Miso Chicken Bento (309)
There are only two days left to vote in my 200k Bento Contest! Also open in this month’s contests is the Furikake Frenzy. I received the first entry last week and hope to see more soon!
Last Friday when I marinated the chicken for my Valentine’s Day lunches, I didn’t cook all of the chicken. This morning I broiled the last three pieces and used one for today’s lunch. Since I wasn’t using already cooked food, it took me an hour to put this one together. I’m pretty sure that time would have been cut in half if I had cooked the chicken and asparagus last night.
We went to Foodland on Sunday to buy Baby Girl some vanilla ice cream, so I bought some of this fishcake while we were there. We had taken her to the allergist on Saturday and after being put in my place like the stupid woman that I am (I think Mr. Pikko can take her to this guy from now on), he told us that we had to eliminate a long list of foods from her diet for a month, then slowly introduce things back. No more yogurt, miso soup, spaghetti, candy, chocolate, strawberries, spam, cheese, and eggs. I know, insane huh? At least it’s not permanent though. He said an acceptable dessert for her was plain vanilla ice cream, so out of pity we went to go get her some.
The fishcake has gobo (burdock root) in it, which isn’t on my list of favorite things, so if I’d bothered to read the label I probably wouldn’t have bought it. Too late now though, so I’m stuck with it! On to today’s bentorial!
Today I chose my two tier Sakura bento box (photo below), which I got from Kaolian for Christmas from J-List. First, I added rice to the box and gently pushed it off into a corner. Next, I sliced up one chicken thigh and placed each piece in order laid on top of the rice. I fried up three stalks of asparagus in olive oil and garlic salt, then sliced the stalks vertically to get the nice look. I put the tops in first, then cut the stalks to varying lengths, adding and removing them from the box to figure out how tall each piece needed to be.
In Step 4, I added sliced fishcake and then tucked some julienned takuan into the open space that was left. The final thing to do is to add an ume to the middle of the rice. If you’re going to be taking a photo of your lunch, I recommend that you leave the ume out until just before you’re ready to snap because the little plum will dye the surrounding rice red if left in there a bit. It doesn’t make for a nice photo with red glow around your ume.
In my second layer I cut up some mango and strawberries.
We bought these at Costco and half of them are mush, which really ticked me off. I might go exchange it tonight, depending on how much time I have.
This is one of my favorite boxes, so I thought I’d take a picture to show it off. Sadly, I couldn’t figure out how to get the darned lamp out of the reflection. I think maybe I should have turned the lightbox so that I wasn’t photographing from the top. I love how I think about that now.
You can buy this box at J-List. They also have a white and pink version available!
On Saturday we tried our best to convince Buddy that it was a cool thing that we were going to Toys R Us to buy him a bike, but once he saw all those kid cars to sit in, he had no interest in even looking at a bike for himself. After that failed, we went to Pearlridge to eat lunch and I wandered into the Sanrio Suprises store in the Downtown section of the mall. They’d totally upped their stock of bento boxes!
I wanted to get one of the 4 stack box sets on the bottom left, but ended up getting a dump truck box (second shelf from top, second box from left) for Buddy. I wish Sanrio would design some better boy designs than the Shinkansen train. I mean, it’s a little cute and all, but it’s not exactly my favorite design.
I’ve been getting nice exposure for my site and bentos in general after Sunday’s article on the bento community. I hope people continue to spread the word about bentoers and that our community expands greatly as a result!
Also, I’ve created a page on Facebook if people are interested in joining. Sadly, I won’t be putting images up there because I’m not all that happy with their recent change to the TOS.
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