Archive for the 'fish or seafood' Category

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Side dish containers in action

Today’s lunches show how you can add variety to a meal with a small container of fruit for a healthy dessert. This gives you the flexibility of using main dish containers that might be too small for you or your child on their own, and the ability to microwave one container but not the other (see my post on hot vs. room temp lunches). You can also turn these little side dish containers into edible ice packs by freezing fruit in the side containers (don’t overfill them!), or even just freeze the mini puddings on their own. The edible ice pack how-to is here.

Looking at this lunch, I only now realize that I messed up by packing a yogurt & sour cream-based dipping sauce — going against the “no liquid dairy” lunch restrictions at my son’s preschool. D’oh! Bug did play with the lactose-allergic kid for hours at the playground after eating this lunch, and there didn’t seem to be any issues. Good thing the kids clean their hands after eating lunch — close call! I hang my head, and will put a note to myself on the refrigerator: NO NUTS, NO LIQUID DAIRY.

Contents of preschooler lunch: Kiwi fruit, tiny container of pudding (Kiku Petit Pudding, like a mini creme caramel or flan), Bing cherries, steamed broccoli, crab cakes with lime chipotle cream dipping sauce (sauce recipe here), and fusilli pasta with tomato sauce, pureed garbanzo beans, sauteed eggplant, zucchini and onion. The little pudding cups are shelf stable and don’t need refrigeration; you may be able to find them in your local Asian market. They’re sold in bulk here, but I haven’t located an online source that sells just one package of twelve at a time. Anyone know of a source? Let us know in comments! (EDIT: Reader Patti saves the day with not one, but two online sources for the little pudding cups: here and here. Reader LoriAnn points out that Cost Plus World Market sells them in their retail stores as well.)

Morning prep time: 5 minutes, as I packed the leftover pasta in the bento box and put the dipping sauce into the little container when I was cleaning up from dinner the night before. In the morning I microwaved the frozen crab cakes (review below) and broccoli in my microwave mini steamer, and cut up the kiwi. Very fast! If I had my act together I would pack more lunches the night before…

Cooking: The fusilli dish actually started out as an Indian ratatouille-like dish that I changed direction on partway through. So what if cumin’s not your usual pasta sauce ingredient, it was tasty! I’ll try making Garlic-Braised Eggplant, Chick-Peas, and Tomato Casserole (khatti bhaji) from Moghul Microwave another day. I boiled extra fusilli when making dinner, and froze the excess unsauced pasta for use in future lunches.

Product Review: A friend served Handy brand mini crab cake appetizers at a Christmas Eve dinner last month, and I remember thinking that they were actually quite nice, especially with dipping sauce. I picked up a package of 45 from Costco’s frozen section the other week, and was pleased to find that they came in three plastic containers wrapped in reusable plastic wrap. That made it easy to take three out of a package, heat them up for lunch, and rewrap the rest for the freezer. The manufacturer recommends heating them in the oven for 16 minutes if frozen, but one minute in my 1100W microwave did the trick for three. Lightning fast!

Packing: I tucked a small Anpanman pick and a tiny spoon into the side dish container for the kiwi and little pudding, and the dipping sauce went into a wide-mouthed mayonnaise cup for easy dipping. Packed in a 360ml Disney Cars bento box with one sub-container removed to hold more pasta, and a 100ml side dish container from Daiso (Japanese dollar store with branches internationally).

Verdict: Not bad. Bug finished everything but the broccoli and kiwi at preschool, and ate the kiwi after school as a snack. I can’t complain about that. (Stay tuned — I’ve got photos of a largely uneaten lunch coming up later this week…) (Click to continue reading the full post with an additional lunch…)

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Published by Biggie on January 9th, 2008 tagged bento, dumplings or buns, eggs, fish or seafood, for kids, lactose free, onigiri or sushi, pasta or noodles | 40 Comments »

Korean hotpot bento dinners

Once a week I pack bentos to eat for dinner while we’re out at our running club. I started doing this when my son graduated to solid food and I realized that we might have to stop going to this event that happens at Bug’s dinnertime. My son has become so attached to this weekly ritual that even when we’re off schedule and I offer him dinner at home beforehand, he tells me that he’d rather have a bento there instead. Of course, his eating alone isn’t much fun for any of us, so I started packing meals for myself and my husband too. Our friends are always curious to see what this week’s meal is, and it’s always more satisfying and better for us than the chips and cheese puffs that are there (okay, okay, I eat some of the snacks too).

Contents of my husband’s dinner: Korean vegetable hotpot (with carrots, daikon, zucchini, bell pepper and greens), white rice with wasabi furikake and seasoned Korean seaweed, yellow plum tomatoes, assorted banchan (ggakdugi daikon kimchi, spicy fish cake, sweet/spicy tiny crabs) and daikon and spinach namul (Korean seasoned vegetables served as a side dish). This meal was an antidote to all of the barbecue and fried food we’d been eating in Oklahoma when we were on vacation in December — I came back with a serious craving for fish, vegetables, and rice (nothing oily). Kukje Market’s big panchan bar and fish hotpot packs saved the day when we were still unpacking.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes, using all leftovers from a previous dinner. In the morning I preheated the thermal lunch jar with hot tap water while I microwaved the soup and frozen rice.

Packing: I chose a thermal lunch jar (mine’s a Nissan Stainless, often cheaper than the Mr. Bento) because of its ability to effectively hold warm soup, but left out one inner container because it was just a bit too large for this meal. The soup was originally a fish hotpot at dinner, but I left out the actual fish when packing as I was concerned that the fish would become hard and rubbery when held at higher temperatures over time. Draining the side dishes helped keep flavors from mingling, and packing the daikon kimchi in an aluminum food cup kept it from staining the inner container. I added extra hot pepper paste to the soup, basically giving up on containing strong smells, and the whole family reveled in the garlicky spice (food smells are less noticeable if you all eat the same thing, right?). (Click to read the full post with two additional meals…)

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Published by Biggie on January 7th, 2008 tagged fish or seafood, food jar, for kids, lactose free, rice, soup or stew, thermal lunch jar, tofu | 20 Comments »

Frozen rice bento lunch

Freezing cooked rice in plastic wrap One of my main goals in starting this blog was to show other lunch packers ways to speed up their morning lunch prep, based on the popular speed bento movement in Japan. You know, to prove that you can still make an appealing bento lunch even if you don’t spend hours making decorative food art. One important basic is having frozen stapes like rice on hand, no matter how you’ve frozen the fresh, moist rice: as shaped onigiri rice balls, shaped to fit your bento box perfectly, inarizushi stuffed sushi, in a freezer container, or even just wrapped in plastic wrap. This provides great flexibility in the morning when you remember that you’re not tied to using the rice in the shape that you originally froze it. After you warm the rice in the microwave (turning it over halfway through for even defrosting), feel free to reshape it, plop it into your lunch container, make quick “mixed rice” dishes such as this or this or this, or mix it with other add-ins as I’ve done below.

Contents of preschooler lunch: Sliced fish cake (”minch ball”) on skewers, fruit cup with tangerine, blueberries and raspberries, onigiri rice balls mixed with pink sakura denbu and green hana-ebi, cherry tomatoes and steamed broccoli. Sakura denbu is a sweet powder of ground codfish that’s often used in chirashizushi and children’s bento lunches, and hana ebi is a savory shrimp powder from Hawaii that comes in either red or green. You can see the results of all three types here in an early snack bento for my son.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes, using frozen rice. In the morning I made the rice balls with the plastic wrap method, quickly cooked the broccoli in my microwave mini steamer, and sliced the tomatoes and fish cakes. The tangerine segment was leftover from the previous day.

Packing: This was a finger-friendly meal, so no separate utensils were necessary. The sliced fish cake went on animal skewers (bought at Daiso dollar store with branches internationally, US$1.50 for an assorted set of 10 or 12), the vegetables went in reusable silicone baking cup to keep them from the dry rice balls, and the delicate fruits went into a hard plastic food cup to prevent bruising. Lunch packed in one undivided 350ml tier of a Lock & Lock lunch set.

Verdict: I was overly confident about this lunch; I thought that Bug would eat it all up at preschool because it was cute and finger-friendly. Think again! He ate the onigiri, fruit and tomatoes, leaving the broccoli and most of the fish cake. At the playground after school, he ate the broccoli but gave the fish cake a thumbs down (sometimes he likes it, but not that day). I had thought that he’d reject the tomatoes if anything, but kids are full of surprises once you think you have them figured out! (Click for full details of the second lunch with mini bagel sandwich…)

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Published by Biggie on November 30th, 2007 tagged bento, fish or seafood, for kids, glutenfree, lactose free, onigiri or sushi, sandwich or wrap, tips, tofu | 15 Comments »

Frozen mini pancake lunches

One of my speed bento tips has been to make a little extra when you’re cooking another meal, and set it aside for lunches. Planned leftovers can be divided into individual portions and frozen, or just stashed in the refrigerator for quick use. So when I had time over the Thanksgiving holiday to make buttermilk pancakes, I made mini pancakes with the excess batter at the same time and froze them for a quick lunch option. My son was excited to get pancakes for lunch as a treat, and it was a fast and easy option for me: win, win.

Over the holiday, I made the iconic Thanksgiving dish of green bean casserole from scratch with this Alton Brown recipe, using fresh mushrooms and green beans, but minus the canned soup. When I first saw this on AB’s Good Eats TV show, I thought it was way too much effort for a single dish on a day when the cook would presumably be working on other dishes. Then I realized that it would be an ideal candidate to bring along to a potluck Thanksgiving, what we did this year. Everything turned out beautifully except for the onions, which other readers on the Food Network site had problems with as well. Either turn the heat down and watch them like a hawk, or buy a can of fried onions (you can also find these sold at Thai markets in addition to the mainstream Durkee’s at chain supermarkets). Overall, I’d say it was worth the effort; I especially liked the large slices of fresh mushroom and crisp green beans throughout.

Contents of preschooler lunch: Buttermilk pancakes and maple syrup, deconstructed green bean casserole (mushrooms in the food cup, green beans on the side), scrambled egg ball with peas, and pomegranate seeds. I shaped the egg purses with plastic wrap, as in the how-to here. Using frozen mini pancakes was a variation on this lunch.

Morning prep time: 12 minutes, using frozen pancakes, leftover green bean casserole, and a sauce container pre-filled with syrup. The night before, I put a little stack of two frozen pancakes into the refrigerator to defrost naturally. This worked passably well, but on seeing that there was more room in the box in the morning, I microwaved an additional frozen pancake. The microwaved pancake came out softer than the naturally defrosted pancake, and is how I’ll reheat them going forward.

Packing: For some reason, my son doesn’t like green beans when they have sauce on them, so I simply picked them out of the casserole, rinsed them off, and dried them well before packing them alongside. Bug ate them with his fingers. I packed the mushrooms in a reusable plastic food cup that I thought was shaped like a cow, but my son pointed out that it also looked like a car when you looked at it ‘upside down’. It was like looking at a trompe d’oeuil drawing of a vase, and suddenly seeing it morph into two faces, depending upon how you look at it. Packed in a 360ml Disney Cars bento box with one sub-divider removed.

Verdict: Good over time. Surprisingly, when I picked Bug up from preschool he had only eaten one pancake and all of the mushrooms, leaving everything else. In the car afterwards, though, he happily ate everything except the green peas and the pomegranate. When pressed, Bug said he ran out of time, but I’m thinking the pancakes and egg might have been frustrating for him to eat on his own as I hadn’t cut them up into bite-sized pieces. (Click to read the full entry with pancake freezing directions, adult bento, and review of a “Pon de Lion” box from Mister Donut…)

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Published by Biggie on November 28th, 2007 tagged bento, eggs, equipment, fish or seafood, for kids, freezing, phyllo or pancake or other | 21 Comments »

Triangular onigiri bento box lunch

Bento boxes come in all shapes and styles, from small and cute to big and mannish. I’ve been curious about the triangular boxes that are designed to hold triangular onigiri rice balls. I picked up a couple from local Japanese dollar stores, but so far I’ve only seen cheaper onigiri boxes without proper seals (fine if your lunch is not too moist). I’d welcome feedback from people with other versions, though; have you found one with a really secure seal? (Feel free to provide links to your photos or blog entries.)

Contents of preschooler lunch: Oinarizushi (sushi rice in seasoned abura-age tofu wrappers), fried fish fillets with built-in tartar sauce (Akebono Nichiro brand, reviewed here), edamame skewers, cherry tomatoes, kiwifruit, and pomegranate arils.

Morning prep time: 8 minutes, using homemade frozen inarizushi (freezing instructions here), frozen fish fillets, frozen edamame and leftover pomegranate arils. In the morning I microwaved the frozen items and assembled the fruits/veggies.

Packing: I threaded the edamame onto thin Anpanman food picks; if you try to do this with thick or wide skewers the edamame will split apart and won’t stay on. The fruit went into a medium-sized reusable silicone baking cup that I picked up at Daiso (Japanese dollar store with branches internationally, 3 cups for US$1.50), and the kiwi got a little dog-shaped pick with four prongs as legs (from Daiso).

Container: The lunch was packed in a two-tier Clickety Click onigiri bento box with the Mink Monkey character; the bottom tier is 230ml with a lid, and the 550ml top tier is large enough to hold two convenience-store-sized onigiri (rice balls). 780ml is way too big for a 3-year-old’s lunch, though, so I packed the upper tier lightly with three oinarizushi rice balls for an estimated total volume of 400ml or so (still slightly too large). I picked this box up for US$1.50 at Ichiban Kan in San Francisco, along with a matching dessert box and mayonnaise cups (shown below). Quality’s a little flimsy and the seal is not secure, but at that price who cares? (Just be sure to pack non-liquidy foods inside.) Store details at the SF Bay Area shopping guide for bento gear. There’s no real fastener on this box, so I used a mushroom-themed elastic bento band from Daiso (US$1.50) to keep it all closed in transit. (Click on any photo for a larger view.)

Verdict: Pretty good, but there was too much food. Bug ate all of the sushi, edamame and kiwi, and half of the fish and pomegranate. Tomatoes were a no-go, though. Sometimes he gobbles them up, other times not — I’m finding he has irritatingly good taste and will inhale ripe heirloom tomatoes in season, but reject tougher, less tasty tomatoes. Reminds me of the line on the cartoon King of the Hill, just before Hank Hill tastes organic tomatoes for the first time, “You two are just talking nonsense. Tomatoes don’t have any taste!”