Veggie bento #7 - Straight from the freezer bento

It’s thanks to my habit of freezing things that I was able to construct today’s lunch. I’ve been rather low on time lately, and planning and putting together bentos has been a struggle - hence the dearth of posts. However, a quick rummage in the freezer allowed me to put the box below together in just a few minutes.

Here’s what’s in it:

• 100g cooked sushi rice (defrosted overnight)
• 1-2 tbsp petits pois
• Carrot rounds (these were poached in orange juice, chilli and soy before freezing)
• Bean burger  
• Roasted butternut squash (leftover from last night’s dinner)

When I woke up this morning I packed the defrosted rice into my bento box and topped it with frozen peas, arranged the squash into one of the smaller compartments and popped a bean burger and some carrot rounds into the other. It took me five minutes, and can easily be reheated in the microwave at work. However, you could also microwave the various elements before putting them in the box.

Vegetarian bento #5 - Hangover bento

As a devotee of porridge in all its forms, I have been wanting to try this recipe for ages, and the UK Bank Holiday weekend provided an excellent opportunity.

I'm sure anyone who is even remotely interesting has experienced what I generally refer to as a cumulative hangover. It's what occurs when you start partying on Thursday night, average roughly three hours sleep each night and go clubbing with people who buy beer in jugs, and keep going until the wee hours of Tuesday morning.

Following on of these fun binges, I generally feel like consuming fewer calories and concocting less complicated lunches than normal. This usually means I end up hanging over a bowl of soup, but today, in honour of my new food flask, I decided to try rice porridge, as described by Maki Otoh (my bento guru!) .

This bento takes a bit of planning, but the effort involved is minimal and you can wander off and leave it while you drink water/stand under a cold shower/curse the world's wine-producing nations/gulp Berocca.

For my bento, I put 60g sushi rice and two tbsp dried adzuki beans into a pint jug and filled it to the top with water, then left it overnight to soak. 

In the morning, I crawled out of bed, tipped the whole lot into a pan with a good pinch of salt and brought it to the boil while making myself a cup of tea. Then I turned the heat right down and crawled back to bed. When it was time for me to shower (about 40mins later) I checked the pan to make sure it hadn’t dried out (you want this to be the consistency of breakfast porridge) and hopped in the shower. 

When I was ready to leave the house, I tipped half the mixture into my thermos, half into a takeaway box for the freezer, grabbed some toppings (chopped green onions, sesame salt, a pickled plum) and headed to the office. By lunchtime, it was just the right kind of warm – it’s also filling and comforting and totally guilt free.

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!

Vegetarian bento #2

I always have at least one entirely flesh-free day every week, and at least two flesh-free bentos. If I'm honest, I mostly do this for variety in my diet and because preparing meat and fish can be a bit of a hassle, but of course I am also keenly aware of the environmental impact of fishing and meat farming.

Today’s bento is a little less interesting than the others I did this week – but it is very colourful and also meat- egg- and dairy-free. I wanted to keep it fairly light as I am going out for pizza tonight - but not so light that I end up feeling hungry. 

There is some honey in the dressing, but that can easily be replaced with sugar if you need everything to be vegan. In fact, using white sugar in the recipe is actually more accurate. I also used some leftover pasta salad from the weekend that I wanted to use up, and it’s so colourful I thought it would combine well with my bright green Ojue bento box.

On the top layer, I’ve put the pasta salad:

On the bottom layer, I have a little chick filled with sesame dressing (1 tsp tahini, 1 tsp soy, 1/2 tsp honey or sugar), purple sprouting broccoli to dip into the dressing, tofu stuffed with carrot and ginger salad, and some radishes with panda picks.

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

The Accidental Bento

Today's bento came about because I had a cooking accident. On Sunday, while making up my beloved beetroot salad, I tipped in way too many chilli flakes. I scraped off what I could, but the result was still super-fiery.

On Monday, I took it along to work in my bento as usual - my eyes watered and my tongue burned!!

On Tuesday, I took a smaller amount and stirred it into my rice - but at that rate there was no way I was going to use it all up by the end of the week.

For today's bento I hit upon the idea of stirring it through pasta with a bit of yoghurt to cool it down, and judging from my initial sample I *think* it worked. Fingers crossed, and if it has, I will make the same again for lunch on Saturday.

Also in today's bento are some carrot sticks, some broccoli florets, and an egg.

Stars and salads

A very quick entry on today's bento, which is actually not for lunch. I have Thai food at a local pub for lunch on Fridays, but this evening I am going to the cinema straight after work and I don't want to feel like falling over if I have acouple of drinks after that, so I've prepared a light bento.

Rice stars:

I know there are some wonderful people who do these by hand, but I use rice moulds I bought from Bento & Co and then I pat them with some sesame furikake I got at the local health food shop.

Marinated tofu:

My quick tofu marinade is 50/50 lime juice and soy. I dip the tofu in the mixture and then dry fry it.

Salads:

On the left I have some steamed broccoli, and below it some iceberg lettuce (no dressing). In the middle is a serving of Makiko Itoh's delicious cucumber and nashi salad.

Quickly, quickly

I woke up late today, so today’s bento isn’t particularly imaginative. In fact, it’s three rather hastily composed columns of leftovers from earlier in the week, and took me a total of two minutes. Spend five and you’d get the columns straight!

L-R:

• Sushi rice
• Stir-fried chard with soy and sesame
• Chick pea stew

This post is useless without photos

I wasn’t organised enough to photograph today’s bento, but it tasted so nice I thought I would document it. 

• As usual, 100g (cooked weight) brown rice
• Pea shoots with ginger: This si so easy and so delicious! I made a few days’ worth by heating 1tsp of olive oil and 1tsp of sesame oil and adding two crushed garlic cloves, half a finely chopped onion and a chunk of ginger, also finely chopped. Once these ingredients had softened, I added a bag of fresh pea shoots and cooked until wilted. The bottom of my bento was 50/50 rice and pea shoots.
• Easy carrot salad: grate carrot, drizzle with soy
• Lazy cucumber salad: slice cucumber, drizzle with rice vinegar. For a really flavoursome experience, you could marinate the cucumber overnight
• For protein: two hard boiled eggs

Quick, easy, lazy, but one of the nicest bentos I’ve ever made. I should be home earlier tonight, so tomorrow’s effort will be a bit more impressive…

Back to bento

I haven't been doing bentos lately as the dark mornings have made it increasingly hard for me to wake up early enough. But I got such lovely things in this week's veg box that I was eager to use them.

Today’s bento is fairly simple – I was pressed for time. Still, I think it looks pretty!

Part 1, easy: brown rice boiled and then doused with rice seasoning

Part 2, easy; boiled egg, sliced in half and decorated with nori pieces

Part 3:  Four of my colourful chard leaves and chopped the stalks. I then softened them in a few tablespoons of water with onion, slices garlic, salt and pepper. This works just as well as frying, but without the fat. At the end, I stirred in a teaspoon of butter – not enough to soften the veg or push up the calories, but enough to add a great flavour.

End result: yummy.