294327 Mon Oct 06 14:32:02 -0700 2003 6 27 General Chowhounding Topics 0 1613840 Been doing a bento thing for dinner about every other day for a couple of weeks, for various reasons, including recent receipt of a set of 4-compartment bento boxes. Hungry for innovative-yet-Japanese-in-spirit ideas, especially for little salady dishes, veg dishes, and things not involving maki-making or exotic seafood--impossible for me to get uni, good crab, sushi-grade fish, or anything properly fresh. Typically I do gohan or sushi rice balls, a cooked fish or meat (tonkatsu, teriyaki, tempura), a salad (ohitashi, cuke in dressing, miso mushrooms, etc.), and another dish, like chawan mushi, shumai, noodles, crab fritters, etc. I want to get beyond the standards and would love to hear ideas. We loved a dressed, steamed watercress dish, interested in new pickles, any ideas for daikon or potato, been using jicama here and there, somen and parsnip. Anything, really . . . I do have the basic Japanese seasonings and sauces on hand. Mon Oct 06 14:32:02 -0700 2003 0 lucia 1 1613872 you can put anything you like in Bento box. What I usually do is leftover from previous night. But, that's not what you are looking for, i guess. The important thing about Bento is color. Try to make it very colorful -- yellow, green, red. If you got tired of rice ball or sushi rice, how about friend rice? How about Paella? It gots lots of seafood. Curry is also fun Bento experience. For non-rice item, i love potato salad, pasta salad, beet salad, seaweed salad, any kid of salad. If you want something very seasonal, how about baked sweet potatoes? You can also make pumpkin dish -- cooked with dashi and soy sauce. If you need something yellow, eggs are always good. Hard boiled eggs, scramble eggs, and omelet. I like to make scallion omelet -- eggs, scallion, sugar, soy sauce, and little bit of dashi. Oh, I like to put bell pepper, red or green, in omelet, too. If you need something green, string beans are always great. You can steam it, you can sautee it, you can cook it with soy sauce. For red, tomatoes and carrots. I don't know how much it helped, but I hope you got some idea of your next Bento Box. Mon Oct 06 18:27:23 -0700 2003 1613840 0 anko 1 1613892 Here are several books with very good bento box recipes: Cafe Japan by Emi Kazuko Bento Boxes by Naomi Kijima Simple Menus for the Bento Box by Ellen Greaves Mon Oct 06 21:05:22 -0700 2003 1613840 0 ld 1 1613904 If you want to stay in the Japanese spirit, think in terms of what's in season where you live. This is an important keystone of Japanese cooking. Since it's fall, I suggest the classic Japanese dish of kabocha (pumpkin) braised in shoyu / mirin / sugar / dashi / sake. If you can get it, sato-imo also takes that treatment well. How about renkon (lotus root)? Sliced, quickly boiled, then "pickled" in a vinegared marinade of some sort. I'd personally use miso, ground sesame, rice vinegar, maybe ginger. Daikon takes to braising well, too. Chunked into 1" think wedges, then simmered in dashi-based liquid, it holds it's shape well even if cooked for a long time. Fish opens up a whole nuther spectrum of things to add. You can grill or simmer whatever fresh fish is in your area. The kasuzuke treatment is a bit of a restaurant cliche now, but it's popular for good reason. If little whole dried fish don't gross you out, you can toss some in a sweet shoyu glaze, coat w/ sesame seeds and have crunchy fish treats to put over your rice. You can take squid ink and do a black risotto for an Italian-y take on bento. Should also mention that I leafed through Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen at the bookstore recently, and there's a whole section on bento. Here's a link to amazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0688172423/ref=lib_dp_TFCV/102-4007718-3032945?v=glance&s=books&vi=reader#reader-link Mon Oct 06 22:25:43 -0700 2003 1613840 0 Professor Salt 1 1614123 You might be interested in the book Easy Japanese Pickling in Five Minutes to One Day: 101 Full-Color Recipes for Authentic Tsukemono by Seiko Ogawa. It has both traditional & new recipes such as lemon infused cherry tomatoes. Some recipes call for odd ingredients that you might not be able to find (preserved squid innards anyone?) but a lot of the recipes use easy to get ingredients. She also includes recipes that incorporate the pickles you’ve just made. It’s a nice little book and it’s also the only tsukemono book currently in print (that I know of). Link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/4889961135/qid=1065637056/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-4623357-7988900?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 Wed Oct 08 14:30:10 -0700 2003 1613840 0 Jessie 1 1614146 my bento boxes in the past have included rice sprinkled with furikake with an umeboshi, with cucumber salad or egg salad and a meat like pork tonkatsu. or an egg omelet made with mirin with shiitake mushrooms. buckwheat soba noodle salad - cook noodles, toss with soba sauce (memmi), some rice vinegar, wasabi, green onion and sesame seeds (can add shredded chicken); japanese pickles (the purple, plum flavored cucumber, yellow daikon (takuwan), mustard green pickles, the sweet red daikon pickle) or even kimchee as a relish. sundays at moosewood recipe for junko's sake potatoes (potatoes stewed in butter, sake and soy). spinach or bean sprout salad - steamed spinach or sprouts with soy, sesame, sugar. or chicken or beef domburi (stewed with soy, mirin, egg onions and watercress). steamed and lightly soy seasoned japanese eggplant is good too. Wed Oct 08 17:40:12 -0700 2003 1613840 0 sunshine 1 1614282 Thanks for all these ideas everyone. There was also a new post with a great bento description on Tristate that I loved. Arigato gozaimasu! Thu Oct 09 16:42:55 -0700 2003 1613840 0 lucia