Tomorrow's bento lunch

[Guest guest]

I tried the carrot hot dogs and they are great, so I have gone ahead and made a

couple for tomorrow. I cut the carrot dogs in half, then cut out little faces

(eyes, nose and mouth) out of nori and stuck them on the carrot dogs. The sauce

cup will have some barbecue sauce and I will probably stick it next to the

carrot dog corral. Since I love raw veggies, I'll make little celery sticks and

let them be the divider (corral) between the carrot dogs and the rest of the

lunch.

 

I've already done the slaw (finely shredded cabbage, carrots and a tiny bit of

red onion) with a light sauce (rice wine vinegar, sugar, celery seeds rather

than the heavy, gloppy mayonnaise based sauce. I'll make the onigiri tomorrow

morning. In the middle I'll put a chunk of the carrot dog and will have some

barbecue sauce on the palms of my hands when rolling the onigiri. Yum. We have

some gorgeous grape tomatoes, so they'll go in another cup. I'll gently cook

some snow peas and make a fan shape of them and put that in one corner of the

box and will probably end up making some pita bread in a few minutes since we

ate the last of Friday's batch this afternoon. Since I'm craving a sweet-hot I'm

going to put a tightly covered container of spicy rice cakes and wasabi peas in

for afternoon munching. (Followed by an hour of groaning " Why did I eat that? "

Maybe I'd better just put a cup of toasted, sugared pecans with a little cayenne

pepper mixed into the

sugar solution. 

 

I'm playing around with the idea of making small, square onigiri and rolling

them in toasted coconut to look like haystacks, and stacking them in the carrot

dog corral. Taking that thought a little further, maybe I'll put a little

coconut cream or milk into the water for the sticky rice. Some poached tofu

cubes would work as well. Hmm....what to do, what to do? If I added a little

cinnamon, honey and golden raisins to the sticky rice it would be like little

cubes of rice pudding which is one of my favorite goodies.

 

Carl's bento will have a cup of peanut butter to dunk his celery in, along with

a couple of hard boiled eggs that I won't make into cute chicks coming out of

the shell or pressure forming them into anime characters. I suspect that he'd

prefer that I omit the nori faces on the carrot dogs. Sigh. He'll probably just

want me to make egg salad sandwiches for him, which will totally mess up the

look of the bento. I'll put twice as much stuff in his lunch as I will have, but

right now I am trying to come up with something different to put in his lunch

for a sweet.

 

I can't go too wild with his lunches since he works mostly with men and would be

embarrased by " cutsie pootsie. " I've already been informed that hard caramel

baskets filled with rice krispie bits with little faces was way too too cutsie.

(Made it last year and am STILL getting ragged about it. Heck, he ate it and it

was good, so what's the big deal????) After all that work finding marshmallows

made without gelatin, making the caramel, making a free style basket over a bowl

base and getting everything just so!!! ARGH. He's happy with just a couple of

plain sandwiches in a paper bag. Where's the art in that????? Grumble. I can't

even cut the sandwiches into triangles and make a pyramid out of them. fooie.

 

But if you want to make cute hard boiled eggs for your kids, boil the eggs, peel

them, cut the top half of the egg off, not cutting into the yolk - do a zig zag

sort of cut and gently take the top off. Make a face out of nori (there are cute

punches just for that, but you can use a knife or scissors or even a paper

punch) and put it on the yolk. Put the top half of the white on the yolk,

tilting it so the face shows. It looks like a little chick coming out of the

egg. I can't take credit for it, I saw it on one of the million or so Japanese

web sites dedicated to the art of bento.

 

Jeanne in GA