This Salad Bento took a lot of planning and research. Each component took at least an hour of research, and ideas.

The first step is the base. I put two romaine leaves together to get the base. I then chopped up the stems for color contrast and completed the salad base with julienned carrots.

The second step is the bell pepper creatures. Instead of putting the salad dressing on the side or mixed the salad, I cleaned out one mini bell pepper and poured it in. I secured the top with a toothpick and made sure it stabbed the lower half. I filled the red one with Lemongrass Satay Peanut Sauce. (Waaay better than regular old peanut butter)

Next, I cut out the grapes and lined the side. Then, I cut a celery stalk into 5 segments. It has to be odd numbers for this design to work. You have to blanch the celery, so that the segments are pliable. Then, alternately fold in the segments. That was the easy part. The rest gets harder.

The mushroom is made out of kumquat and a seedless red grape. The stars are nori that are cut with a design puncher. As for the radishes, those are cut using vegetable carving methods. I found one site that gave information on watermelon carving, and I adapted it to the radish. It was a lot harder than I thought. I ended eating half my mistakes. I carved a rose bud, then dyed it blue to get the infamous Blue Rose. I also made radish spirals and other radish carvings. If you want instructions on any, just email me.

Enjoy!

Bento 4 - Husband Bento

I made this cute lunch for my husband Shamus. He likes eating white rice, so I made this for him, while trying some newly acquired designer paper punchers.

It was a really simple lunch, because I had to make bentos for Jessica and Kristy. It's made up of leftover tamagoyaki, grilled taiwanese sausage, blanced broccoli.

The soup is super easy to make. It's basically pork/dashi stock with spam, seaweed and fish mol. (The fish bladder)

Fish bladder is usally sold dried in bags. You can find them in your local Chinese supermarket. They are really cheap for the pseudo ones. The real ones can go up to $30 cdn a pound.

Enjoy!

Bento 3 - The BearDuck

Ever wonder what a cross between a bear and duck looks like? Voila! The Bearuck! I tried make the bear according to what I saw on the internet, but when I was making this, I had a computer glitch. Argh! So, as artistically disabled as I am, I tried making it neways, because I was pressed for time to send this to Jessica and Kristy.

I made the mouth, but found that it looked more like a duck than a bear. So, then, I tried to make a little hair curl for the duck. It still didn't look right, so then, I tried making the ears.

The black onigiri was SUPPOSED to be the ears....unfortunately. However, the proportions were um....off; slightly. Okay, so way off! After disparaging for a moment or two, I spotted wasabi peas in my snack closet, and tried to pass them off as the ears. So, they shared ears... oh well. I placed pan fried circular cut outs of the spam in between the nori onigiri.

The onigiri itself is, literally translated from Chinese as Oily Rice (You Fan). The actual rice is not as oily as it sounds, and is more like sticky rice. The rice was leftover from last night. Oily rice is made out of fancy grade rice, so it's like a sticky rice. To shape sticky rice, you must have some water so it won't stick on your hand. Sorry, I can't share the Oily Rice recipe with anybody; Family Secret.

I rounded out the bento with blanced green beans and baby carrots. For dessert, it was lychee and grapes. The lychee is from a can.

Enjoy!

Bento 2 - The sleeping egg

I rose up to the challege of making more bentos for my cute cousins Jessica and Kristy.

This Bento is made up of hard boiled egg with a sweet ketchup sauce on top of cooked pea sprouts.

In the silicone muffine cup is half a peach from the can. I stuck some grapes on top.

The rice is leftover fried rice. There was bacon, spam, carrots, green beans and surimi all chopped up and fried with the long grain rice.

The spam stars are cut out with fondant star cutters. I didn't have ham at home.

All the decorative seaweed have been cut out with paper cutters with different designs. Dead useful for cute decos; for lazy, non-artistic people like me.

Enjoy!

Roasted Duck Soup with Lai Fun Noodles

Actually, this is a leftover noodle dish that is super simple to make.

The roasted duck is left from last night's dinner. When you buy the roasted duck, make sure they give you the sauce that is in it. If they don't want to give it to you, make sure they give you some of it at least - don't let them drain the duck until there is no sauce left.

Ingredients:

1 order Roasted duck + duck sauce

1.5 cup chicken stock

pea sprout

black fungus

enoki mushroom

Lai Fun - I'll get a picture of this up later. It's a thicker version of a rice vermicelli stick.

1. Cook the Lai Fun according to the packet instructions and put into your soup bowl.

2. Get the stock boiling, and blanch each vegetable for about 3-5 minutes each, depending on how much you are going to put in. The fungus needs to be blanched longer. Put aside on a plate. So you can arrange it later.

3. Put the duck and sauce into the soup. You're just heating the duck up, because it is fully cooked.

4. Add the soup to your bowl and arrange vegetables into it. Tada!

Easy eh? Have fun!

Strawberry Jam, Strawberry Cranberry Lime Jam, and Strawberry Pandan Jam

Recipe

1.5 lbs fresh strawberries, cleaned and quartered

1 cup of water

2 tbsp lime juice

1 tsp lime zest

1/3 cup dark brown sugar

2 oz dried cranberries, soak in water

2 pandan leaves, folded into thirds and knotted

1 cup dark brown sugar

Yield: 750 mL or 3-250mL jars

Method

1. Place strawberries, dark brown sugar and water into a pot and blend.

2. Turn the heat up to medium high, and bring to a rolling boil.

3. Take 2 cups of strawberry stock and place into a separate pot, and add cranberries, lime juice, zest and 1/3 cup of dark brown sugar.

4. Reduce mixture to 1 cup, then jar the mix.

5. Reduce the rest of the strawberry stock to 2 cups. The reduction process develops the natural pectin in the strawberries.

6. Pour 1 cup of the reduced plain strawberries and jar the mix.

7. Place the pandan leaves into the pot, and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove and jar the mix including the pandan leaves. You need to leave it in to develop the pandan flavor.

8. Finish off by bringing a large pot of water to a boil. Place a small wire rack at the bottom of the pot and put all three jars into the water. Boil for 2.5 hours. I like going for three just to make sure that the process works.

Thoughts

I originally thought that the 1.5 lbs of strawberries would definitely yield the 4 jars, because of the research I did of regular strawberry jams. Unfortunately, I forgot that these recipes called for the addition of pectin, which increases the yield, and removes the need for water.

Instead of making two batches, I combined the strawberry cranberry jam with the lime juice and zest to give another depth to it. The result really surprised me. At first, I thought the original idea would yield a more strawberry like taste, but the cranberries were much stronger than I thought. The idea of adding lime to lighten the taste really worked, and balanced the flavor nicely.

The final products are not jelly-like such as the commercial products out there, but the natural pectin that I developed when the strawberry mixture was reducing was enough to semi-solidify the mixture.

The final jam with cranberries did develop the necessary pectin substance that I was looking for, and had the really thick jam consistency.

Any comments, just email me :D or comment :D I'll post up the rest of the vids later.

Bento Box

I made two bento boxes for my cousins Jessica and Kristy. I spread the steamed rice at the bottom, and sprinkled it with some Japanese seaweed seaoning. The Bento Box included tamagoyaki, lobster balls, pan fried Taiwanese sausage slices, octodog, crabdog, and quick blanhed broccoli trees. Along with the bento, I packed a chicken dashi soup in a styrofoam container, though a thermos container would've been nicer.

Here, I liked using the clear plastic container, which I got from Chef Norm when I worked with him at a convention. The container was durable, and I could use it with a divider or not. I left out the dividers, because I like the scene that I was creating. Maybe, next time I should dye the rice blue.... ehehehehe.

The tamagoyaki was not as sweet as traditional Japanese ones, but they were nice anyways. My cousins need to be worked up to the idea of sweet eggs.

If anybody wants any of the recipes just let me know.

I will post videos later.