Just Bento

The main idea of the salmon roe is to provide a nice color punch. If you have access to a Japanese grocery store, something called sakura denbu (it's semi-dried codfish furikake, sort of, often used in fat sushi rolls) would make a nice pink accent. You could also tiny cubes of cooked carrot, bits of bright pink smoked salmon, or pickled ginger (either the bright red beni sho-ga or sushi gari ginger). You could also even experiment with off the wall things like flakes of pink grapefruit flesh (I've seen this used as a decoration at The Fat Duck restaurant), or pomegranate seeds.

If you want to stick to fish eggs, Ikea usually sells them in tubes and jars, though not salmon roe.

Thanks Maki. The grapefruit sounds interesting. Grapefruit AND ginger maybe? I'll do some experimentation. No Ikea in NZ yet unfortunately.

I ended up using pink grapefruit bits. I used umeboshi vinegar for the rice, and the saltiness of it was too similar to the saltiness of the red ginger for them to go very well together. The tartness of the grapefruit worked quite well with the sweetness of the eggs and the umeboshi flavour of the rice. Everyone enjoyed them, though the egg pancakes were really a wee bit big - must get an even smaller pan.

Photo of the Japanese course of my dinner party is here. Blog entry of whole party here.

It all looks delicious, and you have a box of After Eights there --I love them :-)