bento

Bento #4: Real (frozen) Japanese Food!

Today's lunch features some actual Japanese foods, purchased frozen from a local grocery store.

It contains:

  • Heart shaped rice balls
  • Gyoza filled with pork, chicken, and veggies
  • Edamame
  • Half a banana
  • 2 female viagra jelly Chips Ahoy cookies
  • Baby spinach used as a divider

Today was surprisingly one of the longer morning prep times, despite using mostly frozen foods. It took about 15 minutes, so far the only bento which took longer was when I was cooking the rice fresh. These rice balls have been frozen in the freezer since them, I just zapped them in the microwave for about a minute to soften them up again. Having to cook the edamame and gyoza on the stove took a while.

Kitchen efficiency is something that's going to take practice. I have an electric kettle, but forgot to turn it on until about 5 minutes into the prep, after I'd already started the gyoza cooking. Because the edamame was frozen it took a while to bring the water back up to a boil, and I still had the burner on medium heat. Despite the fact that the gyoza takes 10 minutes and the edamame takes about 5, I was waiting on the edamame to finish the lunch. I'll get more streamlined as I get more used to cooking.

I should mention that before this lunch experiment, I pretty much never cooked anything. Even now I'm not doing a ton of actual cooking; mostly I'm just reheating leftovers and frozen foods. But it's still the most time I've spent in the kitchen since I moved in.

I'll only be gone for a few hours today, so I packed myself a mini lunch with some of the leftovers from Chris's:

Unless I come up with an awesome bento idea I'll probably take a day off from lunchmaking tomorrow and start again next week.