Bunny in the Grass

Trying out my borrowed egg shaper.  (You can also shape with cookie cutters - see here) The lettuce around my bunny egg is from my winter lettuce project, which has been a lot slower than I envisioned.

The yogurt is Cabot plain nonfat yogurt with Wyman's frozen rasberries, and sugar added to taste.  This is much less expensive than buying flavored yogurt, and I can vary the fruit every day.

That's a slice of very dark red apple at the bottom - an empire, which gave such a nice red color to my apple jelly.

This bento:  onion and yukon gold potatoes, cooked in a little of the fat from the Dakin Farm Bacon, toast, egg, lettuce, yogurt with raspberries, empire apple

Local foods: onion from my garden, lettuce from my back room, Dakin Farm Bacon, La Panciata bread, Cabot Yogurt, empire apple

Thinking of Spring

So many Spring things to do - seeds to plant, spring cleaning..   So it's time to add flowers to the bento - made from pickled beets, and with a cheese center.  Cheese centers to the cucumber slices in the salad, too.  Homemade croutons.  I just butter a slice of bread and pan-toast it on both sides, then cut up in cubes (usually) or in this case I used a round linzer cookie cutter.

The local ingredients are slim pickings.  Cabot cheese, bread,  and the stems for the flowers, which are from sprouted onions.

This bento: fried rice with onions and asparagus, pickled beets, cheese, onion tops, bagged salad, homemade croutons, cucumber, Ranch dressing, Jordon Almonds

Local foods: Cabot cheese, bread fromLa Panciata, onion stems.

Almost Mac and Cheese

I made the mac and cheese for this bento last night.  It's not a throw together in the morning thing, because I wanted it to form a hockey puck rather than needing another container for it.

This is probably not going to be your favorite mac and cheese, but it might be your favorite New Year's Resolution Mac and Cheese - or almost mac and cheese.  The sauce has sauted onions, mushrooms and garlic, and there's less cheese than usual.  I divided it into 6 cups in a silicone muffin pan, topped with a little cheddar, and stuck under the broiler til the top was just browning.  Sauted fresh bread crumbs in a little butter, added a little parmesan, and packaged the crumb topping separately so it'll still be crisp when I eat it.  Here's the recipe for this mac and cheese. 

The Sweet Scent of Summer Salad recipe here. 

This bento: Almost mac and cheese, mixed vegetable salad, boston lettuce, melon, clementine, grape tomatoes, ranch dressing.

Local foods: Monument Farms milk, Cabot cheddar and butter, onion from my garden, bread from La Panciata

Taco Salad Bento

S

I usually have a bigger salad than this when I have a taco salad. So the good thing is I ate less for lunch.  But I won't repeat this unless I readjust somehow.  I didn't get either beans or ground beef into the salad; didn't want to open beans for just the few I would have used.  Lots of veggies in the salad, and 4 condiments: sour cream, guacamole (with a little salsa and the sour cream on my spoon, lime juice) mayo mixed with hot salsa, and a sweet relish I make that is of course basically a salsa.  I like the sweetness in my taco salad and sometimes use catalina dressing. Bringing the corn chips separately meant they stayed crisp.

The little bit of yellow on the condiments is from a lone little yellow tomato from the garden that has been shriveling up on the counter for 3-4 months.  Still edible.  Don't understand why yellow tomatoes aren't marketed as "keepers," because they last longer on the vine than reds and obviously last longer on the counter.  My own sort of fresh tomato in January! 


This bento: Santitas corn chips, monterey jack cheese. Boston lettuce, grape tomatoes, onion, cuke, red pepper, green pepper.  Sour cream, guacamole, mayo and salsa, Copley Plaza relish, yellow tomato.

Local foods: Cabot's monterey jack cheese and sour cream. yellow tomato, Copley Plaza relish from my garden veggies: red and green tomatoes, red and green peppers, onion.

New Year's Bento (#10)

Yesterday's bento. Black-eyed peas aren't my usual New Year's Day food tradition (creamed salmon with peas is), but I use them in this salad, so why not?   New Year's eve I had quesadillas, so I saved some for this bento.  I've been waiting for avocados to come down in price (got them for 99 cents at Macs).  My quesadilla has guacamole, tomtoes if I have them but I didn't, monterey jack cheese, and sour cream.  The recipe for the salad, which I call Sweet Scent of Summer Salad, is on my other blog, Vermont Food and Garden.  I had thought I'd get Green Mountain Gringo Salsa, to add another local food, but it's now made in North Carolina (!)

This bento: Summer Salad (black-eyed peas, corn, cucumber, green pepper, red bell pepper, red jalapeno, onion, celery, lime juice, canola oil, salt and BP) flour tortilla, guacamole (avocado, salsa, onion, lime juice), monterey jack cheese and sour cream. melon

Local foods: Cabot's monterey jack cheese and sour cream.  A wrinkled jalapeno from my garden, now turned red.

Cookie Cutter Charaben

I've been thinking about the incredibly cute little egg molds that turn boiled eggs into Hello Kitty or a volkswagen. I don't really need to have cute eggs in my bento boxes, but I'd sort of like to anyway.   Some of these cute decorations are in the form of well known cartoon characters, so they're called Chara(cter)ben(to), or charaben, and that's become a general name for cute bento.  I decided to experiment with cookie cutters and boiled eggs, since lots of cookie cutters have interior design lines that will make an impression on eggs, which are pretty malleable.  This is a teddy bear egg, made with a cookie cutter pressed onto the egg for a minute or two..

The pink arc is apple jelly made from empire apples, which have a really red skin.  Apple jelly is incredibly easy to make and doesn't require any specialized equipment.  Directions on my other blog, here.  Also have a few pomegranate seeds. Both give a little sweetness to the fried rice, instead of using duck sauce.  There's also cottage cheese to go with the grapefruit.

This bento:  rice with vegetable broth, 1/2 boiled egg, apple jelly, pomegranate seeds, onions, mushrooms, red bell pepper, grapefruit, cottage cheese.  soy sauce.

Local foods:  Apple jelly from local apples, cottage cheese.

Brand New Bento Box

Christmas present!  I love my new bento box.  Just the right size, about 2 1/2 cups.  There's a tray for stuff like rice (or crackers, or couscous, etc), which holds a cup, and that tray sits on the bottom container which holds fruit, veggies, anything else to go with the rice.  A cover and an elastic strap hold it all together.

I was also given a beautiful set of chopsticks to go with my bento box, and that's certainly going to help me eat more slowly for the time being.  Not one of my notable manual skills. 

Of course I needed to make rice for my first bento in a "real" bento box.  I cooked veggies (mushrooms, onions, broccoli) and love this combination with curry and sour cream, so I added some curry powder to some sour cream and put it in a silicone mini-muffin cup.  Added beet petals. I also like cashews with my curry so they're in the box too.  A clementine adds a nice sweet and acid contrast.

This bento:  rice in vegetable broth, onions, mushrooms, broccoli, cashews, clementine, grapes, beet, curried sour cream.

Local foods:  Sour cream (that's pretty lame)

GETTING BETTER #3

I'm pretty happy with this bento box. Better balance in the composition, good variety of foods. I'm getting the hang of this, but they need to take less time, that's for sure. Because of my work hours this is a dinner bento, so it has more food than yesterday's.

My standard simple fried rice starts with making a thin one egg omelet to cut into strips. Then in the same (now empty) pan saute a minced onion with finely minced garlic. Grate some ginger onto the onion and add either red pepper flakes or minced hot pepper. Add some previously cooked rice (I try to have some in the fridge all the time), a little sesame oil and soy sauce, black pepper. Add the strips of cooked egg and at the last minute some frozen petite peas, which only need to thaw. Scallions as well if you have them, which I didn't this time - except for the little scallion leaves for the flower stems. Try to do this in a fairly hot pan for the best flavor.

My duck sauce on the side is Bonne Maman's apricot preserves and cider vinegar to taste for tartness. I thinned it with a little pineapple juice, but that's optional.

This bento: fried rice, broccoli, pineapple, cucumber sticks, mushrooms, concord grapes, 3 blueberries, sun gold tomatoes. with duck sauce and soy sauce.

Local foods: onion, tomatoes, and lettuce,scallion leaves and red pepper from my garden. cucumber.

FIRST BENTO

First light is what astronomers call the inaugural observation by a new telescope, and this is first bento - my inaugural lunch box after the manner of the little Japanese lunch boxes filled with lots of colorful bite-sized goodies, called bento boxes.

I decided to pay homage to beloved Totoro in my first bento (sorry Totoro, you deserved better, and I forgot your whiskers!). Many bento boxes are called "cute bento," because of the cute little characters, or shaped fruits, vegetables, eggs and rice balls that grace some lucky person's bento box.

I'm not likely to make a lot of cute bentos, and I don't even have a "real" bento box yet, but I like the idea of having a little of this and that. Sort of a New England pot luck lunch. I'll do something local in every box - either something from my garden or something from the great bounty of Vermont foods.

This bento: Rice with terriyaki vegetables. Cherry tomatoes, melon, kiwi, grapes.

Local foods: Onions, sweet red peppers, corn, sweet basil, and the last of the sun gold tomatoes, from my garden.