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February 2008

Bento: week 7 Posted 2008.02.26 21:11 PST

This seems to be the week of leftovers. I've taken to trying to cook about twice the rice a bento needs, and refrigerating half of it. It doesn't make a lot of difference, but it's fewer times that the rice cooker has to go from zero to sixty each week, which can't be a bad thing. It also keeps available the option for fried rice every other day. Maybe I should have some tomorrow if it works with the short grain rice I started using Friday of this (last) week...

Tuesday

Yay leftovers. Sunday we decided we had to use up some chicken and spinach, and I'd remembered this dish we'd made a few years back. So we made it again. It yielded four chicken rolls, of which you can the top two of four slices which amount to about half of one roll. It was just as good room temperature as warm, although I would have liked some more of the tomato based sauce.

Wednesday

No creativity here whatsoever; instead just some duplicate leftovers, and some frozen fruit fresh from the freezer. While the berries generally manage to thaw in a couple hours, this fruit was still somewhat frozen in the center.

Thursday

Yay, I got a new bento box! Now, not only do I have an extra day between forced bento box washings, the two-tier approach will result in much creativity...once I get the hang of it. Today I packed too much into it, not realize quite how big the gobo tempura really was, nor how little room the top tier really has for veggies (the center of the top is a little depressed, so there's less room than there looks like).

Friday

Not only did I pick up a new box, I bought some Japanese style rice: a Tamaki Haiga (still has some of the rice germ) short grain rice from California. Immediately out of the rice cooker it's obvious how much more this rice sticks together. It's nifty! It would actually work for making onigiri! You can eat it with chopsticks without driving yourself nuts! All sorts of benefits over Jasmine rices. Can you tell I like it so far?

The millet salad was something I threw together earlier in the week when I wanted a nice raw vegetable and grain salad. Having not cooked millet before, the way it puffed out rather surprised me, so this wasn't the effect I wanted. But it was tasty in an interesting (but not wonderful) way. Good enough to eat, at least.

After a surprise lunch at work, I really ate this on Saturday. Cold. Man that rice sticks together!

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