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Bento!
I bought a box of random bento stuff off of eBay, and it arrived today. (I recommend looking at smlingcutie's other auctions for small bento boxes at the best Buy It Now prices I've found yet on eBay - and she ships fast.)
So, naturally, I had to do something with them, and prepared lunch for tomorrow, in a semi-fancy manner. :D I thought I'd photograph it, because I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm never actually going to do anything this fancy - even though it's not that fancy - again, and just shove leftovers into the box. :)
The food! Left box: jasmine rice shaped into a heart because it's Valentine's Day (well, mostly because I have these mini heart baking pans I can use as a mold, and it was too hot to shape by my own hands without burning myself XD), and peas, and teeny fishy soy sauce bottles. I'd had the bottles for years, but never used them. Filling them's messy - you squeeze the air out and stick them into the soy sauce and let them suck it in. The divider between the rice and peas is movable, so you can take it out or divide the box up however you want.
Right box, tier 1: corn and edamame
Right box, tier 2: egg salad and as much of a tomato as I could cram in that cute little plastic box (I didn't want the juice to seep out and mix with the egg salad).
Egg salad: 8 eggs, cut up and mashed up, 1/4 c mayo, 1/8 c Dijonnaise, 1 Tb apple cider vinegar, 1/8 c chopped onion, dill and salt and pepper to taste.
That looks like a hell of a lot of foo, but they're small boxes. Here's a scale; my lens cap is 2 inches in diameter:
Now to show you how it fits together. You put these little plastic lids on the tiers:
Then you stack the tiers together:
Then you put the lid on the top of that - there's a space between the lid of the top tier and the final lid, where you can put teeny child-size chopsticks or fork and knife, or put packets of soy sauce or what-have-you - and strap them together with the elastic band. There's a fork in a plastic case that goes with the other box stuck under the strap. The box with the rice and peas has its own lid, with little snappy things so you don't have to have an elastic band to keep it from falling apart. The lid has some nice random English phrases on it.
And then you put them in one of the two carrying things that came with the Box o'Bento. They're both in the bag 0on the right, and tomorrow I'll toss one of my small icepacks in there to keep it cold on the way to work, where I'll put it in the fridge since it's not thermal. If I were using just the stackable box, it would fit in the pink zippered thermal thing with a mini ice pack and I wouldn't need to put it in the fridge.
Whee!
Bonus! THe bag goes with the thing with the English phrases on it, and has them also. Here is a closer shot of the bag, manipulated so you can see the English better if you want to read it.
So, naturally, I had to do something with them, and prepared lunch for tomorrow, in a semi-fancy manner. :D I thought I'd photograph it, because I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm never actually going to do anything this fancy - even though it's not that fancy - again, and just shove leftovers into the box. :)
The food! Left box: jasmine rice shaped into a heart because it's Valentine's Day (well, mostly because I have these mini heart baking pans I can use as a mold, and it was too hot to shape by my own hands without burning myself XD), and peas, and teeny fishy soy sauce bottles. I'd had the bottles for years, but never used them. Filling them's messy - you squeeze the air out and stick them into the soy sauce and let them suck it in. The divider between the rice and peas is movable, so you can take it out or divide the box up however you want.
Right box, tier 1: corn and edamame
Right box, tier 2: egg salad and as much of a tomato as I could cram in that cute little plastic box (I didn't want the juice to seep out and mix with the egg salad).
Egg salad: 8 eggs, cut up and mashed up, 1/4 c mayo, 1/8 c Dijonnaise, 1 Tb apple cider vinegar, 1/8 c chopped onion, dill and salt and pepper to taste.
That looks like a hell of a lot of foo, but they're small boxes. Here's a scale; my lens cap is 2 inches in diameter:
Now to show you how it fits together. You put these little plastic lids on the tiers:
Then you stack the tiers together:
Then you put the lid on the top of that - there's a space between the lid of the top tier and the final lid, where you can put teeny child-size chopsticks or fork and knife, or put packets of soy sauce or what-have-you - and strap them together with the elastic band. There's a fork in a plastic case that goes with the other box stuck under the strap. The box with the rice and peas has its own lid, with little snappy things so you don't have to have an elastic band to keep it from falling apart. The lid has some nice random English phrases on it.
And then you put them in one of the two carrying things that came with the Box o'Bento. They're both in the bag 0on the right, and tomorrow I'll toss one of my small icepacks in there to keep it cold on the way to work, where I'll put it in the fridge since it's not thermal. If I were using just the stackable box, it would fit in the pink zippered thermal thing with a mini ice pack and I wouldn't need to put it in the fridge.
Whee!
Bonus! THe bag goes with the thing with the English phrases on it, and has them also. Here is a closer shot of the bag, manipulated so you can see the English better if you want to read it.
!!
Definitely. :D
Also, nice bento stuff! I watch
(Too tired to respond intelligently to other comment, but appreciate it. Later. Going to bed.)
Re: !!
Thank you! I'm trying to bring food to work with me more often, mostly to save money, but partially because they've closed a couple of parking lots here for construction, so parking's worse than ever and if you leave campus for lunch it takes a good 20 minutes of prowling around the parking lot before you can find a space. I know where the housekeeping staff park, and when they leave, though, so if I hold out 'til 1:30 for lunch, I can grab one of their spaces at 2:30. XD
At any rate, with Shiny! New! Toys! it makes it a bit easier to do that every day. :)
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I never even gave it a thought until today.
My poor bank account.
Oh well, if I never see the money, I'll never know it was there. XD
I'm trying to buy some extraz, like the hard boiled egg mold.. its too cute.
Can I ask what kind of rice you use? I am always confused at rice selections when I want to make the formed rice balls. Would the stuff they have at WalMart in the "oriental foods" section work? (Located next to the Pocky... why WalMart has Pocky.. I dunno.. But its not as good as the original stuff, I can taste the difference.)
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I'm using the wrong type of rice, really - I'm using long-grain jasmine rice, and long-grain rice has less starch in it than short-grain, so it sticks together less. What you want is short-grain. If your grocery store doesn't carry it, then you can either order online from Amazon.com or somewhere or try medium-grain rice. Bento Box (http://www.airandangels.com/bentobox/) has instructions for making the rice balls in the Onigiri section.
The stuff in your WalMart might be sticky rice, which is technically short-grain, but isn't the stuff you really need for making onigiri. It may also be called "glutinous rice" or "sweet rice." The Japanese, from what I understand, use it mainly for desserts. It's more prevalent in Thai cooking. It's good, don't get me wrong because I love the stuff, but needs to be steamed and has a different texture to it.
If your WalMart has something called "sushi rice," get that - it's exactly what you need. Follow the instructions on the package for making it. :) However, you'll want to do a test run and see how well it holds up in the fridge overnight if you're going to make it at night. :) The stuff you get from Chinese restaurants has characteristics that make it all hard and unrecoverable the next day, where regular rice can be mostly revived by a bit of time in a plastic bag or container the microwave with a damp paper towel.
My rice cooker, which you can see in the back of one of the photos there, has a timer on it so I can set it to be ready in the morning, although I haven't tried it yet because I get up so late that I don't have time to make sutff before I leave the house.
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I just want to add that the botan rice is the super-sticky rice, and usually requires 4-8 hours of soaking to be able to cook. The stuff sold as sushi rice doesn't require that.
I've been googling around to find something on the difference btween short-grain and the super-sticky stuff and ahve found, basically, that all the info out there completely contradicts each other. :) Anyway, I use that rice for making sticky rice for Thai stuff, and it's different in texture than the stiff I eat in sushi.
Hm. This site for making onigiri here (http://www.justhungry.com/2003/12/obento.html) links to a page about Japanese rice (http://www.justhungry.com/2003/11/japanese_basics_1.html) and says it's a medium-grain. Hm.
I think the real moral here is to experiment around and see what works best for you. XD
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Sometimes people get angry at the world, and these people will go explain how to prepare sushi rice. I am convinced of this. My mom got me a cookbook that lied horribly about the amount of rice vinegar to put in, and I ruined my rice and got sad and discouraged.
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The mother of my half-Lao friend when I was growing up would put the sticky rice on to soak overnight, then steam it in the morning for the rest of the day. She served it with everything - I'd go over there for lunch and we'd eat corn dogs and sticky rice. XD
Soaking overnight, then steaming for approxiamtely 25 minutes and then turning out onto a plate and fluffing with a fork gets you almost perfect sticky rice. :)
My sticky rice is, at the moment, too old and has lost too much moisture to cook well. I'll have to buy some new stuff and test both ways to compare. Maybe this weekend.
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Heh...doesn't surprise me to see she's in Irvine, CA. Spitting distance from four major Japanese markets. Damn, I miss CA.
I really need to start taking lunch...maybe if I had something cute like that to do it in... XD
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Ebay! Bento! Assimilate! Prove I'm not the only insane person here! XD
I need to go to the grocery store and get some paper cupcake thingys to keep food juice from running out and mixing with other food. Not to mention some short-grain rice and nori so I can make better onigiri that doesn't shed rice. XD
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I saw the thing in the bento comm about freezing spaghetti...God, that just further proves I need to assimilate...may make a trip to Sunrise and see if they have any. (Nice little asian market south of downtown...really, it's only about 4 miles, but it's a bitch to get through downtown...)
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Maybe if I had something like a shiny, new bento to go with a shiny, new house, I'd remember (eg, there'd be no money to buy lunch. XD)
Though I do have to say, your pics of egg salad put me in the mood for tuna (don't ask how the relate...not sure myself). May have to make some tuna today. XD
ftw, LJ....no emails AND it's logging me out....
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I have been craving eggs for a while now. Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! And meat. What I probably need is more protein. XD
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Oh man, I wanted meat so badly last night, but Jim just wanted to bake the frozen pizza...needless to say, I was thrilled when some friends called wanting us to go out to dinner. CHEESESTEAK!! XD
Huzzah the protein!
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MEEEEAT! I have one chicken thigh left, and some taco meat. I'll have to decide what I want. XD
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I need to get better about eating leftovers, though I do have to admit that this whole working from home thing has helped that a bit.
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don't ask. I'm exhausted and cold beyond all reason. I'm getting punchy. XD
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Of course, the $4.99 sushi rolls here in the library are pretty good, too. XD
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