Tuesday bento

I used our dinner leftovers in our bento boxes on Tuesday.

Jac’s bento – on the left: crumbed fish and steamed broccoli, and in the “Tasty” container – tartare sauce. On the right: potato salad on a bed of cos, steamed butternut pumpkin sprinkled with dried chives. I’d asked Jac to bake me a couple of potatoes in the oven the night before, since she was using the oven to cook the chips and fish anyway. I’d left the potatoes to cool overnight and in the morning I made an easy potato salad. I peeled the potatoes and chopped them into cubes, added thinly sliced cucumber, finely chopped celery, finely chopped sour gherkin pickles, Neil Perry aioli (I really need to find a lower fat alternative, or make my own aioli, I think!), a little seeded mustard and some black pepper.

My bento was the same as Jac’s, but I placed my fish on a bed of snow pea sprouts. Oh – and I found an unopened sachet of tomato sauce from McDonald’s in the fridge (sorry, not pictured), which I took along to squeeze on my crumbed fish. The secret to packing crumbed items in your bento box and not having them go soggy is to allow them to cool completely – before you refrigerate them and/or before you pack them. Any hint of warmth and there’ll be unpleasant “sweating”.

Today’s bento note had the weather forecast on the outside.* On the inside… well, on this occasion you will just have to imagine something sweet, mushy and delicious. I’ve promised Jac that although I will always share stuff about us with you guys here, some things will remain private between her and me. She’s always been so supportive of my blogging compulsion, and now, my bento obsession, so I think it’s fair and reasonable. :)

I’ve only got the one bento bag which came with my red rabbit bento set, so I dug around our drawers for an old bandana, which I used as a furoshiki (Japanese wrapping cloth, see this furoshiki website for more info – I used the “basic wrap” technique).

I put Jac’s bento box in the bento bag, and my bento box in the “furoshiki”. I liked the bandana bag much more than the real bento bag! I ended up using it for the rest of my bento lunches that week.