Archive for August, 2007

Links: Bento on the cheap

One benefit of packing lunch is the money you can save by not eating out. Even US$6 a day can really add up over time — $1,560 per year! I don’t know about you, but I’ve got other things to spend that kind of money on, and my own food is usually better than what’s at lunch places closest to the office.

Freakin’ Tasty Bento has put together an excellent post Bento for Cheap Bastards, covering equipment and food ideas. Check it out — there are some good ideas here.

Calculate how much you can save over time by packing a cheap lunch instead of eating out with this lunch savings calculator. It’s eye-opening!

Do you have good frugal lunch tips or links? Let us know in comments!

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Published by Biggie on August 24th, 2007 tagged tips | 10 Comments »

Meatball and rice “bomb” lunches

Consider this lunch a bomb — a meatball and rice “bomb”. I came across this rice ball variation in a Japanese-language onigiri cookbook, where it was called a “bakudan onigiri”, or “bomb onigiri”. It’s pretty straightforward: with your hands or ball-shaped onigiri mold (photo below), cover a meatball with short- or medium-grain rice, then completely cover that with moistened scraps of nori seaweed. I used seasoned, roasted Korean seaweed because I like the taste, but regular Japanese sushi seaweed is the norm and is sturdier to work with. Variations include flavoring the rice with furikake rice sprinkles, or replacing the meatball with another flavorful filling like a steamed shumai dumpling. Think outside of the box for fillings — do you have highly seasoned, non-moist leftovers that might go well with rice?

Contents of my lunch: Meatball “bomb” onigiri stuffed with teriyaki & pineapple chicken meatballs (Aidells brand) and wrapped with seasoned Korean seaweed. The second tier has chunks of imitation crab with sanbaizu sweet vinegar sauce (recipe here) and frozen chopped cilantro, yellow and red plum tomatoes, grilled eggplant with miso glaze, and sauteed nopales (prickly pear cactus paddles) with homemade salsa Criolla (vinegary fresh salsa).

Morning prep time: 20 minutes, using leftovers (rice, eggplant and salsa Criolla), ready-made food (meatballs) and a flavorful basic sauce I keep in the refrigerator (sanbaizu).

Cooking: I bought the nopales already de-spined and diced, so it was quick work to toss that into a frypan with a little oil and salt to start cooking at the start of meal prep. I added the vinegary salsa Criolla when the nopales got slimy, and cooked until the slime dissipated — then drained and cooled in a mini bowl and strainer before packing. I microwaved the cold rice and meatballs to restore texture, and made the “bomb onigiri” with round onigiri molds (shown at left) dipped in water to assist the release. I picked up this mold at Daiso in Daly City for US$1.50 in the freezer container section; check their store locator for additional locations internationally.

Packing: I cut the long slices of leftover eggplant into bite-size pieces for easy eating, and cut the middle onigiri rice ball in half just for the photo to show what’s inside. These are much more stable when left intact; I don’t recommend cutting them apart before packing. Future versions will be packed and photographed whole. Lunch packed in two 350ml tiers of a Lock & Lock lunch set.

Contents of preschooler lunch: Bug requested that his meatballs be separate from his rice, so he’s got some halved meatballs and shaped onigiri (rice mixed with salmon furikake), plus a cheese triangle with his lunch. Everything went down the hatch except the nopales, which he tried but didn’t like. Oh well, at least he tried it!

Morning packing time: 16 minutes (didn’t have to make the “bomb onigiri”).

Packing: Packed in a 350ml Geki Ranger box, with a rounded-tip octopus pick for the meatballs. Everything but the nopales was finger food. If I were to remake this lunch for solo preschooler eating, I’d remove the pits from the cherries.

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Published by Biggie on August 23rd, 2007 tagged bento, for kids, lactose free, meat, onigiri or sushi, recipe, rice | 24 Comments »

Tips for packing smelly food, and bibimbap lunches

Ever pack a tuna salad sandwich for lunch, then feel embarrassed when the smell wafts through the room as you unwrap it? I don’t want food odor to keep me from packing whatever I want for lunch, though, so here are some measures you can take to slow the spread of strong food smells.

Isolate the food in question and wrap it up separately. I’ve done this in today’s lunch by packing up kimchi in a lidded condiment cup, but I’ve also seen people wrap kimchi in aluminum foil or plastic wrap so that their lunch containers don’t take on the smell of the food.
Drain and cool the smelly food well before packing, minimizing leakage and condensation inside the box. This also has the added side benefit of optimizing food safety of a room temperature lunch, and making it easier for children to open their lunch container.
Pack the strong-smelling food inside of another layer of food. Rice balls stuffed with tuna don’t tend to smell as much as a side of tuna salad on its own. Floured and pan-fried faux latkes with tuna and leftover potato salad are dry and don’t have a strong smell when cool.
Keep it cool with ice packs and insulated lunch bags. Heat intensifies strong odors; get ahead of the game by keeping the lunch cool until you’re ready to eat. Get a flexible ice blanket and cut it apart for little ice packs to tuck down next to your lunch.
Tightly wrap the entire container in a cloth napkin, lunch cloth, plastic bag or furoshiki if you’re really concerned about the smell. Then pack in your insulated lunch bag — double safety! Here’s a good illustrated how-to wrapping chart.
Lastly, you might want to take along some breath mints for after your fabulous garlic meal unless you’re a vampire hunter.

Contents of my lunch: Korean bibimbap (white rice topped with seasoned bean sprouts, bracken fern stems, spinach, white radishes, egg strips, carrots and green onions with a small container of kochujang chili sauce) and a molded quail egg shaped like a bird. The yellow tier holds kimchi (spicy fermented cabbage) and pan-fried flat, rectangular mandu dumplings filled with pork, cabbage, garlic chives and rice noodles).

Morning prep time: 13 minutes using leftover bibimbap topping and leftover warm rice. It took 7 minutes to pan-fry the store-bought frozen dumplings, and the remainder to neatly arrange the bibimbap toppings while the dumplings cooled. I could have shaved off 3-4 minutes if I’d just thrown in the bibimbap toppings and not worried about making it photo-ready. I’d previously made a batch of hard-boiled fresh quail eggs, and molded them with the yellow egg mold pictured to the right (click for details and a larger view).

Packing: To contain the smell, I put the kimchi in a common lidded condiment container — the same kind that I used for the fruit jello cups. The kochujang chili paste also went in a little condiment cup, to be stirred into the rice and toppings upon eating. I packed the bibimbap container a little too full, though, so it was hard to stir it all up before eating. Next time I’ll use a larger container or pack less food in this one. Dipping sauce for the dumplings was in a pre-filled sauce container that I was able to grab and go. Packed in two tiers (480ml and 280ml) of a 4-tier nesting Thomas the Tank Engine bento box.

Contents of preschooler’s lunch: Bibimbap, molded quail eggs shaped like a bunny and a car, flat dumplings, and a small package of seasoned Korean seaweed (Yangsan brand here) that Bug and I shared (click photo for larger view). I just love these little snack packs of Korean seaweed — this entire packet was only 38 calories, and it’s light, crunchy, and salty with a clear sesame oil flavor. Mmm!

Packing: I used a plastic food divider to separate the crispy dumplings from the slightly moist bibimbap toppings, and cut the dumplings in half to turn them into easy preschooler finger food. When Bug sat down to eat, though, he was disconcerted that he couldn’t see the rice to put on the seaweed, so if I were to do this lunch for him again I’d pack the bibimbap toppings next to the rice instead of on top. Packed in a 320ml Clickety Click side dish container.

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Published by Biggie on August 22nd, 2007 tagged bento, dumplings or buns, eggs, for kids, lactose free, meat, rice, tips | 17 Comments »

Recipe page up, and T-shirts for sale

1. RECIPE PAGE

I’ve been working on improvements to the website over the past month, and just put up an organized list of all of the recipes that have appeared on Lunch in a Box over the past year. Grouped by main ingredient, I hope this link list will be useful to folks in browsing around. Please feel free to comment even on old posts with any questions as I do keep up via the Recent Comments widget in the sidebar to the right that displays the most recent comments.

2. GET YOUR BENTO T-SHIRTS & GEAR

With design help from reader Corgi, Lunch in a Box now has funny lunch- and bento-themed T-shirts and merchandise available via CafePress, which ships internationally. If you’d like to wear your pasttime on your sleeve, coffee mug, onesie, notebook, greeting card or anywhere else, pop on by the Lunch in a Box store on CafePress. The Original What’s For Lunch blog actually read my mind last week by writing a song parody about Lunch in a Box. If you don’t get the song reference, go to YouTube for the Justin Timberlake/Andy Samberg Saturday Night Live music video spoof “D*ck in a Box”, which is actually nominated for a Grammy Award this year (work warning: uncensored version). We’re working on additional designs, so stay tuned.

3. SITE IMPROVEMENTS

If you’re reading this on the website itself, you may have noticed a few changes over the past week. You can now click icons at the end of each entry to e-mail the post to someone, or to go to a printer-friendly version of the post without photos or comments. This should be helpful for printing out posts like recipes and the San Francisco Bay Area shopping guides.

There are now a number of ways to keep up with Lunch in a Box posts. In addition to subscribing via a feed reader, you can now subscribe via e-mail, delivered daily by FeedBurner whenever there’s a new post. There will be no spam as a result of supplying your e-mail address for the posts — I get cranky about that sort of spamming. Additionally, people who had asked me for graphics to use when linking here can now create and customize a widget via Widgetbox showing the latest Lunch in a Box posts (text and/or photos).

If you keep track of blogs via MyBlogLog, you might want to join the Lunch in a Box community on MyBlogLog. The MyBlogLog widget in the sidebar also lets you see recent Lunch in a Box readers with a MyBlogLog identity — clicking on their photo will take you to their member page where you can surf to their blogs. Interesting stuff! If you have a MyBlogLog identity but do not want your information to be displayed when you visit, you can control this on your MyBlogLog account settings page.

Lastly, the Guestbook is back up after a hiatus necessitated by a conflict with another WordPress plug-in. Unfortunately, the fix wiped out the old entries, so my apologies if your comment is no longer there. Should be fine now!

As always, please feel free to comment with any bugs you’ve noticed on the site, suggestions for improvement, etc. as I continue to work on the site usability. Having just launched this standalone site in June 2007, this is still quite new for me, and your feedback is welcome.

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Published by Biggie on August 21st, 2007 tagged admin, recipe, shopping | 9 Comments »

Lox and cheese mini bagel sandwiches

On short notice, we were invited to go out with a group of Japanese women who all brought bento lunches for themselves and their preschoolers, so I quickly threw these together on our way out the door. It was interesting to see everyone else’s mother/child lunches, trade preschool and lunch tips, and talk about places to buy bento gear in the San Francisco Bay Area. Afterwards another mom showed me around Ocean View Supermarket, a newly opened pan-Asian market near Daly City that’s huge, clean, cheap, with parking, and even has colored mamenori soy paper for making food art (US$2.59 for 5 large sheets). I’ve updated the SF Bay Area guide to ethnic markets with store info; it’s worth checking out for locals.

Contents of preschooler lunch: Mini bagel sandwich with cream cheese and smoked salmon, broccoli and orange cauliflower florets with red wine vinaigrette, and cherries. The orange cauliflower tasted just like regular white cauliflower to me; I bought it and a bag of mini bagels (perfect for little hands) at Safeway.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes to make the sandwich on an untoasted bagel, and quickly cook the broccoli and orange cauliflower in my microwave mini steamer (speeds cook time by 50%). I nuked the cream cheese briefly to make it easy to spread on the bagel.

Packing: I didn’t want the vinaigrette on the broccoli and cauliflower to get onto the bagel and make it soggy, so after cooking and dressing the vegetables I tossed them into my mini strainer and bowl to drain and cool quickly. A short rest of a minute or so did the trick, then I took out extra insurance against leaking by packing them in a coated food cup. If I had the larger size silicone baking cups, those would have been a good waste-free alternative here. One of these days… The lunch is packed in a 350ml Power Rangers (”Geki Rangers”) box that I actually found abandoned near my house!!! Manna from the skies — bizarre.

My lunch has the same food, but with the addition of capers in the bagel sandwich and a couple of Concord grapes that act as gap fillers to stabilize the lunch for transport.

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