Brazilian salgadinhos lunch

I went to a Japanese-Brazilian friend's party where there was a gorgeous array of Brazilian savory appetizers called salgadinhos. Salgadinhos encompass a variety of different savory bites, including inverted cone-shaped stuffed "coxinhas" whose dough is made with yucca and chicken broth, "bolinhos de peixe" fish balls, "risole" thick fried half-moons stuffed with fillings, "empada" pies baked in mini muffin tins, and Middle Eastern stuffed meat kibbeh (ground meat & bulgur wheat) that reflects the immigrant influence in Brazil.

Often eaten with hot sauce, evidently salgadinhos are popular snacks at bars and parties in Brazil. They were definitely a hit with the three-year-old birthday party crowd, who staged repeated strikes on the finger food table. Also popular were brigadeiro chocolate fudge candy and beijinho de coco coconut kisses, little Portuguese-influenced sweets made from condensed milk and rolled in either chocolate jimmies or shredded coconut. We finally had to move the plate out of reach of the children, who took up positions nearby to snatch up the chocolate balls.


I was so taken with the salgadinhos that I asked the hostess if I could take a few home to feature in a bento lunch, and she was gracious enough to give the green light and fill me in on the details. They may seem unusual for a packed lunch, but they're in keeping with other ready-made appetizers that lend themselves nicely to the small scale of bentos, such as puff pastry appetizers, spanakopita, mini crab cakes, meatballs, etc.

Contents of preschooler's bento lunch: Brazilian salgadinhos appetizers (ham rizoli, chicken coxinha de frango, chicken-thigh empada with olives), mandarin orange segments, steamed broccoli with mayonnaise and aonori seaweed (recipe below), steamed red and yellow bell pepper with soy sauce and dashi, and beijinho de coco coconut kisses.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes, using leftover salgadinhos. In the morning I popped the appetizers into my convection toaster oven for 5 minutes to re-crisp the exterior. While those were warming, I cooked both the broccoli and bell peppers in my microwave mini steamer and sauced them.

Cooking: I was looking for a different way to flavor steamed broccoli, and found a quick sauce in Papatto 15-fun! Oishii Obentou, one of my Japanese-language speed bento cookbooks. I put some trimmed broccoli florets in a microwave mini steamer with a tablespoon of water and heated them on high heat (1200W) for 50 seconds (you could also heat the broccoli in a covered microwave-safe bowl with a splash of water). Remove the broccoli from the steamer and pat with a paper towel to remove excess moisture. Let cool while you stir together a quick sauce of 2 tsp mayonnaise, 1/2 tsp soy sauce and 1 tsp aonori seaweed flakes. Either dip the cooled broccoli florets into the sauce or smear a little of the sauce into each floret with a spoon. This added a surprising amount of flavor to the broccoli, and Bug gave it a big thumbs up.

Packing: To make sure the appetizers stayed crisp, I let them cool after coming out of the toaster oven before packing them in the box. This kept condensation from forming in the box that would have made it more difficult to open the box and increased the odds of the food going bad before lunchtime. The peppers went into a reusable silicone baking cup, and the broccoli went into a disposable plastic baking cup from Daiso that was easier to compact into a small space than a silicone cup. The lunch is packed in a 360ml Disney Cars bento box with both subdividers removed to fit the larger salgadinhos, and the box went into an insulated Shinkansen lunch bag with a wide base designed to carry bento boxes flat, not tipped over on their side. Little ice packs cut from a larger flexible ice blanket went inside the lunch bag to keep things cool. If Bug were hungrier, I could have frozen a little treat in a separate container and thrown that in his bag as an edible ice pack.

Verdict: Not great. Bug downed the two fried salgadinhos, the broccoli and the orange segments at preschool, but left the rest. After school he ate a little of the bell peppers and the brigadeiro, but totally rejected the baked chicken empada even though its filling was similar to the coxinha that he downed. Oh well, at least he ate the broccoli!

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box.

Tiffin Tuesday - Not quite Japanese

Whenever I have to explain the concept of bento boxes to people who have never heard of them, the obvious explanation is: it is a Japanese lunchbox. And the next question, inevitably, is: isn't Japanese cuisine terribly complicated for Westerners? Well, not quite... and most of my lunchboxes are anything but filled with Japanese foods. However, I adapted a few (easy) Japanese ideas for this lunch:



As Biggie pointed out last week, a lunch box doesn't have to be filled with the equivalent of a buffet-style meal to be satisfying, but nonetheless some variety adds to the fun as much as to the nutritional value. So let me delve a little into bento philosophy.



In an ideal world, a bento should employ the principle of goshiki (five colors - typically red/orange, black/purple/brown, white, yellow and green), and even better, goho, or five cooking methods - such as grilling, frying, simmering, steaming, pickling and boiling (I've added "raw" to my personal list of choices). By doing this, you will vary the textures throughout your meal, too. You don't have to pack Japanese foods to do this, though.

So in my not quite Japanese lunch above, I packed

• not quite zaru soba - about half a bundle of soba noodles (available as 100% buckwheat or with a little wheat flour added. The wheat soba can be boiled, the buckwheat-only variety nees to be steamed). I boiled the soba the night before packing the lunch. The dipping sauce in the Winnie-the-Pooh container consists of equal parts of mirin, soy, black bean garlic sauce and sesame paste - a little goes a long way. In the morning while packing I added a few scallion slivers to the soba.
• not quite tonkatsu - one of the dishes I call "double duty cooking". We had sesame fried pork chops for dinner, so I used one of the boneless chops, cut it into thin strips, and breaded them with a sesame crust (flour, egg, and half panko crumbs half sesame seeds) . They were fried at the same time as our dinner pork chops - this works nicely with chicken tenders, too, probably even with tofu.
  

To add a little crunch and freshness (and color), I packed a few (organic) cucumber strips to munch on. Cutting the scallions and cucumber (and removing the stone from the red plums in the second tier) takes about 2 minutes, if you did the cooking the night before, so this is done and packed easily even in a hurry.

The "snack" tier features an instant coffee drink (I never buy these, they somehow appear in my life via promotion teams strolling the city, or via mail) and an organic chocolate biscuit bar, plus a handful of almonds as a quick protein-and-fat snack, two red plums and a few mini chocolates. Apple optional :-)

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This Post was written by Petra from Foodfreak

Meatball "rice bomb" lunch

Bento lunches don't have to be filled with a multitude of different dishes in order to be appealing; focus on packing a balance of food groups and contrasting natural colors in your meal and you'll find that a simple lunch can be just as attractive and satisfying as an ornate one.

This lunch revisits the meatball-stuffed onigiri rice "bombs" that I packed in an adult lunch last year after spying them in a Japanese-language onigiri cookbook. Making them is pretty straightforward: with your hands or ball-shaped onigiri mold (photo below), cover a meatball with warm short- or medium-grain rice, then completely cover that with moistened scraps of nori seaweed. I used pre-made teriyaki meatballs that I picked up at Costco and seasoned Korean seaweed for flavor, but regular Japanese nori is easier to work with and keeps its shape better afterwards as it's less delicate.

Contents of preschooler lunch: Onigiri rice "bombs" stuffed with teriyaki pineapple chicken meatballs (my favorite, Aidells brand), grape tomatoes and steamed bell pepper with Korean barbecue sauce. I keep a bottle of Korean barbecue sauce in my fridge to quickly flavor any number of protein or vegetable dishes; having a few premade sauces on hand (store-bought or homemade, any of your favorite flavors) is an easy way to speed up your lunch prep.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes, using leftover refrigerated rice, store-bought meatballs, and leftover bell pepper. In the morning I microwaved the rice to restore its soft texture so I could work with it, and microwaved the meatballs to kill off any surface bacteria (see my Daily Tiffin post on packed lunch food safety). I made these without the molds above, wetting my hands when I put the pieces of seaweed on in order to get them to stick. Honestly, it was just too much effort to dig the mold out from under my stove -- I need to revisit my bento gear organization system to make the larger accessories more accessible.

Packing: Initially I just plopped the rice bombs down into the plain, unlined box, but they looked sad and lonely with the bare box bottom staring back up at me. So I grabbed a piece of lettuce from the refrigerator and lined the box with it for some nice color contrast (I'm guilty of unnecessary garnish here -- my son totally ignored the lettuce). Much better. The bell pepper went into a hard plastic food cup (yellow, to amplify the yellow of the bell pepper), and the grape tomatoes acted as gap fillers to stabilize the lunch in transit. The lunch is packed in one 350ml box from a Lock & Lock lunch set.

Verdict: A qualified thumbs up. My three-year-old ate both of the rice bombs at preschool, and the rest afterwards as a snack. His preschool teacher said that the he had a little trouble eating the rice bombs as they were a little crumbly; this was my fault as I'd let the rice sit too long in the rice cooker before refrigerating it, and it dried out a little. For best results, either use fresh rice or be sure to freeze/refrigerate your leftover rice soon after cooking it, while it's still at its most moist.

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box.

Frozen pancake bento lunches

One of my speed bento tips has been to make a little extra when you’re cooking another meal, and set it aside for lunches. Planned leftovers can be divided into individual portions and frozen, or just stashed in the refrigerator for quick use. So when I had time over the Thanksgiving holiday to make buttermilk pancakes, I made mini pancakes with the excess batter at the same time and froze them for a quick lunch option. My son was excited to get pancakes for lunch as a treat, and it was a fast and easy option for me: win, win.

Over the holiday, I made the iconic Thanksgiving dish of green bean casserole from scratch with this Alton Brown recipe, using fresh mushrooms and green beans, but minus the canned soup. When I first saw this on AB’s Good Eats TV show, I thought it was way too much effort for a single dish on a day when the cook would presumably be working on other dishes. Then I realized that it would be an ideal candidate to bring along to a potluck Thanksgiving, what we did this year. Everything turned out beautifully except for the onions, which other readers on the Food Network site had problems with as well. Either turn the heat down and watch them like a hawk, or buy a can of fried onions (you can also find these sold at Thai markets in addition to the mainstream Durkee’s at chain supermarkets). Overall, I’d say it was worth the effort; I especially liked the large slices of fresh mushroom and crisp green beans throughout.

Contents of preschooler lunch: Buttermilk pancakes and maple syrup, deconstructed green bean casserole (mushrooms in the food cup, green beans on the side), scrambled egg ball with peas, and pomegranate seeds. I shaped the egg purses with plastic wrap, as in the how-to here.

Morning prep time: 12 minutes, using frozen pancakes, leftover green bean casserole, and a sauce container that I pre-filled with syrup for speed. The night before, I put a little stack of two frozen pancakes into the refrigerator to defrost naturally. This worked passably well, but on seeing that there was more room in the box in the morning, I microwaved an additional frozen pancake. The microwaved pancake came out softer than the naturally defrosted pancake, and is how I’ll reheat them going forward.

Packing: For some reason, my son doesn’t like green beans when they have sauce on them, so I simply picked them out of the casserole, rinsed them off, and dried them well before packing them alongside. Bug ate them with his fingers. I packed the mushrooms in a reusable plastic food cup that I thought was shaped like a cow, but my son pointed out that it also looked like a car when you looked at it ‘upside down’. It was like looking at a trompe d’oeuil drawing of a vase, and suddenly seeing it morph into two faces, depending upon how you look at it. Packed in a 360ml Disney Cars bento box with one sub-divider removed.

Verdict: Good over time. Surprisingly, when I picked Bug up from preschool he had only eaten one pancake and all of the mushrooms, leaving everything else. In the car afterwards, though, he happily ate everything except the green peas and the pomegranate. When pressed, Bug said he ran out of time, but I’m thinking the pancakes and egg might have been frustrating for him to eat on his own as I hadn’t cut them up into bite-sized pieces.

Freezing: To freeze the pancakes, thoroughly cool, then wrap individual servings in plastic wrap (I made stacks of two). Place the wrapped pancakes in a freezer bag or plastic freezer container, and freeze. If using a freezer bag, use a straw to suck the excess air out of the bag before sealing to reduce the chance of freezer burn. Eat within a month for best quality, although technically they can be kept indefinitely if stored below 0 degrees C (not F). One of my books on freezing says that allowing frozen pancakes to thaw naturally causes them to lose fluffiness and collapse, so to unwrap the frozen pancake, rewrap in aluminum foil, and reheat in a toaster oven or oven. My pancakes didn’t collapse when I let them defrost in the refrigerator, but I preferred the light, fluffy texture when I microwaved them briefly on medium heat.

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Contents of my lunch: Pancakes with orange cranberry sauce, olives, green bean casserole, pickled herring and pomegranate arils. I really enjoyed the pancakes with cranberry sauce, it was reminiscent of Swedish pancakes with ligonberries…

Morning prep time: 8 minutes, using all leftovers.

Packing: The cranberries went into a lidded disposable condiment cup, the kind that I used for jello cups. The green bean casserole went into a short, large silicone baking cup with fluted edges that I picked up from Daiso (2 for US$1.50). Packed in the 465ml two-tier Pon de Lion box from Mister Donut described below.

Container: A friend gave me a limited edition bento box from the doughnut chain Mister Donut, given to customers in Japan accumulating enough points on cards given with a purchase from March to May 2007. The “Pon de Lion” character is a play on the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon and one of the chain’s new products, a filled donut that looks like the outside ring of the lion’s head. The box itself is 465ml total, with a 190ml top tier and a 265ml bottom tier. The upper tier has a flat, tight-sealing white lid, and the top tier can be turned over when empty and nested into the bottom tier, reducing the size of the empty container you carry home. The outer lid isn’t latched and the bottom tier lid is essentially the bottom of the top tier itself, so best to be sure that foods packed inside aren’t wet. The box is all held together with the yellow elastic bento band, and sits inside a non-insulated matching cloth bag. It’s a little on the small side for my lunches, but Bug is quite taken with it (good when I pack bulky foods or when he gets a little older).

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box.

Tarako spaghetti lunches

Pre-packing some or all of the next day's lunch is a practical way of speeding up daily lunch packing and making hectic mornings more manageable. Here I pre-packed leftover pasta the night before and stored it in the refrigerator overnight, briefly warming it in the microwave the next morning to restore the texture of the pasta.

Contents of my lunch: Tarako spaghetti with onions, red bell peppers and kaiware (daikon sprouts). The top tier holds a section of corn on the cob, plum tomatoes, broccoli with red wine vinaigrette, black Mission fig, and grapes. Tarako is salted cod roe, but I often use jarred Greek tarama for this dish instead.

Morning prep time: 7 minutes, using leftover pasta and corn. I pre-packed the pasta when cleaning up from dinner. In the morning I briefly microwaved the pasta to restore texture, garnished with fresh kaiware, steamed the broccoli in my microwave mini steamer (speeding up cooking time by 50%), and arranged food in the the top tier.

Packing: I used tongs to twist the spaghetti into two large loose nests, making the pasta tier a little nicer looking. Nothing in the top tier was particularly wet, so I didn't use food dividers (edible or otherwise). Packed in a 580ml two-tier Urara Dragonfly box.

Cooking: Here’s a tarako spaghetti recipe with good notes. I start by sauteing an onion and bell pepper if I have some on hand for color contrast. When I lived in Osaka, I often had it with a little Kewpie mayonnaise stirred into it. Other variations omit the cream in favor of sauteing in butter and tossing in mirin/tarako/mayo (that's what I did here). However you vary it, it’s bound to be good — just get the sauce loose enough to lightly coat the noodles.

Preschooler lunch: Contents are the same as mine. For packing, I used kitchen scissors to cut up the spaghetti into smaller bits (right in the box) that are easier for little hands to manage. Packed in a 270ml one-tier Thomas the Tank Engine box with one hard plastic sub-container removed to fit more pasta, and a 150ml Anpanman side dish container for the fruit. After taking the photo I tucked in a little Anpanman pick for the fruit. Verdict: 5 stars. Bug ate all of this at preschool, nothing left over. Success!

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box: Building a Better Bento.

Silicone baking cups, and salmon box lunches

Silicone cupcake liners work well as removable food cups in packed lunches, separating foods to keep different textures and flavors from mingling. Because the cups are made of silicone, they're flexible and fit into odd spaces, with the added benefit of being reusable. They come in all sorts of fun shapes, sizes and colors to fit a variety of food and containers (click for a representative sample of silicone baking cups). Housewares, kitchen, and crafts stores such as Michael's often sell them -- if you find a coupon you can bring down the initial cost as well as save on the cost of disposable paper cups down the line. I finally found the large ones for a good price at Bed Bath & Beyond and used a 20% off coupon. Hooray, I'm finally a little greener!


Contents of husband's lunch: Slow-cooked salmon with a container of sweet-hot Nonya sambal sauce, chicken fried rice, blueberries, and salad with mango, strawberry tree fruit (a.k.a. arbutus berries) and poppy seed dressing.

Morning prep time: 7 minutes, using leftover salmon, fried rice, torn lettuce, and a pre-filled sauce container with salad dressing to save time. In the morning I just cut the mango and arbutus berries, briefly microwaved the fried rice to restore the texture, and packed everything together.

Packing: The silicone baking cup kept the fried rice away from the salad and blueberries, and was tough enough to stand up to salad dressing once the salad was dressed (more durable than a paper cupcake liner). There are two layers of salmon, one on top of the other. Packed in a 650ml Leaflet box with movable divider, and both sauces in small containers.

Equipment: The standard-size silicon baking cups (Wilton brand) were 12 for US$6 at Bed Bath & Beyond (use their omnipresent 20% off coupon and it gets even more reasonable). I got the four pastel mini cups as a set for US$1.50 at Daiso in Daly City (Japanese dollar store with branches internationally).


Contents of my lunch: Same as my husband's, but with pesto sauce instead of sambal, and no salad.

Morning prep time: 5 minutes.

Packing: A little Clickety Clack sauce container holds the pesto sauce, and the lunch is packed in a 500ml Leaflet box with movable divider.


Contents of preschooler lunch: Roast chicken drumstick, chicken breast, strawberry tree fruit, mango, blueberries, and fried rice. I wrapped the end of the drumstick in decorative aluminum foil to create a clean "handle" (similar lunch and foil details are here).

Morning prep time: 5 minutes.

Packing: I included a small Anpanman pick for the chicken breast and mangos, and packed a spoon on the side for the rice. The silicone cup squished nicely into the available space to hold the fruit without touching the chicken. Packed in two tiers (280ml and 180ml) of a four-tier nesting Thomas the Tank Engine bento box set.

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box: Building a Better Bento.

Cassava and wild salmon lunches

I'm gearing up for preschool to start in September, when I won't be right there to help my son with frustrating food in his meals. This means putting myself in his shoes when I'm packing his lunch, trying to imagine what'd give him problems if he were eating solo. Kids this age are still perfecting utensil use, so it's important to either cut things small or pack finger food. This month I'm going to try to pack his lunches as if he were already eating on his own, to get both of us into the swing of things.


We did have an eating milestone today, though: Bug successfully used real chopsticks for the first time! I'd packed both fork and chopsticks for him and figured he'd go for the fork, but last week he saw his little friend Maya using little chopsticks and wanted to be like her. He polished off all but a couple pieces of salmon using only chopsticks -- I was floored. I guess I should enjoy positive peer pressure while it lasts, right?

Contents of preschooler lunch: Mango and romaine lettuce with homemade vinaigrette, grilled wild salmon with a mustard seed glaze, and boiled cassava root (a.k.a. yuca, manioc or casava) with salsa Criolla (Creole sauce: a vinegary fresh salsa often served with grilled meats or vegetables). My husband and I had some outstanding roasted cassava and salsa Criolla last month at a local Peruvian restaurant, so I made a note to duplicate it at home. I took a shortcut by boiling the cassava instead of roasting or grilling it, but the vinegary salsa complemented the potato-like cassava nicely.

Morning prep time: 8 minutes, using all leftovers from dinner.

Packing: Bug isn't a fan of mixed salads, so I separated out the lettuce from the mango and put his dressing in a cute sauce container. I cut the salmon and cassava into bite-size pieces and removed the salmon skin to head off eating frustration. There's a tough little stringy bit that runs through the very center of the cassava, so I removed that as well. Packed in a single 350ml container from a Lock & Lock lunch set.

Cookbook: I found the Creole salsa recipe in award-winning cookbook The Book of Latin American Cooking by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz. From the book jacket: She "describes how the Spanish, Portuguese, African, and Middle Eastern influences have combined with the indiginous cooking of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations." An interesting read with extensive commentary on each recipe.

My lunch: Contents are the same as Bug's, but the grilled salmon is intact, the salad is mixed up, and the cassava is in larger pieces. Because I didn't have to cut things up, I was able to pack this in 5 minutes.

Packing: I rotated the cassava chunks in the box to create gaps in the corners for the fresh salsa. This saved me from using sauce containers or condiment cups, and the salsa was dry enough that it didn't leak sauce onto the salad. But if it had leaked, the vinegar of the salsa would have complemented the vinaigrette for the salad, so I didn't worry too much about it. Of course, after I packed this up, I shoved it unceremoniously into the diaper bag sideways, cassava-side first. Yes, I know Japanese books say you should carry your bento flat, but that's just not practical for our lifestyle. So our lunches are packed to survive rough treatment. Packed in a 500ml Leaflet bento box, which is actually a little small for an adult woman my height, according to the bento box size guidelines.

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box: Building a Better Bento, recently featured in Boing Boing.

Leftover Remake: Curry pasta lunches

I had some leftover chicken curry from dinner and some frozen unsauced pasta, so today's lunches are a Leftover Remake: curry pasta.

Contents of my lunch: Japanese curry pasta (gemelli) with chicken, carrots, onions, potatoes and added broccoli. The fruit layer has fresh figs, half an apricot, blackberries and mango nectarine. The mango nectarine is a pale nectarine reminiscent of both mango and nectarine in flavor and texture -- delicious although delicate and easily bruised. I packed mango nectarines in last summer and liked the flavor, so when I saw them again this year I picked some up. Good thing, as evidently their season is very short (just two to three weeks in the summer).



Morning prep time: 6 minutes, using frozen unsauced pasta and leftover curry. I quickly cooked some broccoli florets in my microwave mini steamer for one minute, and added them to the leftover curry and frozen pasta that I microwaved to revive the texture before packing. Sliced some fruit and we're ready to go.


Packing: Much of the fruit here is very delicate and ill-suited to rough treatment or tight packing (see gap fillers). As blackberries are especially fragile, I put them in a reusable plastic food cup to ensure they didn't turn into mush in transit. I like these little cups as they're reusable like silicone cupcake liners, but sturdy enough to actually protect the food inside from damage. I bought some of these at Daiso, others from eBay (click the photo for details). I did forget to reserve some extra curry sauce to pack on the side, though, so unfortunately the pasta was a big dry by the time we ate it (live and learn). The lunch was packed in my 580ml Urara dragonfly box.

I packed my husband's meal in stainless steel containers (review here) for a masculine touch.

My two-year-old's meal was lightly packed into a 600ml two-tier box with built-in food cup. The meal would have been too big for him according to the bento box size guidelines, but he decided he didn't like this shape of pasta (go figure!) and just ate the meat and veggies out of the curry pasta. The curry was a big hit with him at dinner (Curry no Ohji-sama from S&B -- a Japanese curry roux for kids), just not this particular pasta. Oh well!

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box: Building a Better Bento.

Tarako spaghetti lunches

My son's lunch consisted of tarako spaghetti (salted cod roe) with onions and aonori (cooking notes below), Latin American ham croquette and chipotle cream dipping sauce, cheese triangle, steamed zucchini (courgette) with ponzu, and a strawberry.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes. The spaghetti was leftover from the previous night's dinner, so I packed that up directly into the lunch container after dinner. I cooked two things in the morning: teamed the zucchini quickly in my microwave steamer (then tossed with my favorite ponzu sauce), and fried the frozen Goya-brand croquettes in a tiny pot. In Japan many lunch-packers have a tiny little pot for boiling or frying small amounts of food. The pot on the left is only about 4 inches in diameter (1 quart at max), so it was a good size to deep fry just three croquettes without using much cooking oil. Any small pot would work as well -- it saves on oil use and cleanup to work in miniature when frying.

Packing: I used an egg slicer to partially slice the strawberry for easy preschooler eating, packed the fried croquette in a lined food cup to absorb remaining oil, and drained the sauced zucchini on paper towels to reduce the possibility of leakage. The frozen fruit cocktail pack in my lunch kept the cream dipping sauce cool and safe inside an insulated lunch bag. Packed in the two middle tiers of a 4-tier nesting Thomas the Tank Engine box.

Cooking: Here's a tarako spaghetti recipe with good notes. My variation omits the cream, instead sauteing an onion (and maybe some bell pepper), mix in some butter, toss the pasta with tarako, mirin and a little mayonnaise, then garnish with nori and kaiware daikon sprouts if I happen to have some on hand. However you make it, it's bound to be good -- just get the sauce loose enough to lightly coat the noodles like pesto. If you can't find fresh cod roe sacs, you can use "tarama" that is often sold in refrigerated jars in Mediterranean markets.

Contents: Ham croquettes with chipotle cream dipping sauce, zucchini with ponzu, cherry tomato, and rice mixed with yellow Thai curry sauce. A small container of frozen Thai fruit cocktail (pineapple, papaya, guava and nata de coco) acts as a delicious ice pack to keep both bentos cool (see directions and cautions when freezing little containers of canned fruit).

Morning prep time: 10 minutes. In the morning I fried the frozen croquettes and microwave-steamed the zucchini. I also had leftover cold white rice and a couple tablespoons of yellow Thai curry sauce from dinner a few nights back, so I combined these in a microwave-safe dish and heated for less than a minute until the rice regained a nice texture. I now find myself saving even tiny amounts of food (like the curry) because there's usually some way it can be used to jazz up an otherwise boring bento lunch.

Packing: I packed the fried croquettes in an oil-absorbent food cup from Daiso to cut the grease, and allowed both croquette and curry rice to cool before closing the lid on the lunch. This cuts down on condensation in the box, improving packed lunch food safety and making it easier to open the box (a vacuum can form inside otherwise). The frozen fruit cocktail pack kept the cream dipping sauce cool and safe inside an insulated lunch bag. Packed in a 500ml bento box box, this plus the small fruit cocktail was just about right for an adult woman, according to the bento box size guidelines.

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box.

Wine bag holds lunch jar innards

Although I like my thermal lunch jars, the bulk and weight of the jars themselves keep me from using them as often as regular bento boxes. But when searching for the right container to hold today's meal, I realized that there's no reason not to use the internal containers on their own as little round bento boxes, and pack them stacked inside a wine carrying bag. This lunch didn't necessarily call for extended chilling or warming, so...

Contents: Nests of spinach zarusoba noodles with kizami-nori (cut seaweed garnish), green onions, wasabi and dipping sauce in the soup container. Bottom containers hold cherries, grapes, and a tinga of Salvadorean chorizo, fresh corn, yellow bell peppers, pinto beans and chili sauce. To eat the zarusoba, mix the green onions and wasabi into the dipping sauce, dip a bundle of noodles and a little nori into the sauce to flavor and loosen the noodles, and eat. Great hot weather dish.

Morning prep time: 15 minutes. The chorizo tinga was leftover from dinner, the zarusoba dipping sauce for the noodles was store-bought, and the nori was sold already cut up. The only thing I made fresh was boiling the noodles and chopping the green onions -- it just takes a certain amount of time to bring water to a boil. During that time I was able to prepare and pack everything else for the three lunches. Once the noodles were cooked, rinsed and drained, I curled them into bite-sized nests on chopsticks for easy eating. This also works well with somen and any other noodles for dipping. To make looser nests, twirl the noodles around your fingers instead of chopsticks.

Packing: Since I'd decided not to use the thermal jar itself, just the internal containers, I was free to substitute a smaller metal container for the fruit instead of using the large rice container. I was drawn to the thermal jar containers because of the excellent watertight soup container with screw-on lid, which holds the dipping sauce in this meal. I stacked both this and my husband's meal (packed in take-and-toss Gladware, below) in a single wine bottle gift bag, with chopsticks and a spoon tucked down the side. This was inspired by Japanese-language bento book "Watashitachi no Obento" (私たちのお弁当), which showed a stack of little round tupperware-type containers in a fabric wine bag. Clever! You could even use an insulated bottle bag and slip an ice pack down the side if you like.

Contents: Same as mine, with the addition of kaiware (daikon sprouts) for the noodles, cherry tomatoes and a mini pudding cup (Kiku brand Petit Pudding, sold in Asian & Japanese markets).

Packing: As proof of concept that bento meals don't necessarily need to be packed in expensive boxes, I packed my husband's meal in disposable Gladware plastic containers and stacked them with my lunch inside of a wine bag. The containers nested inside of each other when empty, saving space on the way home. I used reusable silicone mini-muffin cups to hold the noodle garnishes, and the mini spoon for the pudding also acted as a divider to hold back the cherries and grapes.

Bug's lunch has the same contents, with orange slices, noodle dipping sauce in a sauce container, and an animal surprise cap on top of the chorizo tinga to keep it from shifting around during transport. Packed in a 350ml Asvel box (Bug also wound up eating my grapes).

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box

Microwave mixed rice & fried chicken

Preschooler's lunch: Quick mixed brown and white rice with asparagus, kamaboko fish cake, and green onions (recipe below). Strawberries, green grapes and Ajinomoto-brand Japanese-style fried chicken ("kara-age"). Pre-cooked frozen fried chicken was great in theory, but not very good in practice as it turned out soggy and greasy -- yuck. It was moist and the flavor was good, but the breading was unappetizing. Didn't bother my son Bug (my son), though, as he devoured the chicken but left the rice untouched for reasons yet unknown...

Morning prep time: 8 minutes, using frozen fried chicken and microwave faux "fried rice" using leftover cold rice.

Packing: For the fried chicken, I used paper-lined cups specially designed to absorb the oil from fried food (bought at Daiso dollar store for US$1.50 -- look for the cartoon shrimp on the package). I was pleased with these as they absorbed a lot of oil from the chicken. This was too large for Bug, but the leftovers didn't go to waste...

My lunch was the same as Bug's, with bigger pieces of chicken and halved strawberries instead of quartered.

I used a shortcut to make cheater's 5-minute "fried rice" in the microwave that I adapted from Japanese bento cookbook 園児のおべんとう　("Kindergartner Bentos" from Kodansha), a variation on this version that I made a while back.

Loose Recipe for Mixed Rice

• 1.5 cups leftover cooked rice (white or brown, refrigerated, frozen or fresh)
• a few slices of kamaboko fish cake (or any protein, such as roast pork or chicken)
• a green onion (scallion)
  
• a vegetable (asparagus, frozen green peas or corn, etc.)
• sesame oil
• soy sauce
• salt
• roasted, ground sesame seeds (optional)

1. Chop up a handful each of protein (kamaboko), green onion and vegetable (if cutting is necessary).
2. Put the leftover cold white rice in a microwave-safe bowl, and top it with the protein, green onions, and vegetables. Cover with plastic wrap and heat for one minute in a 1100W microwave (times will vary depending upon how much food you're nuking and the power of your microwave). If you have fresh rice made up, just nuke the protein and veggies on their own, and mix them together with the hot rice afterwards.
3. When hot, add a couple teaspoons or so of soy sauce, a dash of salt and a drizzle of sesame oil to taste, and mix it all up.

NOTE: I keep a cheap sesame seed grinder filled with roasted sesame seeds for freshly ground sesame. If you don't have a sesame seed roaster, you can use a frying pan covered with a splatter screen to toast your own sesame seeds (cheaper and fresher than buying them pre-roasted, but slower).

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This Post was written by Biggie from Lunch in a Box

Pasta frittata lunches and recipe

Contents: (upper) Mini frittata made with leftover pasta (recipe/tutorial below), hard-boiled egg shaped like a car, and grapes. (lower) Leftover grilled shrimp with wasabi bread crumbs, cherry tomatoes, grilled zucchini and butternut squash, and cheese triangle.

Morning prep time: 15 minutes. The zucchini and squash were already cut and prepped from a picnic; I microwaved them in a covered bowl with a splash of water first to speed up grill time (no-cost substitute for a microwave mini steamer). A friend had made the shrimp, so that was leftover too. I'd made a batch of eggs before, so it was waiting in the fridge in the mold. The frittata was the most labor-intensive thing in the morning.

Packing: Lettuce can also act as an edible food divider (instead of hard-to-find plastic food dividers). I cut the tails off the shrimp for neater eating.

Japanese bento cookbooks often show the speed technique of cooking different kinds of food together in the same pan, pot, broiler pan, etc. This is a variation: multi-grilling on a stovetop grill. Similar to a Japanese fish grill, this one has finer mesh on the top so that vegetables don't fall through, and is marketed as being the right size for bento lunches. Just put it on your gas or electric stove, heat, oil the grate and grill food (veggies, meat, fish, etc.) as if you were outside -- much faster than firing up the outside grill in the morning (yeah, who's going to do that?). Mini stovetop grill bought for US$1.50 at Daiso (Japanese dollar store with stores internationally). Amazon carries a slightly larger Japanese stovetop grill here.

Contents: Bug (my two-year-old) had a mini pasta frittata, grape, leftover grilled shrimp with wasabi bread crumbs, and little skewers of leftover grilled zucchini, butternut squash, green bell peppers and cherry tomatoes.

Morning prep time: 15 minutes. The shrimp and the vegetables were leftover from a Mother's Day picnic, and the pasta in the frittata was also leftover. The only dish made especially for this lunch was the mini frittata.

Packing: Lettuce can also act as an edible food divider (instead of hard-to-find plastic food dividers). Little Anpanman-character picks make it easy for little hands to manage the grilled vegetables, and the blue pick is for the slightly messy shrimp. I cut the tails off the shrimp and halved them to make it easier for Bug to eat. The lone grape acts as a gap filler to keep the lunch from shifting during transport.

Pasta Frittata Recipe

• 2 cups leftover pasta with sauce (any kind, although long pastas like spaghetti work particularly well, and pesto sauce is particularly nice)
• 3 large eggs
• 3 Tb Parmesan cheese, grated
• 2 Tb Pecorino Romano cheese, grated (if not available, substitute Parmesan)
• 2 Tb parsley, chopped
• freshly ground pepper to taste

1. In a bowl, beat together the eggs, cheeses, parsley and pepper. Add leftover pasta and stir well.
   
2. Pre-heat broiler, and heat a mini frying pan (8-inch or similar) on medium heat and oil pan (with cooking spray, vegetable oil or butter). Pour in the egg and pasta mixture, and stir with a heatproof spatula until curds have formed in the egg. Use the spatula to pat the pasta down and shape the sides into a disc (will look like the fourth photo above).
   
3. Run the pan under the hot broiler until the top is golden brown, remove from heat and let sit for a few minutes. Residual heat will continue to cook the inside of the frittata without turning it rubbery.
4. If necessary, run the rubber spatula under the frittata to loosen it from the pan, and turn it out onto a cutting board. Cut and serve (additional sauce optional).

I threw both lunches into the blue "Polarer Bear" insulated lunch bag above (gotta love the Engrish -- my bear is polarer than your bear!). Both zippered bag and lunch wrapping cloth (furoshiki) are lined with insulated material to keep food cool or warm. The 41 x 41 cm lunch cloth holds up to a 600ml two-tier box, with an easy elastic & button closure. I quite like the insulated lunch cloth -- it's compact and keeps multiple boxes tightly wrapped, so I can toss the whole secure bundle into my diaper bag. Bought for US$1.50 each at a Japanese dollar store in San Francisco.

I also picked up a larger bag made of insulated material with an adjustable buckle. Holds larger boxes up to 1000ml: either a one-tier (max. size 21 x 16 x 5 cm) or a two-tier (max. size 20 x 9 x 8 cm). These kinds of products are indicative of the trend in Japan toward insulated lunch bags and better packed lunch food safety.

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This Post was written by Biggie, originally for Lunch in a Box.