Building a Better Bento - Sushi, Strawberry, and Pea Bento

Date of Creation: 2/16/09

Ingredients: Top - Sliced strawberries and snow peas.
Bottom - Sushi roll with fake crab and cucumber, soy sauce, wasabi, and spreadable cheese wedge.

I think this was my first attempt at rolling sushi with a mat, and definately the first bento I took where I made my own sushi. This was also my first attempt at using brown rice for sushi. I think it worked out pretty well taste wise. My main complaint with brown rice in sushi is that it doesn't have the same visual impact, but I can live with that sacrifice in the name of better nutrition. All in all, I'm fairly pleased with this lunch, at least color wise. I still like the contrast between the peas and the strawberries.

Improvements: There isn't too much I would do with this box, aside from rolling the sushi better, and using some of the rind of the cucumber, instead of the insides, to give a better color varience in the sushi. Also, the cheese wedge was pretty extra in this box. It didn't go as well with the peas as I had hoped. Also, I wouldn't use a piggy sauce bottle for the wasabi. It was hard to get in there, it didn't come out at lunch when I wanted to use it, and it was a pain in the butt to wash the bottle afterwards.

Building a Better Bento: Poking at a Theme Bento

Date of Creation: 3/16/09

Ingredients: Top - Sushi rolls made with cucumber and smoked salmon, wasabi on cucumber. Bottom - Slices of green apple, green pepper, and cucumber. White Mint chocolate square on the side.

I made this bento for St. Patrick's Day, which was a bit of a change. I don't usually do theme bento (unless the theme is "yummy"!), so some of the specific tricks, like dying rice, was new to me. The slices in the sidecar were really excellent, but the top part was less than stellar.

Improvements: Lesson number one from this - CUCUMBER DOES NOT WORK TO HOLD WASABI! Cucumbers are fairly watery, which meant that my wasabi dissolved in the cucumber juice and then spread across the bottom of the box. Mm. Wet, wasabi/cucumbery sushi. Yeah, not. When I look back at this picture, the main thing I remember from this lunch was the taste of wasabi overpowering everything else in the sushi roll. Now, when I use wasabi as a condiment in a box, I'll put it either in a little condiment container or in a little silicone cup.

Also, the sushi rolls could have been done better. I'm not sure if I had a sushi mat at this point or not, but better rolling technique would have helped. Now, 10 months later, I'm still trying to get a passable roll, so I know I still need practice on this. Since I was going for a visual impact of green, I should have centered the salmon a little better before rolling up the roll. It would have looked better if I had the pink salmon totally encircling the cucumber pieces. Lastly, the green food coloring in the rice is not working. I'm pretty sure I did a good amount of mixing, but it still ended up blotchy. I've read about people using actual food and spices to dye rice. It may have been worth it to do some research on what to use to get a green color.

Building a better bento - Making a good thing better

Date of Creation: 2/10/09
Ingredients: Top - Scrambled eggs and Carrot/Tuna Salad. Bottom - Frozen mango, fresh blueberries, and plain brown rice with nori decoration.

Even though this was one of my earlier bentos, it remains one of my favorites, and really, it's all because of the textures. I love the way that the softness of the scrambled eggs contrasts the hard lines of the carrot salad, and the flatness of the nori contrasts the grainy texture of the rice. The sourness of the vinegar in the salad went well with the scrambled eggs, and the juice from the thawing mango pieces added a fruity component to the rice, so if I remember correctly, this was good to eat as well.

Improvements: My major complaint with this box is that I decided to use a bright yellow box for the container. Usually, this box makes the contents pop, but with the large amount of yellow in the meal from the eggs and the mango, it makes the visual aspect of the meal lose a little punch. I have a very similar box in blue, and since I did own it at that point, it would have made a better receptacle for this particular grouping of foods. Also, if I was to re-take the photograph, I would have rotated the top tier in the photo 180 degrees, so that the yellow foods weren't all concentrated on the left half of the photo.