Archive for the 'leftover remake' Category

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Decorative rice ball lunch & how-to

Today’s lunch illustrates an easy way to dress up an onigiri rice ball using ordinary plastic wrap and a little box. This is the first time I used this new little 350ml two-tier bento box that I found at Sanko in San Francisco’s Japantown for $8 (see my full store review or a brief writeup in the San Francisco Bay Area shopping guide for bento gear). 350ml is small, so it might seem unnecessary to split it into two tiers (especially ones that don’t nest inside each other when empty). But there is a reason behind it: the small shallow upper tier is the right size and shape for making decorative onigiri rice balls with the help of a little plastic wrap.

Contents of preschooler bento lunch: Onigiri rice ball with edamame and pre-cut nori seaweed shaped like Shinkansen, a little sauce container with Gohan Desu Yo! jarred seaweed paste for the rice, kiwi, broccoli, roasted eel (unagi kabayaki), and red/yellow bell pepper strips with Annie’s Green Goddess salad dressing (surprisingly good). Not pictured is a side dish container with snack strips of seasoned Korean seaweed shown in this bibimbap lunch, which is my three-year-old’s favorite way to eat rice: making little packets of rice with seaweed paste on Korean seaweed.

Morning prep time: 13 minutes, using frozen rice and leftover unagi eel. In the morning I microwaved some frozen rice, slapped together the rice ball (instructions below), and multi-cooked the vegetables in my microwave mini steamer, and filled the little sauce container. I could have taken a lot more time to really fancy up the rice ball, but that’s not my style and Bug was pleased enough with minimal decoration. (Read on for full cooking details, a review of the little bento box, and an additional lunch with pasta frittata.)

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Published by Biggie on April 18th, 2008 tagged bento, eggs, fish or seafood, for kids, lactose free, leftover remake, meat, onigiri or sushi | 25 Comments »

Leftover Remake: Curry gyoza

I often cook in bulk and pack leftovers for lunch, maximizing the payoff for the time I actually spend cooking. But eating the same thing day after day gets tiresome, as anyone who’s eaten turkey for a week after Thanksgiving knows. Japanese bento cookbooks are full of ways to give new life to dinner leftovers, for example using leftover potato salad to make little Scotch eggs or faux latkes with tuna.

One fast dinner option at our house is Japanese curry, made with little blocks of shelf-stable Japanese curry roux (cooking notes here). I’ve previously made curry pasta with frozen unsauced pasta, and stirred leftover curry into macaroni and cheese. This time I decided to try my hand at using the leftover curry to fill gyoza potstickers (jiaozi in Chinese, mandu in Korean). These can be frozen in bulk and cooked up quickly on time-pressed mornings.

The trick to making these is to use premade gyoza wrappers from the market, and to pick out the chunks of meat and vegetables from the curry and mash them up with only enough curry liquid to flavor it. An overly liquid filling yields soggy, flat dumplings. (Read on for step-by-step directions.)

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Published by Biggie on March 1st, 2008 tagged curry, dumplings or buns, freezing, lactose free, leftover remake, recipe, tutorial or how to | 20 Comments »

Mac & cheese lunches: Hot vs. cold

I’ve used thermal food jars before to pack curries, stew, oden, chili, hotpot, and even rice — keeping everything warm and soft until lunchtime. Given how stiff macaroni and cheese can get once it cools, I wondered if it would benefit from being packed in a food jar. My three-year-old doesn’t complain about cold pasta (yet), but I tried some of Bug’s leftover pasta after picking him up from school, and it was still soft and warm in the jar. Success! Think outside of the box if you’ve got a thermal food jar and no access to a microwave at lunchtime; what else would be good warm?

Contents of preschooler bento lunch: Organic shells & cheese with sauteed zucchini, onions and diced bulgogi (Korean marinated, grilled beef) with a little leftover Japanese curry stirred in at the end. Steamed broccoli with Korean barbecue sauce, carnitas braised pork, cherry tomatoes, blueberries and homemade apple crisp (recipe is from Cooks’ Illustrated’s The New Best Recipe, but online subscribers can find it on their website).

Morning prep time: 10 minutes, using leftover mac & cheese, apple crisp, and Del Real carnitas from Costco. In the morning I pre-warmed the food jar with hot tap water while I microwaved the mac & cheese with a splash of water to restore the texture. I also nuked the carnitas to take the chill off, and cooked the broccoli in my microwave mini steamer.

Cooking: As an aside, I recently saw Alton Brown’s new Good Eats show on broccoli, which mentioned that “a study in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture found that microwaving broccoli reduced its antioxidant compounds by 74-97%.” Ack! I’m having double thoughts about microwaving broccoli now; it looks like steaming or pan-frying are much better. I’m going to all this effort to make sure Bug gets his vegetables, I don’t want them to be nutritionally crippled… (Click for packing info and an additional preschooler lunch with panda bento band.)

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Published by Biggie on February 26th, 2008 tagged bento, equipment, food jar, for kids, leftover remake, meat, pasta or noodles, poultry, sandwich or wrap | 16 Comments »

Lunches with pork mole sopes

To keep lunches from getting boring, find ways to transform dinner leftovers into different dishes (”leftover makeovers” or “leftover remakes”). Earlier in the week we had pork carnitas tacos for dinner, so I mixed the leftover carnitas with some instant mole sauce and made it into sopes. Sopes are little discs of corn masa (like tiny thick tortillas with a lip around the edge) with toppings, typically something like refried beans with grated cheese, onion and hot chili sauce. I ran these under the broiler to make them neater to eat on the go.

Contents of my husband’s meal: Homemade sopes with leftover pork carnitas (Del Real brand carnitas from Costco, full thoughts here), mole sauce and Monterey Jack cheese melted on top. Side dish of berenjenas con vainitas (Venezuelan dish of eggplant with green beans) and grape tomatoes. Not shown: a little sauce container with crema (sour cream) for the sopes. I got the recipe from award-winning cookbook The Book of Latin American Cooking by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz. From the book jacket: She â€œdescribes how the Spanish, Portuguese, African, and Middle Eastern influences have combined with the indiginous cooking of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations.â€ An interesting read with extensive commentary on each recipe.

Prep time: 18 minutes, using leftover carnitas and eggplant with green beans. The masa discs for the sopes were ready-made from my local Mexican market, so I heated them up to soften, mixed the already-shredded carnitas with instant mole sauce, assembled and ran them under the broiler to melt the cheese.

Packing: I put the side dishes in reusable silicone baking cups to keep the moisture away from the sopes, and used grape tomatoes as gap fillers to stabilize the lunch during transport. Packed in a 500ml Leaflet box with movable divider.

My meal: Contents are the same as my husband’s, with the beans packed in a smaller disposable food cup (”leisure version” — ha ha) to fit the smaller space. Lunch packed in my 470ml Afternoon Tea box without the removable divider (box bought for US$2 at Irving Housewares in San Francisco).

Contents of preschooler’s meal: Homemade sopes with chopped carnitas mixed with a little Lizano sauce, topped with cheese. Side dishes of green beans (he was not a fan of the olive-laden eggplant dish), an entire miniature Fuji apple, and a little cup of creme caramel (Kiku brand “Petit Pudding”). Not shown: a little squeeze bottle of crema (sour cream) for the sopes.

Packing: I cut the sopes into quarters to make them easy for little hands to eat, and cut off a thin slice of the apple at the bottom so that it would fit inside of the bento box. A tiny clear plastic spoon for the pudding cup is tucked in alongside the sopes. Lunch packed in a 350ml Power Rangers bento box.

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Published by Biggie on October 15th, 2007 tagged bento, corn tortillas or masa, for kids, glutenfree, leftover remake, meat, phyllo or pancake or other | 6 Comments »

Weird Pokemon lunch bag cloth

When I was shopping at Ichiban Kan in San Francisco the other week, I stumbled across a strange Pokemon lunch bag that I initially thought was an ordinary lunch cloth (like a cloth napkin or furoshiki wrapping cloth). When I got it home, however, I discovered that it was actually a weird cross between a wrapping cloth and a lunch bag.

The bottom and sides are sewn together so that you can just drop in a bento box and any other lunch gear, then simply knot the top to close it securely (similar to the Otsukai Tsutsumi illustrated in this cool wrapping chart). I’ve used furoshiki, cloth napkins, and dish towels to tie flimsy bento lunches together and throw into a backpack before, but I can see this being a fun way to ease a child into lunch wrapping without a lot of skill involved. I’d seen a similar Shinkansen-themed lunch bag on Amazon before, but it hadn’t really sunk in that this was how it was supposed to be used — now I get it! Ingenious. (Click on any of the photos for a larger view.)

Here I put Bug’s two-tier pasta lunch inside (shown below), along with a fork, cloth napkin, and damp oshibori hand towel and case. It looks cool, but he went on strike when I asked him to practice opening it, and requested his new Cars lunch bag instead (”I can use just two fingers to open that one!”). We’ll practice some more before I send him to preschool with it so I can be sure he can open it by himself, but it’s hard to compete with Cars!

Contents of Wednesday preschooler lunch: Radiator-shaped radiatore pasta with leftover slow-cooked salmon (salmon recipe here) mixed with tomato-based sauce and sauteed onions with bell peppers. The fruit tier holds gold kiwifruit, tangerine slice and a strawberry.

Morning prep time: 4 minutes, using leftover pasta. The night before, I packed the pasta tier when cleaning up from dinner. So in the morning I just cut the kiwi, cut another wedge off the rapidly shrinking tangerine from the fridge, and quickly microwaved the pasta to restore texture. Very simple lunch this day, nothing fancy.

Packing: Packed in two tiers (180ml and 100ml) of a 4-tier nesting and stacking Thomas the Tank Engine bento box set. I included a small Anpanman pick for the kiwi.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Bug ate everything at preschool except the kiwi, which he ate in the car afterwards.

Contents of Thursday preschooler lunch: Half of a bagel sandwich with cream cheese, grapes, grape tomatoes, and a tiny Manzano banana (smaller and drier than a baby banana, with a slight apple flavor).

Morning prep time: 4 minutes

Packing: I started peeling the banana by cracking open the stem end to make it easier for Bug to peel himself. The interesting thing about this lunch is that I lined the child-sized Snoopy collapsible sandwich case with decorative aluminum foil to keep any cream cheese from escaping through the holes in the bottom or sides. Although I usually pack sandwiches directly in these kinds of ventilated sandwich cases without any kind of lining, my friend Mami (Japanese mother of one of Bug’s classmates) tells me that she always lines hers with colorful plastic wrap to keep things tidy and clean. Her theory is that Japanese-language bento cookbooks don’t often show photos of the plastic-wrap-lined boxes because it looks nicer without the wrap. What do you think?

Verdict: Bug ate the bagel sandwich and a couple of tomatoes at prechool, then ate the banana and remainder of the tomatoes in the car afterwards. For some reason the grapes were uninteresting to him, so I wound up eating those myself.

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