Meaty bento #5 - Chili and cornbread

Sometimes life gets busy and you don’t have a lot of time for planning and preparing bento lunches. This is a great example of how you can use leftovers to prepare a cute bento – any stew and bread will do.

For my bento I used:

• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 portion chili con carne
• 50g rice
•  1 piece cornbread

I used the base of the removable section of the bento box to cut a half-moon of cornbread, then cut it in half to make a reasonable portion.

Because this bento box is rather deep, and to ensure a veggie element, I layered the bottom of both sections with chopped carrot, then on one side I added the chili, topped with a circle of cheese with nori to make a smiley face. On the other, I put the cornbread (with roasted chilli stripes) and some rice. The whole thing took me about 10 minutes to put together.

An even quicker version, which I made for my friend, was two tortillas folded into triangles and placed in a takeaway box with a portion of chili topped with cheese smiley faces.

Cute and quick, see.