Chicken and Rice Bento

Teri-chicken with pressed rice, a pickle, dried fruit, omelet, and cheese bento came with me to work this past week. Lots of change coming this month too.

Bentoin' all week with you

Monday ! Tuesday ! Bento Days!

Leftover panko chicken and stuffed peppers, and vegetables and brie and crackers.

Mixed salad, chicken sausage and rolled omelet, carrots and tomatoes and hummus, cookies and candy.

Wednesday ! Thursday ! Bento Days!

Tomatoes and mangoes chunked, hummus and peanut butter with bread sticks and kumquats.

Heirloom tomatoes and cottage cheese and a carrot star and thinly sliced radish, pecans and orange slices and bell pepper and carrots and strawberries

Yay!

Crab Apple Bento

Apple and chicken sausage with shiitake omelet, rice with flower detail, rice snacks, cheese, tangerine treat, date nuggets, and an organic crab apple.

I would really love a crab apple tree in the front yard. Maybe I will convince him this year.

Recommended Reading For Beginners Like Me

This fun little cookbook has a variety of recipes suitable for bento as well as a regular meal such as karaage (Japanese style chicken nuggets), tonkatsu (pork cutlets), tamagoyaki (Japanese omelet), and jyagatama (potato balls). They even provide instruction on how to use chopsticks and how to set the table. And they also give you a recipe to make your own udon noodles. Now that I must try!

Bento Box Week #3 At Work

Somebody in one of these bento box Flickr groups put rice crackers in their box and immediately I was teleported back to my childhood, childhood childhood when Lee and I would visit the Japanese tea room at the Descanso Gardens. A woman dressed in a kimono would serve us a pot of tea and a dish of delicately shaped crackers. We would sit outside by the pond or the bridge under the tall oaks and camellia forest. Peace all around us.

Maybe that is why I equate Japanese culture and food as calming and sublime. Maybe I had been significantly influenced by the nurseries, the architecture, and rice crackers, and that's why I turned out this way. Eh.

I went sort of cracker happy on Tuesday. Along with my rice and meatballs (recipe at this blog), crackers, grapes, radishes, tomatoes, and yogurt with raspberries et al, the lunch was a success.

Wednesday I woke feeling so inspired by this video (click on "Bento" near bottom right) that I made a "sunflower." It wasn't perfect, but hey this is my tenth bento box. Ever. It was weird to eat the egg lukewarm too, even though I eat cold hard boiled eggs. Don't know. Just odd.

Yogurt again with three fruits, tri-color bell peppers with mayo and pickled cabbage, and pork cooked with soy sauce and a leftover stuffed jalapeno. Those be pine nuts.

Thursday I was all get outta my way. I'm late! Grilled swordfish with rice and bell peppers and clam chowder were leftovers. So gooooooood! Red bell peppers which I'm really liking with soy and a fruit bowl. Those raspberries were so tiny.

Donburi Bento Box

This is my first try at donburi which is rice served with a topping. I think the topping should be saucier and originally I was going to mix the egg with the pork and vegetables. But I had to try a 1 egg tamagoyaki (Japanese omelet) recipe that I read about on Maki's Just Bento website.

This is a seriously good omelet! I almost jumped up and made another one.

I'm still loving these "Master & Commander" glasses that I purchased from Williams-Sonoma. Today I brewed some Wild Raspberry Tea and poured it over ice. So refreshing!