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 #3 - Texan steak

 This week’s lunches are looking pretty carb-free: would you believe it’s simply because I am TOO LAZY to cook rice? But honestly, folks, that is the long and the short of it. I simply haven’t the time or commitment required to cook rice! Appalling, I know. Another factor keeping me away from the rice is the heat: it has been pretty hot here, which makes me crave lots of fruit, protein and veggies and less starch/carbs. 

The most labour-intensive part of the bento was the green bean stew. I get organic food boxes delivered fortnightly and to make sure the vegetables don’t rot before I have time to eat them, I cook them up and freeze them. This recipe took about an hour, but since I was doing it anyway I thought it would make a great addition to my bento.  

And now, a confession: I really have no idea what makes this steak Texan, but I think it is the marinade. I bought it pre-seasoned from Abel & Cole and I'm guessing it has some species of bbq sauce on it. So, if you want to replicate this, I suggest you marinate your steak in bbq sauce. But teriyaki would also be nice.

 The advantage of the steak is that it is thin-sliced, so it took less than five minutes to cook. I heated up the frying pan and dry-fried it for about two minutes on each side and it was cooked through, so you could probably even cook it for a little less if you want your steak rare (I did, but I got distracted!).

To go with the steak, I made a tamagoyaki – something I am getting so much more adept at these days – and a salad of grated carrot with a little tahini, soy sauce and honey. The green stuff is chopped cucumber grown in a colleague’s garden – so nice on a hot day! 

Vegetarian bento #4 - Greek Salad

One of my favourite songs to listen to in summer is Rufus Wainwright's Greek Song (I am listening now as I type!), which is the inspiration for this bento - warm weather, beautiful people, cocktail glasses pearled with drops of water and colourful salads for lunch.Best of all, it's unbelievably simple.

For the top layer, I used some cucumber, cherry tomatoes, leftover feta and black olives

Those are pretty much the ingredients of a Greek salad, of course, but I have LOADS of lettuce from my veg box which needs to be used up before I go away tomorrow afternoon, so in the bottom layer I put a generous handful of lettuce and a little panda pot full of homemade lemon dressing.

Lemon dressing

(makes 4 little pots)

2 dessert spoons olive oil
juice of half a lemon
1-2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tsp parsley (freshly chopped or dried)
salt
pepper

Put all your ingredients into a clean jar and shake vigorously, then decant into pots as you need it.

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....

Mix and match bento #1

This is a mix and match bento because while my version has meat in it, it doesn’t have to. I just used what I had to hand – you could easily swap in some tofu or more veggies or whatever you fancy, or leave that element out altogether.

It’s still really grey and muggy here in London and I’ve been trying to find dishes that fulfil my need for stodge, but are still healthy enough for Weight Watchers. And on top of this, I want my meals to look summery. Yes, I am demanding!

Today’s bento has a roasted vegetable salad and a lot of protein in the form of cheese and a pigeon breast :) I need to fill up today, it's Tuesday and I have exercise planned before lunch, and an 8km walk after work (and before dinner). 

Top layer: This aubergine salad by Abel and Cole is simply delicious. I adjusted the oil quantities in the dressing to reduce the WW points and left out the red onion because I forgot, but it still tastes really good and is probably less, um, fragrant, if you know what I mean. 

Bottom layer: I dusted a pigeon breast with lemon zest, salt and pepper, pan fried it and sliced it up. I then filled the box up with shredded gem lettuce and added 30g of cheese to go with my apple for dessert. 

The whole thing (30g cheese included) came to a modest 7 WW points and I felt very full after eating it, so mission accomplished!

Fish bento #4 - maki

I haven't made sushi for ages, but after spying a pack of nori sheets in my food cupboard yesterday I couldn't resist.

The sushi part

For today’s bento I made two different kinds of maki:

Mackerel: for this I spread 100g cooked sushi rice onto the nori sheet and topped it with freshly cooked mackerel fillet mixed with salt, pepper, a dash of Dijon mustard and a spoonful of low-fat plain yoghurt

Red pepper: again, I spread 100g cooked rice on the nori and then laid some lightly fried strips of red pepper on top.

The salad part

For the salad, I peeled and chopped a pear and sliced two sticks of celery. I added a little salt and pepper and stirred in some plain yoghurt.

The filler

I filled in any gaps using broccoli stalk poached in soy and dashi.

Apologies for the crap photo - I have been too lazy to recharge my camera, so I used my phone.

Meaty bento #2: Bears in the Wood

Today's meaty bento is  a quick, cute bento:

Bed of rocket - The easy part. Remove rocket from packets and spread over the bottom of your bento!
Bear onigiri - I used my onigiri mould to make rice balls in the shape of a bear's face, and my nori punch for the faces.
Venison burgers - For the bears' bodies I used venison mince mixed with a little redcurrant jelly and onion and then shaped into oblongs. I pan-fried them and placed them under the onigiri to make a body
Carrots - Bears need paws! I used small carrot rounds for this. 

Fish bento #1

This week I got a haul of new stuff from Bento & Co – so I have lots of new goodies to experiment with. Today I decided to use the Toji box. 

I like this one because it is very elegant – and it was inexpensive, too.

Today’s bento is fish-based. The main component is one of my favourite recipes by Jamie Oliver. I filled the shallow layer with 100g brown rice, which I topped with a grilled mackerel fillet. It looked a bit plain and brown, so I added an umeboshi for prettiness.

In the deep layer, I included a panda pot filled with the delicious dressing from Oliver’s recipe, some radishes spiked on cute panda picks, some purple sprouting broccoli, a portion of namuru, and some sliced poached carrot.

The only slightly annoying thing is that the panda's ears stick up too high for this box, so it didn't fit together as snugly as it should. However, thanks to the elastic band, it all held together well. 

Vegetarian bento #1

Over the weekend I bought a new lunch box. I couldn’t resist it because it’s shaped like a LEGO brick:

As a result, I was very excited about packing today’s lunch. It’s a much larger box than I usually pack, so I have used lots of low-calorie filler like radishes. 

• Namul – this is a salad made with blanched greens, sesame oil, toasted sesame seeds and salt. I have topped each portion with a radish spiked on a panda pick to make it cuter and more colourful.
• Chopped radishes – to nibble on and to take up some space in the bento
• Egg in treasure bag – this is one of my favourite recipes of all time. I like to make a few at the start of the week and have them in bentos or slice them into soups.
• Poached carrot – this is just carrot that has been poached in the dashi/mirin/soy combo I used for the eggs
• Multi-coloured rice – I’m not sure the effect comes off that brilliantly, but there is supposed to be one layer of white rice and one layer of green rice. I’d say it is lightly green, and I have added some petits pois to enhance the effect. The green tinge was achieved by boiling the rice in the water I used to blanch greens for the namul

Party girl bento

Today’s bento only happened because I did all my cooking for the week yesterday afternoon. I made:

• A batch of carrot and sesame furikake
• A batch of my spicy beetroot salad (raw grated beetroot tossed with sesame seeds, chilli flakes, honey and rice vinegar)
• Tamagoyaki for this morning
• Boiled some eggs for later in the week

I also remembered to take a portion of rice out of the freezer and the end result was that despite getting to bed after 3am, I was still able to pack a bento because all I had to do was pan-fry a burger and arrange everything in my box.

Not too shabby, eh?