Archive for June, 2007

Exploitation of the bento community by marketers

I’m too annoyed to make a proper post today — sorry everyone. Here’s why.

Plus a quick reminder to update your links to point to the new Lunch in a Box blog at lunchinabox.net. Thanks!

Published by Biggie on June 22nd, 2007 tagged admin | 19 Comments »

Making dinner roll sandwiches

Contents: Boiled egg shaped like a fish using an egg mold, mango and blueberries, donut nectarine, and mini hot dog sandwiches made out of dinner rolls, cocktail sausages and julienned red leaf lettuce.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes, using previously boiled and molded eggs. This 070620a morning I just cut the mangoes and made the sandwiches. Tip on making sandwiches with dinner rolls: cut them in half, and use a knife (or your fingers) to remove some of the soft bread inside. This makes room for the filling and holds it securely inside the sandwich, especially handy with soft fillings that fall out such as egg salad or tuna salad. I used a similar technique with tuna salad sandwiches on ciabatta rolls, and a different technique in the preschooler lunch below.

Packing: The dinner rolls were small enough to fit whole inside of a regular bento, so I 070620b packed them in the Lock & Lock lunch set (two 350ml containers and a drink container). My little squeeze bottle for ketchup was too large to fit in this box, so I tucked in a spare ketchup packet that I’d saved from restaurant take-out. Putting ketchup on the sandwich at the last minute helps keep the bread from getting soggy. The little red pick was for the fruit (no need for a full-size fork).

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Published by Biggie on June 20th, 2007 tagged bento, for kids, lactose free, meat, sandwich or wrap, tips, tutorial or how to | 23 Comments »

Disposable bento for airplane

One nice thing about bento lunches is that they’re practically waste-free, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to toss the whole container when you’re done. Today my husband went on a business trip, so I packed him a bento lunch for the plane. This morning when I mentioned that I’d made him a bento, his first question was, “Is it in a collapsible container?” He was jazzed when he heard that it was actually disposable, so he wouldn’t have to keep track of a bento box on his trip and bring it home. In Japan, parents are occasionally asked to pack their children lunches in disposable containers for school excursions, so this is established ground. (More info on using disposable containers below in the Packing Notes.)

Contents: Donut nectarine, black Mission fig, and fried rice with Italian sausage, fresh corn, mushrooms, yellow bell peppers, egg, green onions and Korean chogochujang sauce (sauce recipe here). A recent mutation of the donut peach, the donut nectarine is flat and just the right size to pack whole in a bento lunch.

Morning prep time: 2 minutes, using leftover fried rice packed the night before when cleaning up from dinner.

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Published by Biggie on June 19th, 2007 tagged bento, equipment, glutenfree, lactose free, meat, rice, tips | 25 Comments »

Bucatini bento lunch

Contents of preschooler lunch: Orange, cherries, grapes, figs, and cut-up bucatini with tomato sauce.

Morning prep time: 3 minutes, using leftover sauced bucatini.

Packing: What looks like macaroni here actually started out as long tubes of bucatini, but that’s difficult for a preschooler to eat neatly. To cut it up quickly and neatly, I skipped the knife and cutting board and went right for clean kitchen scissors. After I put the leftover bucatini in the little nested Thomas the Tank Engine container, I cut it up with the kitchen scissors directly in the container, Korean-style. Very fast and convenient, and Bug was able to then eat this with a little fork. The fruit was all finger food.

Lunch in a Box is nominated for Best Food Blog in the Bloggerâ€™s Choice Awards. If youâ€™d like to cast your vote for speedy lunch packing, click here (you can vote for multiple blogs in the same category).

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Published by Biggie on June 18th, 2007 tagged bento, for kids, lactose free, pasta or noodles, vegetarian | 14 Comments »

Wine bag holds lunch jar innards

Although I like my thermal lunch jars, the bulk and weight of the jars themselves keep me from using them as often as regular bento boxes. But when searching for the right container to hold today’s meal, I realized that there’s no reason not to use the internal containers on their own as little round bento boxes, and pack them stacked inside a wine carrying bag. This lunch didn’t necessarily call for extended chilling or warming, so…

Contents: Nests of spinach zarusoba with kizami-nori, green onions, wasabi and dipping sauce in the soup container. Bottom containers hold cherries, grapes, and a tinga of Salvadorean chorizo, fresh corn, yellow bell peppers, pinto beans and chili sauce. To eat the zarusoba, mix the green onions and wasabi into the dipping sauce, dip a bundle of noodles and a little nori into the sauce to flavor and loosen the noodles, and eat. Great hot weather dish.

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Morning prep time: 15 minutes. The chorizo tinga was leftover from dinner, the zarusoba dipping sauce for the noodles was store-bought, and the nori was sold already cut up. The only thing I made fresh was boiling the noodles and chopping the green onions — it just takes a certain amount of time to bring water to a boil. During that time I was able to prepare and pack everything else for the three lunches. Once the noodles were cooked, rinsed and drained, I curled them into bite-sized nests on chopsticks for easy eating. This also works well with somen and any other noodles for dipping. To make looser nests, twirl the noodles around your fingers instead of chopsticks.

070614c Packing: Since I’d decided not to use the thermal jar itself, just the internal containers, I was free to substitute a smaller metal container for the fruit instead of using the large rice container. I was drawn to the thermal jar containers because of the excellent watertight soup container with screw-on lid, which holds the dipping sauce in this meal. I stacked both this and my husband’s meal (packed in take-and-toss 070614b Gladware, below) in a single wine bottle gift bag, with chopsticks and a spoon tucked down the side. This was inspired by Japanese-language bento book “Watashitachi no Obento“, which showed a stack of little round tupperware-type containers in a fabric wine bag. Clever!