Birthday Bento

Today is my dad's birthday. Since I'm a broke student and I suck at buying gifts for people anyway, I decided a couple months ago that I would make my dad a bento lunch for his birthday. However, he went out for lunch today with my mom, so I told him I would make him lunch for tomorrow. He's at my sister's dance recital right now, so I took advantage of his absence by putting together this bento lunch ^.^

I'm actually quite pleased. In my original sketches, I had gyoza and lumpia and fried rice included in the bento box, but we don't have gyoza or lumpia and I don't have all the ingredients needed to make fried rice on me...

I'm so bad at planning for things.

Nevertheless, I hope he likes it ^.^ Happy birthday dad!

Weekly Bento Recap 1

Monday: Salmon Monday

This is the third week I've had salmon in my bento box on a Monday. I am considering dubbing Mondays "Salmon Mondays."

Bottom tier: Lebanese rice. In one of my last posts, I mentioned that I wouldn't be posting again until Wednesday. Well, I ended up posting a couple days later, on the Sunday. I've been dying to make this Lebanese rice recipe I found on Pinterest for a while now, and decided I would bring it to school as part of my Bento lunch. I also ended up writing a recipe review of it ^.^  

Upper Tier: Consists of leftover grilled salmon, strawberries, broccoli and pork shao mai (dumplings). In the past, I've only brought one little slice thingy of salmon, but I found I was still hungry afterwards. So this time, I've packed two into the container. (Well, technically, the salmon is one whole slice, because I have to cut it in half anyway to fit into Chin Po)

I very much enjoyed this Bento. Would definitely make again. 

Tuesday: American Bento

I've mentioned this before, but lately I've been wanting to get another box. I love my panda bento--IT'S SO CUTE <3 BUT trying to fit things into a nice neat circle gets really old really fast. I've kind of wanted some variety. While I was tearing my house apart, looking for my silicone baking cups because someone had moved them (-_-) , I stumbled across one of my mom's (many) tupperwares. And guess what. IT WAS DIVIDED INTO BENTO PORTIONS. There was the 4 parts carb, 2 parts protein, and then the 1 part for fruits and veggies respectively. 

I was at Dollarama the other day, and I saw a bunch of toothpicks for sale with little images attached to the ends. I've always wanted to get those toothpicks with the little plastic panda heads on the end ^.^ But the paper chicks and eggs were also cute (also in the spirit of Easter), so I decided to get them. 

(Left to right): Flower ham  (without the radish), 2 hotdogs (cut to fit), 2 buns, broccoli, and strawberries.

This should have been better than it was. Like, theoretically, this meal is delicious. I love hotdogs; I love strawberries. I can tolerate broccoli. But you know how sometimes people who you're eating with/certain situations can spoil a meal? Yeah. That happened. Also, I thought I was okay with broccoli since I ate it on Monday and was perfectly fine with it, but I didn't finish them all on Tuesday. Maybe because of the vaguely-aforementioned lunch circumstance? The pink container contains ketchup (I packed a knife to spreed onto the hotdogs), and the green container contains cheese for the broccoli (which melted in the caf microwave to the point of not even existing anymore). 

Wednesday: "Soup" Dawg (haha im so funny) 

This is what I had for lunch today. It's also my last bento for the week. There's no school on Friday, and I typically go out for lunch every Thursday (or hit the caf). 

Lower tier: Pancit! It's a Filipino dish my mom makes once in a while. I don't think this is a good picture of pancit because it's supposed to have canton noodles (She forgot to put them in) and have a bucket load of vegetables and shrimp I won't eat, and waaaay more chicken. But when I was scooping this into the container, I was trying my hardest to avoid all the vegetables (while also trying to get carrots and parsnips, because those are okay and add texture) and as a result got mostly noodles. Just Pinterest pancit and a lot more images (of better quality) will pop up ^.^

Upper tier: M&M Meat Shop's spicy breaded chicken breast cut into two. Strawberries, and one shao mai. 

Soup: Lipton noodle soup. I made it for the first time the night before, but I think I put too much water in. My mom makes it better than I do. The soup wasn't as good as I thought it would be and as a result, it made an awesome meal (because the two tiers were DELICIOUS) kind of okay. It also didn't help that my friend spilled some of the soup onto her new (white) shoes. I didn't end up finishing it. If I were to bring soup again, it would probably be wedding soup (brought it last week and I only have good things to say about it). I would post a picture, but the lighting is really bad and it doesn't look very appetizing haha. Maybe next time.

Thanks so much for reading this post! Next week, I'll also only be posting three bento lunches (since Monday is a holiday and Thursdays are not bento days). Also, remember that person from my company in marketing class who I mentioned two posts ago and is considering getting into Bento? Well, yesterday he bought a Bento box off ebay! I'm so happy! My dream of having a bento buddy might become a thing ^.^

The Wonderful Misadventures of an Almost-Hinomaru Bento

I was looking forward to eating this bento lunch today, but I was disappointed with the results. But before I go into that, a brief overview of what was in each tier:

Lower Tier

 Our family had some left over Filipino rice cakes (called puto), so I had the vision of going hinomaru style and making the bottom tier look like the Japanese flag (hinomaru is the name of the Japanese flag). Unfortunately, there were no red putos, so I chose to use purple. Out of blue, yellow, and white, purple was the closest colour to red. I was debating whether or not to add soy sauce to the rice, but I figured naw. I didn't want the soy sauce getting on the puto by accident because that would make it taste...well, gross. It's supposed to be sweet and delicious, not...soy-saucy ew. I don't have any of those mini sauce bottles a lot of bento users seemed to have so yeah, soy sauce was definitely out of the question. 

When I opened my lunch, my friend told me that the purple rice cake looked like a scoop of ice cream in the middle of the rice. I kind of have to agree, to be honest. I don't think it looks very appetizing in the picture, and in real life, I don't think purple-dyed foods look very appetizing in general. But puto is absolutely DELICIOUS! Man, I haven't had these babies since the last time I was in the Philippines back in 2009. In fact, I had completely forgotten all about them until a family friend came over and delivered a bunch. Bless her.

Upper Tier

There are four components in the top tier: One strawberry (maaan I so thought I'd be able to fit more!), a couple grapes inside a green silicone baking cup (not a total fan of the shade, I forget why I chose green, to be honest), hotdog eggrolls (which are freaking delicious. The reason I added the strawberry is because the colours red and yellow...well, they look so good together), and some unknown thing. My sister calls it a stove-topper. ...I asked her why she calls it that, and she said she doesn't know why. Go figure. All I know is that it comes from the oriental party pack from M&M and is freaking GREAT. Like, I wish I had packed more--but we only had one left. Cries. Also, I was running out of space. Anyway, that's why if you read the tags at the bottom of this post, you may notice ??? among the other list of foods from this particular bento lunch. Well, the question marks are supposed to represent the mysterious "stove-topper." 

General Thoughts 

Okay. So as I already mentioned, this meal was not on-par. The fruits were great. The "stove-topper" was awesome. The hotdog eggrolls were on-point. So pretty much everything in the top tier was wonderful. The problem was with the bottom tier. 

The first problem was that the puto got squished. I hadn't dug a deep enough hole in the middle of the rice, so it was sticking out a lot when I put the top tier over it. Fine. Whatever. I can deal with squished rice cake. The problem begins when you try to dig the rice cake out at school and you end up getting bits of purple puto everywhere! Okay, well...not everywhere. The shredded bits were kind of confined to one portion of the box. But more on that in a sec.

I always eat steamed rice with soy sauce. Except, the thing is, I never realized that before. I assumed that I would enjoy plain white rice simply because...well, rice is rice. Rice is life. I've grown up eating it with soy sauce peppered here and there, and I guess I never realized how much of an impact soy sauce has really had on my life. So in short, today I learned that I HATE plain white rice. 

My friend noticed (different friend than the one previously mentioned) my discomfort and she stated that she also hates white rice by itself and made the lovely suggestion that I should mix my hotdog eggrolls in with the rice. I was kind of looking forward to eating the rolls by themselves, but desperate times calls for desperate measures. Anyway, once I combined the two foods, it tasted GREAT. 

But just when I thought that I was safe...my taste buds were greeted by something horrid. Okay, so picture this: Chewing rice, hotdogs wrapped in egg and cheese, everything's going fine. You know the general flavour in your mouth, right? Okay. Good. Now add SWEET RICEY CAKE FLAVOUR. NO. THAT FLAVOUR SHOULD NOT BE THERE. THAT NEEDS TO STAY THE FUCK OUT. YOU CANNOT MIX DESSERT WITH MEAL. NO. 

Okay, I know it might seem like I'm over-reacting but like...I don't know...

 Food is quite essential to my happiness (and overall health and bodily functions). 

Will I be making this bento again? The top tier for sure. But the bottom tier? Not. A. Chance. It would have to be modified. First, I would dig a deeper hole so the rice cake doesn't get squished as much. Then I would buy a little bottle for sauces (and fill it with soy sauce) and pack it with my bento lunch. And finally, if I were to pack this with puto again, I would confine the rice cake to a silicon baking cup so that it will be easier to remove from the rice SO THAT LITTLE PURPLE BITS DON'T GO AROUND IMPREGNATING THE RICE WITH THEIR FLAVOUR, AS IF THEY'RE ATTEMPTING TO BUILD NEW COLONIES OR SOMETHING. Oh, and if circumstances were really ideal, I would use a red rice cake instead of a purple one ^.^