Bento Corner

This is a bento idea that I got from my latest bento book purchase. These are actually meant to look like dango, but they are actually small rice balls! Cute, yes? In the book they actually had toothpicks attached to the end to make it appear as if they were on wooden skewers. But since I didn't have any on hand, I just placed them in cups.

The steps were pretty easy. Just take piping hot rice and drop a small amount  in saran wrap and shape it into a tight ball or rice. Roll the rice in sakura denbu (fish flakes), kinako (grounded soy bean which you mix with a bit of salt and sugar to taste), and the last one is nori furikake. Aonori is also a good option and leaving one dango just of plain rice is really pretty too.

I taste tested quite a few with my son as we made them -- very flavorful and very good. My kids liked the kinako one best as that is their favorite kind of mochi. Speaking of which I tasted kinako soft cream a few weeks ago at Namja Town (thanks for taking us E!). They had all sorts of soft cream flavors and wasabi was one of them. The kinako soft cream was so-so. Was not brave enough to try the wasabi ice cream though...

Back to bento, I also fried some frozen whole okra in butter to get rid of the slimy factor and rolled them in tamagoyaki. My daughter really liked this too. And the last item is a menchi-katsu ball with cheese (frozen item).

Hot dog bento since my daughter started requesting them again.

Thanks to all the education I received from the commentary about "pigs in blankets", I was all set and ready to induldge in making them again when my son and I came across these ready made hot dogs sold at the nearest convenience store. Excellent!

These hotdogs were called hot dogs with mayo -- mayo is serious business here. The bun is super soft and there is a small sausage inside with a thick white stick that was cheese-like...So I thought "Hey, there is cheese in here too! Calcium! Nutrion! Great!" So I re-read the packaging to confirm and the contents were restricted to just two ingredients -- sausage and mayo.

Wait, no cheese...

Just a whole stick of mayo (!!)...yeesh, what's a mama to do?

Glanced at the clock, saw that we were running late, laughed in the face of cardiac arrest and shoved not one, but 2 in my daughter's bento, that's what.

Bento also includes cucumber salad with chirimen jayko (baby sardines) and wakame, and orange segments with apple star.

If you've got the work commute blues, check this out and cheer yourself up!

Rush Hour for Tokyoites.

If this happens to be your commute, my deepest sympathies...

As I was making this bento I thought about Peter Gabriel and sang that song as I was assembling the monkey together -- geek at heart, absolutely. I just googled the lyrics and true to form, I had the lyrics completely wrong. And of course after all these years, it all makes sense now about shocking monkeys! Erh, slow much?

I have 2 pictures of the same monkey because I assembled the one in the pink box first and my daughter said it was too much food. She can eat more that this but she is a really, really, really slow eater. She will chew one morsel of food for like 5 minutes -- I am so not kidding. Well, I guess it's more like a minute, but even that is a really long time. So I have to adjust bentos a bit so that she can finish in time with her peers and function as part of the classroom unit. This is very important in Japanese culture -- do as everyone else does, don't stick out, follow suit, be orderly... So I stuffed it all in the smaller yellow box and everything fit except the broccoli and a few beans. Doesn't the color scheme in the yellow box look better anyway?

The monkey is made of tamagoyaki, cheese face, carrot cheeks, and nori face. I made the cheese part the night before and just placed on top of the tamagoyaki in the morning. Underneath the face is an onigiri with hijiki mixed in and underneath the two ears are tamagoyaki with spinach. Under the heart carrots are sweet kidney beans and Japanese sweet potatoes.The last item is the mayo shrimp dumpling (frozen item).

I also packed a small box of whole yogurt mixed with maple syrup and added cut kiwi and raisins -- the raisins should be soaked a bit in hot water first to soften. This was dessert, which can always be eaten quickly and needs only 5 seconds of chewing each bite. How convenient for my girl.