Multicultural Bento!

Tomorrow morning begins my busy work week! I've prepared my bento meals for the next two days, as I won't have time to get ready between work shifts. I'll be lucky to get some sleep!

Ever since I ate those tasty carrot pickles I made for the last bento I posted, I've been craving pickles! Especially antipasto, yummy! I decided to add some antipasto to my next bento.

Antipasto, lemon-soy-mirin marinated chicken, and fried rice. I reused the left-over purchased fried rice I used previously, added beef, soy, and sake, and remade it into something tasty (finally, it has flavor!) Maybe the antipasto makes this a strange mix mix of Asian and Italian, but I love it so much!

Tonight, we decided to get fajitas for dinner from a local Mexican restaurant. There is always way too much food, so I figured, why not put some in a bento!

Steak fajita, rice and re-fried beans, chips, sour cream, and salsa in the sauce container. I like this bento box, but I rarely use it. The three tiers make it look so tiny, but it packs a lot of food!

Simple yet oh so tasty, chicken and egg soboro donburi. The ground chicken is flavored with ginger and soy, and the scrabbled eggs are flavored with sugar and sake. Japanese sweet scrambled eggs are delicious, especially with the chicken. Also, left overs make wonderful onigiri!

I'm a Cooking Machine!

For the last two days I have been cooking up a storm! I am working a temporary job during the election season, and election day is coming up on Tuesday. This upcoming week is going to be hectic with processing ballots, and I've got a 60+ hour work week ahead of me. Monday and Tuesday in particular I will be working from early morning to at least midnight, so I need to be prepared to eat all of my meals at work. I seem to have caught the bento bug, so I thought, "I should pre-cook a ton of food for bento box meals for the entire week!" So I've been cooking for the last two days... A normal person might have just bought a bunch of microwaveable TV dinners.

But, this is good practice for me, as I've been complaining that my cooking skills have deteriorated. The last two days I've whipped up some yummy foods like yakisoba, teriyaki, saute veggies, pickles, and froze a bunch of pre-cooked rice. After wrapping everything up I realized I should have cooked more green veggies, everything looked so... brown. Tomorrows meals included, I ended up sprinkling some green onion on top because I felt so guilty about it!

I was excited to be able to fit my 3 meals in a single insulated lunch bag! I baked a bunch of apple granola muffins for breakfast, and a big thing of yakisoba for dinner. Lunch is chicken tatsuta-age (fried chicken), boilded sweet potato topped with ground beef (nimono), rice, and pickled carrots.

Just a tiny bit of green onion in a sea of brown :-(  I still feel kind of bad, but oh well. I used the whites of the onion on the nimono, and the green parts on the chicken. At least I have a vegetable, and those carrot pickles are so addicting!

I promise to blog about things other than bento, after my hectic work week. My week is going to mostly consist of working and bento, so here's a forewarning!

Trick-or-treat Bento!

Happy Halloween!! I am getting ready this morning for a night of trick-or-treating with my son and my sister's family. Trick-or-treat time is going to be right around our normal dinner time, so I decided to pack a quick meal for my son, just in case he protests about having an earlier than usual dinner (toddlers, tantrum about everything!) or if anyone needs a quick snack.

Super easy things my picky eater can eat in the car or between trips to houses in the pursuit of candy.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwich bites, sliced grapes (his favorite!), and some cheez-its. I was just going to do a plain sandwich, but then I remembered someone gave me some Halloween cookie cutters!

Bats, pumpkin, cat, and ghost shaped sandwich bites!

Have fun and stay safe tonight!

Baby Clothes Quilts

I decided I wanted to try and reuse as much of my son's old clothing as I could, and looked into ideas for turning them into quilts or blankets. There are a lot of cute ideas and examples out there!

I had never quilted before, so it took a very long time to make my first quilt, even though it is a very small "lovey" quilt. For the first quilt, I used all the clothing from my son's newborn layette set.

 

Monkeys!! I used soft minky fabric for the backing and wrapped it around to use as a border. For the quilting, I attempted to "stitch the ditch", as I read it was easiest, but I had a really hard time keeping the stitching even and straight. Oh well, I'm not such a stickler for perfection! 

Perfect size to sit and read a book, or snuggle and drag around the house.

After the first quilt was finished, I started right away on the second! None of his other outgrown clothes have a theme to them, so I decided on a random style quilt, using squares of various sizes from 1 to 8 inches, then put them together randomly in 8 inch wide strips (and a 4 inch strip in the center).

It is very random and fun! I cut out the parts of his clothing that had pictures, patterns, or pockets. This quilt has a lot of pockets! This is now my son's favorite blanket, and it is a perfect size for a toddler bed. He likes to sit and point to all the pictures, and put little toys in the pockets.

It was difficult to decide on border and backing fabrics, because there is so much randomness and colors. I finally decided on stripes with dull colors, because it looked good with the denim in the quilt, and puppy fabric on a dark denim blue color for the backing. All the other fabric options were way too bright and overpowered the well worn clothing fabric on the front of the quilt. I machine-tied this quilt. Very fun!

I'd like to get started on the next one, I hope to make a twin size quilt, probably in the same random style as the last one. But he is now a toddler, and therefore isn't growing out of his clothes as quickly as he was! So it may be a while before the next baby clothes quilt!

First Two Bento Lunches

I recently just returned to work, a temp job, and have decided I want to try and make bento lunches again. Years ago I used to make bento lunches for work, it is really enjoyable and so much more delicious than a simple sandwich and bag of chips. I don't know why, but my workday seems so much more tolerable when I have a cute and delicious lunch!

I've been out of practice as far as cooking goes (I'll explain why in a bit), so I was nervous about making my bento lunches, so I cheated and used leftovers for the first few! I know, leftovers are typically what makes most bentos, but I will have to admit I didn't make everything from scratch this time around.

Here is my first bento that I made for my first day of my new job:

I used leftover bulgogi (Korean yakiniku) that my mother-in-law made. MIL's bulgogi is always delicious, this batch I think she used a lot of Korean pear in the sauce, because it was very thick and flavorful sauce.
I made green beans simmered in a broth made of water, soy sauce, sugar, and mirin - I adjusted the ingredients until I got the flavor I wanted, sorry I didn't write it down!
In the yellow container is just salad greens and a side of blueberries (fresh-frozen, they thaw by lunchtime). I love the cute little salad dressing container for my sesame dressing. I packed a fork but ended up not using it.
My co-workers loved my cute boxed lunch, and complimented/teased me for eating small blueberries with chopsticks.

For my second day of work, I attempted to do teriyaki chicken from scratch for dinner, with the idea of using leftovers for lunch. Teriyaki chicken is a staple in my house, but unfortunately I had to toss it and made Hamburger Helper instead, because when I put the lid on the pan to let the chicken simmer in the marinate, I didn't realize the lid was dirty. A film of unknown nastiness had peeled off the lid and incorporated itself in the teriyaki glaze, ugh...

That brings me to my point I hinted at above: for some reason I suddenly became a bad-luck cook. I used to be really good at cooking, but it all went down hill when I became pregnant with my son! I don't know what happened! I think that the clumsiness and foggy-brain that often accompanies pregnancy messed up my cooking skills, and it never really went away even 2 years after baby. Despite that, I still cooked my son's pureed and soft cooked foods for his first year, at the expense of burning the Teflon off of 2 pots from not putting enough water in it for steaming, and melting 3 plastic utensils.

Evidence A: This is why I don't cook more often...

My bad-luck cooking had made me rather discouraged, and I ended up relying on ready made meals, such as those you pour out of a bag and cook in a skillet. I am growing sick of those meals, and I'm determined to get out of my cooking slump and make more meals from scratch. I'm getting there!

So, after the failed teriyaki chicken, I ended up using up the rest of the leftover bulgogi for my second bento lunch. Again the ladies at work teased me for my chopsticks, thinking I was going to use them for my yogurt cup! Then teased me again for using a baby spoon (my son's spoon). What can I say, it fit in my little lunch bag.

Bento number 3. We were having a lazy night and for dinner I just made a family size frozen meal from Safeway for dinner, orange chicken and fried rice, when I got an email from work asking me to come in the next day. I thought "this is perfect leftovers for a bento lunch!"
I added an egg roll, cut in half so it would fit in the bento box. The "fried rice" had edamame and orange and yellow carrots. The rice had no flavor at all, unfortunately, but it wasn't bad with a little bit of soy sauce.
Mandarin oranges and giant grapes finish the lunch! The grapes were huge and egg shaped, I had never seen grapes shaped like that before. They were delicious, yet dense.

I microwave my bento lunches, as I do refrigerate them the night before and take them to work without reheating first. I don't have the time to reheat everything in the morning for preparing them to be eaten at room temperature. Plus, if there is the option for reheating it in the lunchroom, why not!