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.

Meaty bento #1

Today’s bento is in my little panda bento box, which is apparently for kids, but in my opinion it is deceptively small – you can pack a lot of food into it.

The top layer contains rice with petits pois. I froze the rice last week and put it into the box frozen with a tablespoon of petits pois on top which is why it doesn't look very neat. When it’s time to eat, I just pop it all in the microwave for 60 seconds. 

The bottom layer has quite a few different things in it In the panda’s ears are some portions of namuru. I also made mini meat wraps filled with broccoli stalks, a radish and some broccoli. Yummy!  

Cooking!

As part of my healthy living regime, I’ve been cooking up a storm. Essentially, I’ve been trying to prepare as much of the food I eat as possible, which has meant getting up early to make breakfasts and lunches instead of grabbing cereal at work or buying lunch from a café; making my own stocks and soups, etc.

Another reason is that I am quite a foodie and most low-fat foods in the supermarket just don’t inspire me. Also, I am signed up to an organic veg box service which means that once a fortnight I get a crop of food to use up. And since the contents are a surprise, I get to push my boundaries and think creatively. 

I am doing Weight Watchers, so my criteria for each main meal is that it must be fewer than ten points – other than that, anything goes. 

Here is what I cooked last night: stuffed courgettes with a side salad tossed in parmesan and balsamic vinegar. 

The salad was my own invention, but I got the courgette recipe from AllRecipesUk using smaller quantities of everything (100g mince, 50g brown rice)and substituting lean beef mince for the lamb. And yes, that is cheese on top - I grated 25g of parmesan, topped all my courgettes and still had a generous amount for my salad. Even with the more modest quantity of filling I made I was able to stuff two large courgettes and freeze about 1/3 – enough to stuff a small aubergine I think.