that cute kyaraben (charaben) are not really my style.

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Bento contents:

  • Bite size shrimp and caper sushi, about 40 cal per piece
  • Tamagoyaki (Japanese omelette), 3 eggs worth, cut into 12 pieces - about 30 cal per piece
  • Cherry tomatoes
  • Blanched snow peas or mangetout
  • Carrot flowers
  • Cherries (not shown)

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Great news for fans of cute kyaraben, especialy Hello Kitty themed ones: the Hello Kitty bento decorating set that was featured in this post is now available at J-List/JBox! They offer it for $25, which considering the original Japanese price is 1980 yen is not too bad. Now Her Royal Kittiness can invade bento boxes worldwide with consummate ease! Now, can I resist getting a set myself?

(Note: I'm not sure from the description of the product if the second nori punch with the Kassie and Teddy faces is included - although the pictures do show Kassie and Teddy-shaped onigiri with the appropriate nori faces. If this is important to you, you may want to ask J-List if it is included before ordering.) Rita just got hers and let us know that it does include two nori punches!

(Disclaimer: JustBento is a J-List affiliate.)

Okowa: Sticky rice with all kinds of good things

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Okowa (おこわ)is the name given to a type of rice dish in which sticky glutinous rice is mixed with all kinds of vegetables or meat and steamed. It's related to Chinese sticky rice, which you might have had as part of a dim sum meal. If the rice mix is steamed in small packets, wrapped in a bamboo leaf, it's called chimaki. You can mix any number of things in with the rice to make it a complete meal in itself.

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Last time, I mentioned how I thought the Fit & Fresh™ Breakfast Chiller, which is decidedly not a bento box in the traditional sense, could serve as a bento box. I put this into practice with some leftovers. It doesn't look that photogenic so I'm putting it in the also-ran category of bentos, but it's here since I thought it might be useful to see how to use a container like this.

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This week's bento, or rather food-on-the-go, box is from the popular Fit & Fresh™ line from Medport. Fit & Fresh™ products are plastic containers with a cooling element included in some way. This makes them interesting for use with food that needs to be kept chilled, especially in the warmer months.

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Bento contents:

  • 3/4 cup (1 cup = 220ml) brown rice, 170 cal
  • 4 Tbs. Vegan dry curry made with soybeans, 200 cal
  • Cucumber and cherry tomato salad with yogurt sauce, 40 cal
  • Broccoli, 10 cal

Total calories (approx): 420 (how calories are calculated)

Time needed: 10 minutes in the morning

Type: Japanese-yohshoku, vegan (soybeans or tempeh)

Japanese dry curry with soybeans or tempeh

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Dry curry is a uniquely Japanese dish, much like the stew-type of Japanese curry. Dry curry is really well suited to bentos. The spicy curry aroma is appetising yet not overwhelming, and the combination of salty, spicy and sweet flavors really gets me going.

The recipe for a more traditional ground meat based dry curry has already been posted on Just Hungry. This is a vegan version that uses cooked soybeans or crumbled tempeh. It's so rich in flavor that even non-vegetarians won't miss the meat. It's also very easy to make, though a food processor helps for chopping up all the vegetables.

Both the meat based and this soybean based dry curry mixes freeze very well, making them perfect freezer staples.

As I posted yesterday, making individual pies in muffin or cupcake liners is a great way to make 'planned leftovers' from dinner look neat enough to put into a bento box. As Sile suggested in the comments, if you don't want to use throwaway paper cups, silicone cups are a reusable alternative. Calphalon makes a nice silicone liner and cupcake pan set which would be perfect for this. The liners are in pretty pastel colors.

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You can also use the liners as dividers in your bento, for salads, fruit, and so on. They sell the tin and liners as a set, as shown here, or the liners on their own. Extras might be a good idea to have if you do freeze the food 'cupcakes'.

Since Just Bento is attracting a lot of new readers these days (thank you!) starting now I'm going to be highlighting some of the most popular or interesting articles from the past month every month, in case you missed something good.

See more entries from April, not to mention March, February and more!