March 2008

All the content on this site by month.

Natural ways to make your bento colorful

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If you love character bentos (kyaraben), you may wonder how the creators manage to color some of the elements. Do they use food dyes? Not necessarily. Bentobako.net, called Ranchi-ryuu Obentoubako Community (Lunch-style Bento Community) is an attractive and very useful bento resource site in Japanese. One of the most interesting sections that they have recently set up is the Bento Coloring Dictionary, a reader-contributed section with lots of ideas for making various bento elements colorful without resorting solely to food dyes. Here are some of the ideas listed there, arranged by color, with my notes in parentheses.

I've added the formulas for deriving 3 (or 4) different colors from one ingredient - red cabbage juice!

Eggs in treasure bags (Tamago no takarabukuro)

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Takarabukuro (宝袋) is a treasure bag. In food terms, it's a small parcel that is cooked in a fried tofu skin (aburaage 油揚げ)bag - the one that's used for _inarizushi_. Here an egg is dropped gently into the bag, and then poached - so, an egg in a treasure bag! It is delicious hot or cold, and is very nice in a bento box as a main or secondary protein.

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Bento contents:

  • 1 cup vegan potato salad with extra tofu 'mayonnaise', 220 cal
  • Mixed green salad with cherry tomatoes, 30 cal
  • 1 medium apple, 60 cal

Total calories (approx): 310 (how calories are calculated)

Time needed: 5 minutes in the morning

Type: Salad, vegan, gluten-free

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Bento contents:

Total calories (approx): 380 (how calories are calculated)

Time needed: 15 minutes in the morning, less if you make the kidney beans ahead

Type: Fushion, vegan, gluten-free

Curried kidney beans and vegetables

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I'm Japanese, so I love the taste of curry. (If you've been to Japan you'd know this makes sense.) This is a very quick and easy vegan dish that could be the main protein in a bento, or a filler. You can use any kind of beans here, but I do like the dense rather fudgey texture of kidney beans. They're not just for eating with chili! I've made this quite spicy, but you can tone it down if you like by adjusting the amount of chili powder. The sweetness of the vegetables counteracts the spiciness. It tastes terrific at room temperature, and can be made in advance. It lasts for a couple of days at least in the refrigerator, though it tastes best when it's freshly made so I don't make a big amount at one time.

Bento filler: Vegan Japanese potato salad

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It's time to get back my bento mojo! Here's a vegan version of Japanese potato salad, that is a great bento side dish, or the main carb in a salad bento.

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(This is the web elf. This is one of the articles Maki instructed to post while she's on the disabled list.)

Bento contents:

  • 1 cup zakkokumai (mixed-grain rice, see this article), 160 cal
  • 1/3 cup white beans with honey, 50 cal
  • 2 mini tofu-meat burgers with red wine, ketchup and Worcestershire sauce (recipe), 160 cal
  • Blanched spinach with sesame sauce (recipe), 40 cal

Total calories (approx): 410 (how calories are calculated)

Time needed: 15 minutes in the morning

Type: Japanese, omnivore (protein comes from beef, tofu and beans)

Hi folks. I will be mostly offline for a week or so. Some new articles that are already written up will (if it works out) get posted but replying to comments and so on will have to wait a bit. Here's why in case you don't follow Just Hungry too. I'll be back though! :)

(Update on my status is here.) \

Bento filler: Stir-fried cabbage with garlic, dried cranberries and balsamic vinegar

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The title of this recipe says it all! In case you hadn't noticed, quite a lot of Japanese recipes use a bit of sugar to make them a little sweet. That's fine in moderation, but I'm always looking for sugar-free methods that still have that sweet-salty taste that I love. In this one there's the sweetness inherent in fresh cabbage (which is especially strong in new spring cabbage), the dried cranberries, and the balsamic vinegar. It tastes great at room temperature so it's a nice bento side.

Cabbage is one of those vegetables that is so good for you and lasts for a long time in the fridge, and dried cranberries and balsamic vinegar are good things to stock in a pantry. Garlic, I have on hand all the time. So I make this when I'm low on freshly bought ingredients and need something crunchy to fill a bento box corner. It goes well with rice or other carbs, since it doesn't taste that specifically Japanese or Asian.

Homemade furikake no. 9: Green tea

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Reader question: How to get rid of that plastic taste in bento boxes?

Reader Sandy sent in this question recently. She's having trouble with certain bento boxes, which are making her food taste like plastic!

Hi. I've recently begun collecting and using bento boxes (which I adore), but I've had some troubles when eating out of them. Everytime I eat something, it tastes like plastic.

Read more about Sandy's dilemma after the jump.

The author of the book Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes (my review here) Christopher Salyers, has an excerpt of the interview he did with the one father/bento creator that appears in the book.

Takupapa (meaning the father of Takkun, his son's nickname) started making cute kyaraben for his son when his wife was hospitalized. Quoting from the interview:

What is Charaben to you?

Charaben is a collection of precious times I spent with my son. Each and every Charaben has an episode, and I hope they will become good memories when he grows up.

And here's the link to Takupapa's bento blog (in Japanese). Takkun has one year left to go in kindergarten, and Takupapa plans to continue making those cute bento for him until he enters first grade in the spring of 2009.

(Incidentally, someone asked me if there is a difference between charaben and kyaraben. There isn't - it's just two ways of spelling out a Japanese word. The original is キャラ弁, and it's a combination of キャラクター (character) and 弁当 (bento). I prefer the phonetic kyaraben, since I keep reading charaben with the ch part pronounced as in chair.)

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Bento contents:

  • 1 1/4 cups zakkukumai (mixed-grain rice, see this article), 200 cal
  • 'Vegan scallops' made with komachibu and shiitake mushrooms (recipe), using 10 g of komachibu, 50 cal
  • Carrot kinpira (recipe), about 1/3 cup, 50 cal
  • Blanched spinach with soy sauce (recipe), 10 cal

Total calories (approx): 310 (how calories are calculated)

Time needed: 20 minutes in the morning if you make everything in the morning

Type: Japanese, vegan (shoujin ryouri style)

Panfried Komachibu - Vegan 'Scallops'

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Komachibu is a small round form of yakifu, grilled and dried fu. Fu is a traditional Japanese form of wheat gluten, that is a good vegan protein source. (Read more about fu_.) If you like to use seitan, you'll probably like _fu as well. Komachibu is available at any reasonably stocked Japanese grocery store (in the dried food section).

Komachibu are about the size of a large coin. When they are reconstituted in water, they swell up to about the size of a small scallop (they do shrink back down a bit when cooked with this method). The texture is very soft, like very very tender scallops. I don't pretend that they are as good as real, fresh scallops of course, but if you've given up shellfish for dietary reasons, these are not bad at all. And, they are terrific in a bento box, vegan or not.

Bento filler: Easy sugarfree carrot kinpira

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This is probably my favorite way to eat carrots - cut into matchstick size, stir fried in sesame oil until crisp-tender with some red pepper flakes, and finished with a scatter of sesame seeds. It's crunchy, salty and spicy. It's really tasty at room temperature, which makes it a great bento filler.

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The kyaraben (cute character bento) artist in Japan does not have to go it alone, armed only with basic tools. There's a big array of specialized tools that she (or the rare he) can use. I saw this company's products mentioned in several Japanese kyaraben blogs as being easy to use and innovative. And indeed they seem to be.

I've been doing a lot of background organizing on Just Bento, now that it has a few months under its belt. So far, I've been featuring mainly bento staples or _johbisai_, things that you can make in advance and stock in the freezer, refrigerator or elsewhere. There are lots of things that aren't well suited to cooking in advance (or any earlier than the night before) though. So I'll be writing up more individual item recipes.

Bento filler: Blanched spinach with soy sauce or sesame sauce

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You may be used to eating spinach leaves in salads, or sautéed. In Japan spinach is rarely eaten raw. The most common way to eat spinach is to blanch it briefly. You may lose some nutrients when you do this, but it's more than made up for I think by the fact that you can eat a whole lot more spinach than in a salad or so.

In the U.S. and Europe, it's probably easier these days to buy ready-washed bags of the leaves only. This is a bit of a shame really, because spinach stalks and roots have a different texture which adds interest. In any case, the instructions here assume that you are dealing with the leaves only.

Recipe collection: Mains

This section contains recipes for main okazu, the star of your bento box. Usually the main is some kind of protein, but you'll also find some carb-and-protein combination recipes too.

Recipe collection: Side dishes and space fillers

This section contains recipes that are secondary okazu, food items in a bento box besides the main carb. Most are vegetable based.

Basic meat and tofu mixture for mini-burgers, meatballs and more

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I spent about an hour on Sunday making and cooking up a big batch of a basic burger mixture. The mix is very versatile, so I made four different things from it. Now I have enough mini-burgers, meatballs and more in my freezer for at least 20 or more bento portions. It was an hour well spent! I love just knowing that my freezer has a nice stock of ready-to-go bento items - it takes the pressure off considerably on busy mornings.

Now that there's a comfortable amount of content on Just Bento, I've added two features to the site: an index page of all entries on the site, and a recipe only index. (The links are in the top navigation, on the left side of the page.) Both pages are sortable by title or date, and clicking on a category will take you to a page which lists all entries under that category. I hope you'll find them useful!

Here are some more achingly cute and amazing kyaraben (character bentos) to enjoy, from yet another contest. This time it was one sponsored by Bandai, makers of various video games and the infamous Tamagotchi. The bento contest had three divisions, and the results were just announced yesterday. This is the winning bento in the Tamagotchi division.

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Yes I know, I said "!!!!!!!!" when I saw that too.

You can check out the creator's own blog (in Japanese of course), where she has many more closeups of her amazing creation in this entry. Her blog has lots of how-to entries and closeup photos of various bento goods, so it's definitely worth checking out if you are a fan of the cute bento style. (Her profile says she makes kyaraben for her 2 year old and 4 year old kids.)