I will be dividing this into several steps:
- Finding the Ideal Container
- Bento Recipies (Including some goofy ideas)
- Bento Accessories
- The Group Bento - How to host your very own Japanese Food party using a multiple-person bento box. Serves up to 10 people comfortably (I did it in L.A. ^.^)
I have a bento box. Now what?
Bento Recipies: Traditional, Americanized, and Just Plain Goofy
Traditional
An all-around great tutorial to watch. There are so many great things here like how to properly cook tomagoyaki, how to make apple rabbits, and how to make octopus weiners:
There are so many sites that offer information on how to create traditional recipies all over the internet. Here are my top favorite sites:
At first, I was going to go into more detail about specific recipies, but with those sites, I'll only end up repeating stuff anyway. Something that you don't see as often on bento sites are things like tomato flowers and other little designs that you can put into the recipe of a bento as a whole.
Americanized
Here is a tutorial for a tomato rose:
How to carve a carrot rose:
There is another way to make octopus weiners that does not involve frying, so it is probably less fat; cut the wieners like in the tutorial, 4 cuts to make the 8 legs, and boil. The legs will still curl up.
Here is a totally Americanized "tomagoyaki". This is so simple it'll suit anyones taste that likes eggs at all. This is so far from traditional it is rediculous, but oh well. I like it. You can also use this sort of a modification for the real ingredients if you don't have a square pan and really care about that or if you would rather bake than fry.
Required: Sushi roller, milk, eggs, square baking pan, spatula, pan spray
1. Set the oven to 350 degrees
2. Mix how ever many eggs you intend to eat (I'd go with 3 or so for a small pan)
3. Pour a half a tablespoon or so of milk in the eggs and whisk
4. Lightly spray the pan
5. Pour the mixture into the pan
6. Keep in the oven until it is no longer runny (About 3-5 min)
7. Get it out with the spatula and onto the sushi roller
8. Let it cool before you roll it up (roll the "tomagoyaki" up completely before rolling the sushi roller around it
9. Hold tightly together and bind
10. Leave it in the fridge for a couple hours
11. Take off the sushi roller. The food should stay rolled.
12. Slice as if you were making cinnamon rolls or cookie dough
13. Lightly salt if desired
(If you want to do a sort of American, tomagoyaki Spanish tortilla version, boil some potatoes to almost soft and add them to the mixture before baking)
I know, that is SO not tomagoyaki, but as said, I like it. ^.^
And, Yakisoumen - I really don't think this exists as soumen is such a delicate noodle. Yakisoba exists and I wanted to try soumen fried, so... (Note: Soumen tastes so good in Campbell's soup.... mmmm)
1. Marinade your meat
2. Cook your soumen
3. Drain the water from the soumen
4. Fry your meat on medium (add nothing to it!)
5. When your meat is almost done, add the drained soumen. Add marinade to it until the combination reaches your desired taste. Careful not to add too much soumen! I was able to feed 3 people easily with one bundle of soumen.
(Soup requires much less soumen)
Just Plain Goofy
This section has a main focus: Food coloring!
Mono-colored bento!!!! Thanks to Kelly who showed me this site, I had a blast putting together mono-colored bento like my pink rice in a pink bento with soup and tomatoes. Or the tie-dye bento I tried to create and utterly failed. ^.^ I wish I had pictures... All of the dye rules I used came from that site and I just had fun with it! The ideas come out great except for the multicolored rice... Even when I was careful, the colors always mixed in my rice cooker and made something ugly... Intended mixing, like blue and green always came out so stunningly beautiful! I used the packs of 4 colors at Jewel. Both the neon colors and the regular. I used colored rice to make onigiri at the party :)
Since I've only colored rice, if you do choose to color something else, would you please let me know how it goes? I'd love to see pictures!
(Oh! There is a brilliant, beautiful, elegant, and traditional aspect. If you want to create characters, you might want to use dyed egg (or egg-whites) or rice ^.^ It is also important to note that while I enjoyed playing around and creating bento of only one color, lots of different colors is much more traditional. Please see the tutorial in the "Traditional" section above to see which colors.)
Let your creativity run wild. ^.^
(Next "Making the Perfect Obento Part 3 - Bento Accessories: How to make your bento look cute like the ones in the pictures with organizational and shaping accessories)
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