2 Giraffes

Today's zoo animal: Giraffes! Only day 2 of the zoo theme and A-chan's already twigged onto it :D I love giraffes! They seem very graceful to me. Isn't it amazing how versatile provolone and soy turkey can be? A monkey, giraffes...who knows what it will make tomorrow?

In the bento: The two giraffes are on top of a layer of jasmine rice. At the top of the right side is a bunch of soy sauce sauteed tofu and carrots, a couple of rice pasta giraffes, a heart shaped container with raspberries and quick cucumber pickles are squished in beside the berries.

The giraffes are made from provolone and soy turkey, cut out with scissors. The bottom part of their faces is cut out of cheddar. The eyes and nose are nori. The antennae are green peas with dry somen noodles. At the bottom are bits of red leaf lettuce that I cut into grass with scissors. I really like the way the lettuce kind of curled up and gave a good 3D look to the grass!

I'm so glad that I finally got a chance to use the rice pasta giraffes!! I've had the bag of pasta for a while but haven't had a good excuse to use any. When I saw it in the grocery store I convinced myself I bought it for our friends who are gluten intolerant, but I have to be honest - it was for bentos!

Japanese Curry Recipe

The way that I cook Japanese curry is rather basic. It involves Curry mixes which make it very easy! There are lots of different brands. Golden Curry is the most pervasive where I live, I can find it in our regular grocery stores like Kroger and Publix. My personal favorite is Vermont Curry. Who can resist apple and honey?? I generally purchase one pack of med. hot and one pack of hot. I mix them together so that it allows for the spice tolerance of the whole family. When I'm just making some for me I only use the hot :D

Since this is a dish that I make once a week, I like to play around with the basic recipe and add things to it. Some of these additives are liked by A-chan and some are not so I make a large batch by the basic recipe and then separate it to put the extra ingredients in. Sultanas and honey are the combination that she likes the best. Coffee and coconut milk are the ones I end up choosing the most often. For this batch I added chunks of apple and crushed pecans. (She was okay with the apple but loathes pecans.)

Basic recipe

Ingredients:

4 blocks of Curry mix (I use 2 hot and 2 med. hot)

1 onion

3 large carrots

3 Idaho potatoes, peeled or unpeeled

½ block of extra firm tofu

1 TB Sesame oil

1 TB Olive oil

1 TB butter

1. Squeeze liquid out of tofu. Cut into cubes.

2. Heat sesame oil in large sauté pan and cook tofu until golden brown.

3. Meanwhile chop the onion in large pieces and set aside.

4. When the tofu is done remove it from the pan and replace with the onion.

5. Chop the carrots and the potatoes.

6. Remove the onion from the pan.

7. Heat the olive oil and butter in the same pan. Add carrots and potatoes. Cook several minutes, stirring occasionally

8. Pour in enough water to cover the vegetables and simmer on med. Heat until the potatoes are fork tender. There should be a good amount of water left.

9. Add 2 blocks of curry mix to the veggies and water and stir rapidly until they dissolve, then add 2 more. Sometimes it is necessary to add more water to make enough curry sauce.

10. Once the curry blocks are dissolved, add in the tofu and onion. Stir and cook for a few more minutes. Serve.

I added the apple pieces about halfway through the carrot/potato simmer. The pecan pieces were added with the tofu and onions at the end so that they would still be a little crunchy.

I also add sriracha sauce on the top of my curry, yum!!

Monkey girl

This week I have a theme for bentos! We went to the zoo on Saturday. It was a perfect day for a trip to the zoo - mid 60s, beautiful sunshine and a tiny little breeze. The day was just wonderful and it has inspired me to try for a week's worth of zoo themed bentos. I'm starting with the monkey because that was A-chan's favorite. She is also fond of telling me that she was born in the year of the monkey! I was excited about the Bongos. They have never been out when we've been there before. They are lovely deer/antelope type animals that look as though they were taken straight out of Star Wars. Even though everyone else in the entire metro Atlanta area had the same idea and were at the zoo with us, we didn't feel caught up in a crush of people. The day was leisurely and we took so much time just being at peace and enjoying everything that we missed out on the petting zoo. A-chan was disappointed but I was rather relieved. It's hard to keep the goats from nibbling on my hair!

I'm also excited about this bento because there are two new food items in it, can you believe it?! Two! The first is the container of Veggie Stix in the background. One of her friends went to the zoo with us and had these as a snack. Now A-chan likes them. (A case where peer pressure is a good thing?) And second are the blood orange wedges. A-chan saw me looking at Happy Little Bento and asked for some of those 'neat looking oranges' in her bento. Too cool, thank you Sheri!!

In the bento: Under the monkey girl is a layer of rice with a layer of Japanese curry on top. In the other compartment are some blood orange slices, steamed broccoli, grape halves, black olives and corn on picks and one solitary raspberry.

The Monkey is made from a layer of provolone cheese as a base, then a layer of soy turkey for the body and head and another layer of provolone for the face. The shapes were all drawn on white paper and cut out with scissors. The paper cut outs were then used as a template on the cheese and soy turkey, which I cut out using my 'food only' scissors. The facial features are nori, black sesame seeds and pickled ginger for the cheeks. She has a raspberry and corn flower over one ear and carrot flowers around her with cucumber leaves that you can't really see in the picture, but I promise they are there!

Later this afternoon I intend to post my curry recipe since a couple of people asked for it a while back :D

Sumo Boy

One of A-chan's favorite books is 'Sumo Boy' written by Hirotaka Nakagawa. It's continually been one of her favorites for well over a year now. At one point she had expressed the wish that she could someday grow up to be a Sumo wrestler. I believe that she has since changed her mind, but she is still fascinated with all things sumo. In honor of Sumo Boy I have turned what might have been a boring sweet potato bun into a glorious Sumo hero! My sumo boy doesn't look anything like the one in the book, however.

In the bento: A sweet potato bun surrounded by a layer of rice covered with green peas, sesame carrots and baby corn. On top of the veggies are provolone letters.

I am not sure if the word 'sugoi' has anything to do with Sumo or not, as far as I'm aware it's the equivalent of 'cool' or 'awesome'. I couldn't fit 'Dosukoi' in the space I had, though!

Sumo Boy's mawashi is made from strips of nori, as are his facial features. The nori is secured with my new incredible nori-glue, otherwise known as strawberry jam. (While cleaning sticky jam off 6 year old fingers I had a revelation, lol ) His cheeks are also strawberry jam, dipped from the jar with a toothpick. The jam seems to work just as well as mayo but is a lot less troublesome than the honey I sometimes use. It is nice to have an alternative to mayo when securing decorations to sweet foods!

Box Appetit Review

One of the bento items that I received for Christmas was this curious version of a bento box. It was entitled "Box Appetit". It is quite different from any other bento box that I own and I was very excited about trying it out for the first time. But I felt that I needed to make a special lunch for this unique box and spent some time thinking and planning.

It seemed to me that the box called out for noodles. It had to be a recipe that I'd never made before. And because I rarely get a chance to make food that is as spicy hot as I like it, it's hard for me to settle on one thing because I end up wanting to make everything! Finally, I decided and made a special trip to Earthfare to acquire the ingredients that I needed.

In the bento: The main part of the bento was filled with Spicy curry noodles which had yellow and red peppers, onion, carrots and baby bok choy and had a scattering of peanuts on top. On the left side were three slices of coconut curry tempeh and three fried slices of purple potato. The other side had quick cucumber pickles. In the triangular compartment were two hot pepper and jap chae dumplings, some Z crackers - cumin and cayenne flavored, a halved cherry tomato and a wedge of lemon.

This is a huge box. It actually reminds me more of styrofoam take-away boxes than of bento boxes. In fact, the resemblance is quite striking, right down to the sloping sides! It was easy to fill, but it took a lot of food.

Pros - I enjoyed using the sauce dish that is built into the lid. It was perfect for dipping my dumplings into soy sauce. The triangular containers are neat and fun to use! The lids seemed secure enough that I might try some soup or saucy curry in the large one sometime. The small triangular container is meant for sauces which is really awesome if you're a hot sauce loving person like me :D

Cons - It's huge. And because of the size and the shape I couldn't find a good way to carry it. None of my bags would fit it and none of my furoshiki were large enough to wrap it. So I ended up having to cart it by hand. This wasn't a big deal but it was a bit inconvenient. The special fork holder on the outside of the lid seems like a good idea but actually gave me the heebie jeebies since I didn't have a bag or wrap for it to go into. I could just imagine the fork picking up germs from random things that could possibly touch it while I was on the go.

All in all I think that I will prefer to keep this as a fun dish for eating in at home, but not for using to make bentos. I will also be taking it along whenever we eat out and I know that I'll be bringing home leftovers. Filling it up at the restaurant will save the environment and also make it easy for me to just pull out and dig in the next day!

Love letters

It may be a little early to jump into making Valentine's Day bentos, but I figured this was subtle enough to slide in under the radar. I started my planning for Valentine's this morning, after a weekend of being shocked that it was not as far in the future as I'd thought. I have to buy stuff to make Valentine's chocolates! I have to figure out what to do for A-chan's school! I have to keep it from sneaking up on me and walloping me in the head with the suddenness that it has done so often in the past.

In the bento: Two cheese sandwiches in the shape of envelopes, a heart shaped container of black eyed peas, a halved cherry tomato, 3 spears of baby corn, 3 black olives and a carrot flower on a pick.

To make the envelope I cut the crusts off of the bread slices then smooshed it flat with a rolling pin. The flap of the envelope is just another flat piece of bread put on top of the sandwich. The heart 'sticker' was cut from soy ham. The stamp background is provolone cheese with a tiny nori heart on top.

I'm really loving the tiny heart punch. I didn't think that I would get so much use out of it, but it's showing up all over the place, lol! Also pictured is a package of Genji pie that we splurged on at Super H Mart yesterday. (It's basically a heart shaped butter pastry with sugar on top, very light and crispy and yum!)

Sunny Day Bento

It's been a while since I've done a 'sun and flowers' bento. Today is the perfect day for one! The sun is bright and beautifully shining and you can just feel Spring right around the corner. In keeping with this week's (inadvertent) theme, today's bento was another simple one with minimal time and decoration.

In the bento: Garlic and basil couscous, cherry tomato, carrot slivers (see, I told you they would show up again!), baby corn spears, steamed broccoli, and a tulip-shaped container of black eyed peas.

The decorations: A carrot slice makes up the sun and I used slivered carrots for the rays. For the flowers I used a flower cutter on provolone and put sugar stars on top. Cucumber peel was used for the stems and leaves. The eyes of the tomato girl were cut from provolone and then I used a nori punch for the rest. A bow-shaped pick was inserted at a cute angle, but I'm not sure that I like it now.