Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Hand made triangles!

My daughter's bento features heart shaped onigiri from a mold while my husband's and my bentos have hand made triangle ones. I normally don't take the time to make triangle onigiri but just do quick spheres instead, but I think these turned out pretty well.


Left to right: Steamed broccoli, onigiri with origami paper faces, little bottle of soy sauce, baby tomatoes on toothpicks with cute stickers, fuji apple with flower cutout, Morningstar Farms chik nuggets, raw carrot circles, a couple of 'two - potato' gyoza.

Top tier: Triangle onigiri with lemon slice, 'two-potato' gyoza and steamed broccoli.


Bottom tier: Raw carrot circles, baby tomatoes, triangle onigiri with lemon slice, steamed broccoli, Morningstar Farms chik nuggets, little bottle of soy sauce, lemon slice curl for extra color.

Top tier: Morningstar Farms Buffalo Wings (Yay, I get hot stuff, yay!), Fuji apple bunnies, two small triangle onigiri with raw carrot flower decorations. Little bottles: white cap holds soy sauce, red cap holds hot sauce. Hello Kitty tin holds m&ms for my daughter - it's hidden in my bento to be a surprise.


Bottom tier: Steamed broccoli seperated with raw carrot circles, 'two-potato' gyoza and baby tomatoes.


Little bottles: The sauce bottles come with different colored caps, which is very nice! My family knows that the red caps mean hot sauce and never get them mixed up. They are very small so they fit well in the bentos, but they hold a lot more sauce than you'd expect. In order to fill them I pour the sauce that I want into a bowl, squeeze the air out of the little bottle and submerge it in the sauce, let go and the sauce will flow into the bottle. To get it all the way full I do this about 3 times, making sure not to squeeze too hard once some sauce is already in the bottle. (These things make great squirters, be careful!) It's a very messy method and you need to wash the outside of the bottle, not to mention your fingers afterward. I'm sure there must be a better way, but I don't know of one yet.

I try to remember to fill the bottles when I'm also doing some sort of cooking that requires that particular sauce. That way I can just pour the sauce from the bowl into my cooking and not worry about just wasting it or trying to get it back into the sauce's bottle.

3 comments:

Creakinator said...

A suggestion for filling the small bottles - would a meat injection needle like this http://www.turkey-fryers-online.com/injector/original_spice_injector_dlx.htm
work? (google search for meat injector needles). This needle holds 1 oz and I'm not sure how much the bottles hold, but you may be able to find ones with larger volumes.

Natakiya said...

Hmm, I don't know. It looks like a great idea, the only question is how big the needle might be, these tiny little bottles have incredibly small holes to fill through. I'll see if I can find one like this and give it a try, Thank you! It's definately not something that I would have ever thought of on my own since I'm vegetarian and wouldn't use one for anything, but it's a nice idea :D

Michèle said...

Where can you buy those small bottles?