Category Archives: uncategorized

Kindergarten bento – Field trip (6/Oct/17)

06/10/2017


Today I made sandwiches for our daughter, to bring to the school trip to the zoo. 

Unfortunately, the field trip has been postponed due to the forecasted rain… Well, I’ll just have to replicate something similar next week.

The problem is that I’ll have to wake up earlier than usual, maybe by 20 minutes, again next week. I’m not a morning person, so that 20 minutes is a huge difference… And of course it didn’t rain today. They could’ve gone to the zoo!

Anyway… hope our little big girl enjoyed her bento today.

Kindergarten bento – Sukiyaki-esque Gyudon beef donburi (29/Sep/17)

01/10/2017

Occasionally, there are days I cannot pick up my daughter from the kindergarten at 2:00PM due to my work or other engagements. When that happens, my kind parents who live an hour away in Saitama, a prefecture north of Tokyo, come for the rescue. Of course they happily come all the way to Tokyo to spend time with their dearest granddaughter, but it’s still a huge favour they do for me. As a sign of gratitude, I cooked Sukiyaki-esque lunch for them in the morning, along with my daughter’s bento.

It’s a quick & easy one-pan dish, but  is tasty and fulfilling thanks to thin slices of Japanese beef that’s a little fattier than lean beef that is common elsewhere.

This is how I make it:

1) In a medium frying pan on a medium heat, stir-fry a half onion, thinly sliced, with a table spoon of cooking oil, until translucent

2) Add 200g of thinly sliced beef and stir fry a bit more

3) When the beef starts to brown, still reddish on the edges, add the Sukiyaki sauce mixture (1 table spoon each of sake & soy sauce, 3+ table spoons of mirin) and bring it to boil

4) Once it starts to boil, pour a beaten egg evenly on the beef
5) Put the lid on, lower the heat, and cook until the egg is cooked (for bento, heat the egg completely, but if you eat right after, a half cooked egg is also quite tasty)
6) Turn off the heat, and sprinkle chopped spring onion on the beef
Place it on top of freshly cooked rice – it makes a nice Sukiyaki-esque Gyudon (beef donburi) dish.
Menu for bento:

Sukiyaki-esque Gyudon (with steamed carrot slices), Spinach goma-ae, Boiled green beans, Cherry tomatoes

Kaki persimmon & Kyoho grapes for dessert

 

For other donburi recipes, here are the popular ones:

Mum’s nikudon

Tori don

Oyakodon 

Kindergarten bento – Tortilla rolls (27/Sep/17)

27/09/2017

Following my disastrous sandwich attempt last week, I made tortilla rolls this morning. This time, it was a big success!

I lightly heated the tortillas in the frying pan, but it seems I may have overdone it. The tortillas got a bit hard and didn’t roll smoothly. Next time im sure I’ll do better.

Menu: Tortilla rolls (with cheese & appelstroop, ham & cucumber, and strawberry jam & butter), Mashed pumpkin with chicken soboro, Steamed broccoli, Cherry tomato

Kyoho grapes & banana for dessert

Kindergarten bento – Sandwich disaster (21/Sep/17)

21/09/2017

I hardly pack sandwiches for my daughter’s lunch. I have a reason for it; I’m afraid of overfeeding bread for our girl. Having a Dutchman in our household, we have bread for breakfast, almost everyday. We eat thin slices of bread and/or buns, with accompaniments such as cheese (preferably Gouda), ham, jam, unsweetened peanut butter, and this heavenly chocolate sprinkles called “Hagelslag” that the most of Dutch people love. If I have time I’d serve fruits and yogurt, but my husband is happy as long as there is bread on our breakfast table.

Anyway, as a very rare occasion I ended up buying sandwich slices at a bakery nearby yesterday, since all the other bread was sold out (anyone from Central Tokyo, you may want to check out this tiny but beautiful bakery called Panetteria Kawamura). And this made me think of making sandwiches for lunch for a change. I thought it would be easy and quick, and I could even save some time in the morning.

The part of making sandwiches was easy, how can it not be, but the real problem was with packing. I cut the sandwiches into quarters so that it would be small enough for my little girl to hold it with one hand and is also visually appealing. But the sandwiches kept falling apart when I tried to pack them while attempting to hold them up vertically. I’ve seen it many times in various bakeries where they are packed nicely and standing straight in a plastic sandwich box. I didn’t realise how hard it was to pack bread in a neat manner. There must be a trick for it, but I couldn’t figure it out today.

As a result, instead of saving time, I totally ran behind schedule and had to rush like a headless chicken to get ready to walk my daughter to school.

Menu: Sandwiches (fillings: Ham, Cheese & Appelstroop,  Scrambled egg & Cucumber, and Strawberry jam), Mashed pumpkin with chicken soboro, Sausage, Steamed broccoli, Cherry tomato

Japanese Nashi pear for dessert

Kindergarten bento – Tanabata festival (7/Jul/17)

07/07/2017

Menu: Grilled salmon mixed in rice, Boiled egg, Boiled asparagus, Corns & cucumber salad

Grapes & banana for dessert


Today, 7th July is the day to celebrate Tanabata festival, where traditionally we put up our wish on a piece of rectangle paper and hang it on bamboo branches along with other colourful decorations made with Origami papers. It is the festival to celebrate a once-a-year rendezvous of this married couple, Princess Orihime & Prince Hikoboshi, who were derived from the stars (Vega and Altair) and separated by the Milky Way.

At our daughter’s school, they celebrated it by singing a Tanabata song and eating watermelon, one of the seasonal fruits in summer and very typical for summer festival, after their bento lunch. I totally forgot about it and packed grapes & banana for dessert… Oh well, lucky her to have extra dessert today!

Click here for more details about Tanabata, from Wikipedia.

Here is my daughter’s wish. It reads: I WISH TO BE A PRINCESS AND TRAVEL TO SPACE

Kindergarten bento – Carbo overload? (16/May/17)

17/05/2017

For my daughter’s dinner the evening before, I cooked macaroni in tomato sauce with sea bream. She loves pasta, so I cooked bigger portion which she couldn’t finish.

Making the most of it, I fixed macaroni salad with the leftover macaroni. Usually in Japan, macaroni salad is made with mayonnaise, but since non of us really like mayonnaise in our household I just seasoned it with olive oil, salt & pepper. Healthier anyways.

When I packed bento this morning, I noticed there may be too much carbohydrates in the container. It’s quite common in this country to eat multiple carbos in the same meal (Japanese are carbo lovers), and my daughter most likely will develop her culinary preference in that direction. Whether it’s a good thing or not, the bento box came home empty.

Menu: Macaroni salad, Grilled salmon & wakame seaweed sprinkle mixed in rice, Boiled egg, Boiled green beans
Apple bunnies for dessert

Kindergarten bento – Accident (Thursday, 13/Apr/17)

13/04/2017

Menu: Steamed pumpkin & chicken soboro, Omelet, Tomato, Boiled okra, Wakana rice with shirasu (baby sardine) on too
Grapes & strawberry for dessert

My daily bento making resumed this morning for the new Japanese school year. I got up early, set the rice cooker, made omelet, took out other ingredients from the fridge I had prepared the night before, packed them nicely, got dressed while the rice was being cooked, packed rice, all nice and neat in the bento box, right on time, and everything was going perfectly.

I was about to sit down at the breakfast table when I heard this “pshhhh” sound. My husband opened the new can of Illy coffee with which he makes his espresso every morning. By the way, this Italian brand does great coffee with excellent flavour, and we both love it. It comes in this vacuumed packed, beautiful aluminum cannister. Anyway, looking over the kitchen counter to see if there’s anything I should take with me to the dining table, I noticed there was a spray of black pepper-like powder all over the place, including our daughter’s bento. Looking at each other’s faces in horror, we realised my husband’s coffee spilled out of the can with the air pressure and landed all over on the food. Oh…

My husband told me this had never ever happened before. Yeah sure, but how about the bento? I wanted to scream but held back… (got whiny instead). He then innocently told me to just wash it off and wipe a little. Yeah right. How can you wash omelet or rice or soboro pumpkin with water… How convenient if you can do that! To my dismay, I had to repack everything. As for the omelet I chopped off the top part (hence shorter than the original), for the shirasu rice I scraped off the top and added the leftover (thank goodness I still had some left next to the rice cooker not on the kitchen counter), and for the soboro pumpkin I had to put them in a separate bowl, carefully remove the ones with most coffee on them and put the rest back (I’m pretty sure some coffee was still hiding inside but at that point I couldn’t care less).

Voila, here is my daughter’s repacked bento for the first day of this school year’s bento making. I’d say it’s a great start!

* We love Illy coffee and recommend it to anyone who likes espresso. Just do not open the new can next to your food 😉

Kindergarten bento – Chicken shio-koji (31/Jan/17)

31/01/2017

Menu: Stir-fried chicken thigh marinated in shio-koji, Boiled egg, Steamed broccoli, Cucumber sticks, Cherry tomato, Rice with goma-konbu 

Apple for dessert


In the busy morning, this clever shio-koji can help you save a significant amount of time. Just sprinkle a spoonful of shio-koji on the bite size chicken thigh, quickly toss everything and stir-fry them in a frying pan. No oil needed, as the fat of the chicken thigh gives enough grease, and once brown add tiny bit of water (a tea spoon) and cover the lid and steam-fry for a minute (this leaves the chicken nice and moist).  This whole process takes only 5 minutes.