Bento oh Bento

We ended up going out to dinner last night and getting some delicious chicken dishes, however it seems Logician's may not have been cooked all the way as he got pretty sick when we got home. Not wanting to chance the fact that I was feeling slightly sick and we had left overs I tossed them. So it took some quick thinking and replanning to get today's Bento some protein content!

Luckily I had the foresight to pick up two nice thin steaks and some thin pork chops while we were shopping yesterday. I broke both of these down into Bento size portions - the steak by cutting it and placing it between layers of wax paper, and the pork by putting two of the small thin chops in a ziploc bag. This gives me something like 5 servings of steak and four of pork (although the amount of pork may be too much for one day's Bento). So last night I cooked a bit of the steak with a lot of soy sauce to sort of "cure" it.

I also tried out my smaller onigiri maker and it worked amazingly! Seen here: From Japan With Love. I made up a batch of rice and then a small bowl of salt water. I wanted to be extra sure that the mold did not stick. I filled it to the top of the container (I personally packed it a bit full) and then simply inserted the press and voila, cute and adorable triangle onigiri.

Here is Logician's, find mine after the break.

Ours are a lot a like again, but as this is a short week I was going with what I had. For some reason I feel like the box made his food look much more amazing. I think I am crazy. He has carrot medallions with some cucumber slices separated by a barrier of bell pepper in his bottom or "cold" box. Mine is of course my tomato and my cucumber. The tomato does not look as good in the red box, but I don't have a big enough side dish cup (yet) to fix that. I gave us both two onigiri (sans nori as he was not feeling it and I hate it) and proceeded to fill the spaces in the box with snow peas, bell pepper, brocolli, and sauce bottles. I cut his steak into smaller pieces and left mine a bit longer to try out the different aesthetics of it. Once I added the sauce bottles there was a lot of room left over so I added a few bell pepper dices and some carrot slices to my box to top it off. Then with one half used lonely carrot on the cutting board I decided to try and make them faces. For his I did a bit of extra work because I wanted to cheer him up, so I took a pick from a nut cracker set and used it to poke a hold in the carrots for the sesame seed to be pushed into. the eyes are the center of carrot slices with the outside becoming the eyebrows. The noses are nori stars I punched out with a scrapbook punch I got for a dollar at Michael's ages ago! Lastly both ours have sesame seed mouths, pushed into shape with the pick.

I was tired and feeling a bit lazy when it came to mine so they're not as cute and he swears the one on the left is sad. I used bits of broccoli for the noses on mine and over all was quite happy with my first go in actual Bento boxes. I really like the way the food LOOKS in the boxes, even though it's not all that different from what I always use. 

After I took the pictures it occurred to me I had to squeeze my miso soup ball in there somewhere so I rearranged my sauce bottles a bit. I will try to keep that in mind for tomorrows!