Vegetarian bento #3 - Broad bean risotto

Summer is making its first tentative steps into the UK, which suddenly gives me the urge to eat all things light and green. In my most recent food box, I received some lovely broad beans and I wanted to make the most of them.

Of course, 'light' isn't an adjective one usually uses to describe risotto, but I have found a great way of lightening it.

Here is how I made today's dish. This recipe is meant to serve four for dinner, but it works out at about six servings in my little geisha bento and I found that filling enough even after a workout!

Broad bean risotto

1 dessert spoon vegetable oil
2 celery stalks or 3 spring onions
1/2 onion
2 cloves garlic
200g aroborio or carnaroli rice
100ml dry white wine (I used sparkling)
1l vegetable stock
100g broad beans
30g parmesan, grated

Put the oil in a pan and gently fry your celery or spring onions and your onion on a low heat. At this point, put your stock in another pan, and keep it warm on a very low heat.

After a minute or two, add the rice and garlic, and stir for 5-7 minutes - the rice and venegetable shouldn't get brown, but it should start to become translucent, and the pot should start feeling hot. Pour in the wine - it should really sizzle - and stir. Once the wine is absorbed, start adding the stock a ladleful at a time, waiting until one batch is absorbed before adding the next. About ten minutes before the rice is ready (when you're down to your last 3 ladles), add the broad beans. When the rice is cooked, take the risotto off the heat, add the grated parmesan and stir it in vigorously for 2-3 minutes. You should now have something nice, glossy, and not too rich to put on your plates!


For the bento, I put some risotto in one section:

and filled the other one with lettuce and cucumber slices - I just love the combination of warm risotto and cool salad, but perhaps that is just me being weird....

Post-holiday bento

You may have noticed a lack of bentos on these pages. That. my friends, is down to the fact that I have been in France on holiday. I am now back, and back on my diet (hehe) and back to bento.

Today's bento is pretty simple. In the top layer is 100g brown rice mixed with 2tbsp petits pois (this is a great way to sneak in a portion of veg when space is limited) and topped with little stars cut from carrots.

In the bottom layer I put some purple sprouting broccoli, steamed carrot sticks, mini venison burgers (I made and froze these a couple of weeks ago) and a boiled egg moulded to look like a bunny:

The most time-consuming elements were boiling the rice (I just put an extra pan on when cooking my dinner) and making the stars, but it was still only about 35 minutes.

I made an effort this morning...

I haven’t really done much bento lately as the last few weeks have been a combination of NO TIME or LOTS OF LEFTOVERS or BEING HOME SICK and eating dry bran flakes for lunch because it was a better option than getting out of bed.

However, in celebration of my lovely new bento box:

 

I decided to make an effort this morning.

So, here we have organic brown sushi rice tossed with a handful of fine green beans which I’ve chopped. On top are some cute little honey roast ham shapes.

 

On top of that I put some little silicone cups filled with daikon radish in soy/mirin dressing; olives; chopped green beans; boiled quail’s eggs, and finally, I filled a bowl with healthy broccoli tossed with a little salt and some black sesame furikake.

Colourful chard

Look what I got in my veg box today!

I can't wait to use them to brighten up my bento lunches :)

Trying to be healthy

I have had quite a foodie few days, so today’s bento is an attempt to be a bit healthier than normal while still packing in some energy-boosting dark green veg. No eggs today, though, as I woke up too late to cook them.

So, today I made:

• 100g (cooked weight) sushi rice topped with
• 60g grilled salmon, flaked and sprinkled with sesame seeds
• Buttered leeks – my trick for making this less fattening than usual is to slice the leeks and put them in a frying pan on a low heat with 2-6 tbsp of water. Once the water has been absorbed and the leeks have softened, I add a tsp of butter (5g) per leek and a bit of salt and pepper. The result is every bit as good as normal buttered leeks, but without the guilt factor.
• Blanched spinach, no dressing, sprinkled with sesame seeds

Bento for a dark Tuesday

Today’s bento was rather a rushed effort. I am finding it really hard to get up in the mornings now that it’s still darkish at 7am, so I am trying to pack lots of energy-building dark green veg and organic, free range eggs into my lunches.

Today’s box contains:

• 100g sushi rice
• Two handfuls of spinach with sesame dressing (1tsp tahini, 1 tsp soy, ½ tsp mirin, ½ tsp honey)
• 1 spanish-style omelette (1 egg, beaten; 25g chopped cooked potato; 1 spring onion, sliced; salt and pepper; cooked in a fried egg or crumpet ring to keep the shape/thickness)
• 75g salmon grilled with a drizzle of teriyaki sauce and some soy
• Chopped celery (to fill the gaps) 

Making the most of leftovers

This morning, I felt like a lapsed foodie: I burnt my figs to a cinder (after I’d doused the pan in water I realised I should have taken a photo!), didn’t feel like eating all of my porridge and struggled to fill my bento. Admittedly today I used a larger box, so that was part of the problem!

Today’s lunch is mostly made up of leftovers, which gave me time to make some cute little nori shapes.

I decided to go for a chequered effect, which is one of the easiest ways to make a bento look fun. I still had a stuffed courgette left over from the other day, and a bowl of sushi rice in the fridge, so I cut that into pieces and alternated it with rice shapes made with my onigiri mould. Then I used the moulds as a guide to cut matching shapes from a sheet of nori – I scored the sheet with a sharp knife and did the rest with scissors.

In the final corner, instead of rice I’ve put my little piggy pot, filled with salad dressing. The salad is just a colourful mixed leaf affair from a bag.

Of course, I realised too late that I have run out of soy sauce, so I will have to get some of that before lunch time. *sigh*

A Brit Does Bento

I have been making a lot of bento lunches lately, inspired by Makiko Itoh. I am too lazy to go into what all the past bentos had in them, but here are some photos, just to get you salivating.

In praise of porridge

I love porridge. I’d have it for breakfast every day if it weren’t for the perplexed stares I draw when cooking up oats in summer! So, when the warm weather hits I switch to fruits and yoghurt, but as soon as the air takes a cold turn, I reach for my oats!

I’m quite a purist about my porridge, and quite particular about how it is prepared. No microwave oats for me, and don’t even think about mentioning the awful, tasteless Ready Brek in my presence (sort of like baby food, but worse).

I favour organic oats and at the moment I’m using Flanahan’s, although sometimes I like the big, chunky oats Sainsbury’s does. However, my ideal texture is somewhere between the two so I might try combining them at some point – stay tuned for that experiment.

Step one for me is soaking the oats: 30g is about enough for me and I put them in a cup of water over night. In the morning, I pour the whole lot into a pan with a pinch of salt and let it cook on a very low heat until it reaches my desired consistency. I like my porridge thick, so it takes at least 15 minutes. 

Every five minutes or so I give it a good stir with a wooden spatula ("materials are everything") and when it is ready I tip it into my bowl. 

By now, you will have noticed the total absence of milk from this procedure: blame my Scottish ancestry. Occasionally, when I am out, I have to settle for porridge made with milk, but I never make it at home. I think it was Clarissa Dickson-Wright who described porridge made with milk as “puppy sick”. She isn’t wrong, you know. By all means pour a bit of milk or cream onto your porridge once it is in the bowl, but don’t insult your oats by poaching them in it.

Despite my aversion to milk, I do like to top my porridge with something: soft fruits, dried fruits, banana, peanut butter, grated apple, cinnamon, or some combination thereof. For breakfast this morning, I sprinkled some figs with brown sugar (I know some people are horrified by sugar, but one teaspoon won't hurt, even when you are trying to lose weight) and baked them until it the sugar bubbled:

And then put them on top of my porridge:

Delicious, filling and healthy :)

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.