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Bento: week 5 Posted 2008.02.12 18:01 PST (#)

This week was a little unusual, with both a snow day I worked from home, and a vacation day. Mind you, I'm not complaining about the time out of the office, but it does hurt the habit just a bit.

Monday

Monday I finally made a bento fried rice using onions, and threw in some enoki just for luck. Yummy! The newcomer to my lunch, aside from enoki, were a pair of dango. Specifically mochi an dango. I think. Either way I love 'em.

Tuesday

Tuesday was a simple brown rice and black bean main course, accompanied with some favorites. Today I used my newly acquired bamboo sushi mat to try to roll the tamago-yaki tighter. I think they came out a little better, but more due to improving my cooking process than due to the mat. Maybe something else will need the mat more later; for now, it seems like an unnecessary toy.

Wednesday

Snow day! We had heavy snows starting on Tuesday (not unlike those starting Thursday the week before), so I decided to work from home on Wednesday to fight neither traffic nor winter. Actually I fought winter a bit, shoveling our driveway a couple times. As I write this entry nearly a week later, most of the snow we got then is still present on the sides of the driveway, and the sides of our roads, although of course some of it came later as well.

Thursday

Guess what - Thursday I unveiled my other recent new toy: kurogoma, or black sesame seeds. Under them are some eggs inspired by Just Bento's iri tamago recipe (but executed much more poorly). I was in a rush to create these and did them at my normal tamago-yaki heat and used a spoon. For the results shown on Just Bento's blog, I think you really need to use chopsticks, and perhaps a slightly lower heat. Under the eggs are leftover fried rice like Monday's. And mmm dango!

Friday

Vacation! But I made bento-style foods outside of a bento anyway. I'm really starting to want a two-layer bento box. I think it'll let me (and force me) to be a little more creative about the food I take, and I want that challenge. But I told myself I'd wait until at least week 6 to see if I was still doing this before getting any more boxes. One week left!

Lessons Learned

I think I'm learning less on a weekly basis now that I'm not completely new to bento, but there's still plenty of lessons that come up when trying new things. Like the iri-tamago failure (which was still yummy so I don't mind), or actually remembering to use onions in my fried rice. Sometimes when I end up making bland food I wonder if I'm doing something wrong, but then I just think back to the sandwiches this has replaced, and I'm quite happy with the trade. Life's too short to eat turkey sandwiches every day!