Ah yes, sweet student life, whenever you think you have a little time to yourself something comes up and you end up spending your holidays busy with random stuff. Like we have this fabulous internship coming up for April. Normally universities, especially here in France, try to incorporate as many internships as possible in the study program for both bachelor and master degrees. Personally I don’t question the necessity of internships and they are absolutely crucial after several semesters of acquiring theoretical knowledge, which, in all honesty, is mostly useless for your future professional career. Yes, the intentions of universities are indeed honorable, but when reality strikes in, you often find yourself stuck in a small company that tries to replace full-time workers by chain hiring interns. Some of my friends at university have to work under abominable conditions, yet they still can deem themselves lucky to have found some sort of working experience to validate their semester. As a student, especially here in France at a public university, it’s difficult sometimes not to lose your motivation when all the support you get is “make it work” from your professors. But hey, all of this is just to make us a stronger, right? Right!
Anyway, enough ranting, let’s get back to business. This bento was quickly made with left-over gnocchi and a tomato relish (the recipe is from one of Jamie Oliver’s cook books). The sandwich and the snow-pea stir-fry are really nothing special. I really liked the taste of the tomato relish with the gnocchi but one must be very careful with packing the relish. It tends to be rather liquid so a leak-proof container with a compartment that can separate gnocchi from relish is needed. Overall I’m not quite happy with the presentation and I’d really like to get back to making more elaborate bentos but for now I’ve got almost no spare time
Recipe section
Tomato relish
Ingredients
100 ml vinegar (the lightest one you have)
2 Tbsp sugar
1 shallot, sliced
400g cherry tomatoes, chopped
salt, pepper
3 Tbsp olive oil
Preparation
In a small saucepan combine vinegar, sugar and the shallot. Bring to a boil and reduce to half at least. Then add the cherry tomatoes and let them get hot. Remove from heat immediately and season with salt, pepper and olive oil.
Serves 2-3. Can accompany various things like pasta or meat dishes.
Today I tried a recipe from Naomi Kijima’s bento cookbook “Bento Boxes: Japanese Meals on the Go“. This is about the only bento cookbook from Japan that has been translated into English. The problem actually lies there, the book might be a big success in Japan but I imagine that people in western countries won’t find much use for it. The main issue being that many recipes simply use ingredients that you can’t get around here, even with the best Asian supermarket close-by: Fish cake, taro root, atsuage, nagenegi, konnyaku noodles, burdock root… I mean let’s be honest, I wouldn’t even recognize those ingredients if they’d bite me in the foot.
Still I don’t think that the book is useless at all. Actually you can use many recipes and simply make your own variations. For instance if I would substitute burdock root with celery (I’m sure celery doesn’t even come close to the taste but hey), my husband wouldn’t notice. And if he does reclaim burdock root he can try to search for it himself next time we go to our local Asian supermarket. (Good luck with that)
The book can be a great inspiration, especially if you’d like examples for bento that can be brought to a rather serious working environment. Miss Kitty boxes and pirate ship scenes with rice ball monsters and octopus wieners certainly have a kawaii effect, but if bento are really your every day meal at work you might have to resort to something more sober and the recipes in ‘Bento Boxes’ are a great example for that (minus burdock roots and the likes!).
I finally managed to move the old site (http://petitebiscotte.blogspot.com) to this wordpress powered site. The basic transfer is done, now a lot of adjustments especially in terms of presentation and design have to be made. That means a lot of changes are incoming over the next week, so stay tuned!
During the last two weeks I didn’t get much time to post but I managed to keep reading my favorite blogs and some very interesting things have been posted:
Biggie over at Lunch in a Box updated her link section (click here) with a lot of new bento blogs/sites. Over the past year or two the trend seems to have spread and there are so many bento blogs now, it’s amazing!
For everyone that lives in Europe and especially in France it might be very difficult sometimes to come buy Japanese articles such as bento boxes or cooking utensils. Ichiban Kan is a Japanese discount dollar store that has several subsidiaries all over America. You can get all those great colorful articles from Japan there for very cheap. Unfortunately in Europe there is no such store yet. But luckily thanks to Biggie on Lunch in a Box, I found out that Ichiban Kan is opening an online store. Check out Ichiban Kan’s blog for more info. Bento Toys r Us, yay!
Did you ever hear of furikake? No? (And I’m sorry to disappoint but it’s nothing filthy I’m getting at) Furikake is a topping for rice that can be made ahead of time and stored in the fridge. You can assemble bentos very quickly in the morning with it and most of the time it enhances the looks of the bento greatly. Maki at Just Bento made a few great posts about several furikake recipes. They are a great help, especially if you don’t have much time.
One last AWESOME thing I discovered for bento lovers is this flickr community, which is very active and frequently updated with bento pictures. There are so many that you couldn’t watch all of them in a whole day! Me likes.
I can’t believe that I’m still alive :p I have shadows under the eyes the size of apples, my stove hasn’t been used in two weeks and my cat is deliberately ignoring me because he didn’t get any attention for some time now… But the first thing I did when everything was over was shopping fresh ingredients and making a nice bento which I had for lunch. What a treat after a fortnight of processed foods and salad
The bento was quite nice, I enjoyed the red bean rice the most, however next time I’ll have to be more careful with the amount of liquid I put into the rice cooker. With the cooking liquid from the red beans and the soy sauce there was slightly too much, so the rice was a tad on the mushy side (which I hate but my husband likes so that was ok).
Nothing special about the salmon beside that I didn’t like the taste of the Teriyaki sauce. Last time I went to the Japanese shop around here I bought one from Kikkoman, which I had great expectations for which unfortunately were not met. I think I’m going back to making it on my own next time.
Snow-peas were a little bland (think I’m going to add some chili flakes or soy sauce next time). The tamagoyaki on the other hand turned out really well. I’m happy about that one because I managed to make it in a round pan. So far I’ve bought three rectangular frying pans. Yes, three (unfortunately from the same brand because of a lack of choice), and after the first use the non-stick coating of the pans always stopped working (and I didn’t use anything but a plastic spatula inside it). During the second use the egg started to stick so badly that I couldn’t even have gotten it off with a shovel. That means back to good old round pan and it worked!
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Red Bean Rice
Ingredients
2 cups of uncooked Japanese rice
1/2 - 1 cup of cooked red beans with two Tbsp of the red water they cooked in (you can use canned beans as well or you can precook the beans on the weekend and just use them for this recipe during the week)
2 Tbsp of soy sauce
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Wash the rice according to these instructions and put it in your rice cooker. Add the red bean water to it and the soy sauce. Now fill the pot with water until you reach the usual liquid mark for 2 cups.
Turn the rice cooker on and proceed as usual.
When done, serve with toasted sesame seeds for example. Serves 2.
“. This is about the only bento cookbook from Japan that has been translated into English. The problem actually lies there, the book might be a big success in Japan but I imagine that people in western countries won’t find much use for it. The main issue being that many recipes simply use ingredients that you can’t get around here, even with the best Asian supermarket close-by: Fish cake, taro root, atsuage, nagenegi, konnyaku noodles, burdock root… I mean let’s be honest, I wouldn’t even recognize those ingredients if they’d bite me in the foot.
