venta

Well, it's Monday and I'm committing to another week of making myself bento boxes. Now with even more planning...

Last week I made some batches of stuff, bought some other stuff, and figured I'd work it out as I went along. And, while it turned out all right in the end, it required some thinking mid-week. I thought if I planned a week's menu then I wouldn't have to do any thinking, and there was less risk of wasting stuff which hadn't got used.

Of course, the downside of rigid planning is that it might be more difficult to incorporate leftovers as the week progresses. At least, having not had a Sunday roast this week, I'm not starting the week with a backlog of leftovers to incorporate into meals. Some of the things on my list are in the freezer, so can be postponed if leftovers loom.

I spent a few hours in the kitchen yesterday, making up batches of things to freeze. Hanging out in the kitchen for hours on a Sunday isn't, obviously, necessary, I just quite like cooking. And fiddling about with new recipes. And I now have lots of bits and bobs waiting in the wings which mean that I can make more boxes in the future with less effort.

Today's box features white rice, miso chicken pieces, sweet pepper and carrot confetti, sugar snap peas and radishes.



The white sushi rice is certainly way more successful that the brown rice was - despite having been cooked and packaged and frozen and microwaved and squashed into a box it was fairly normal-tasting. By "sushi rice" I mean the shorter grain rice sold as such; I haven't attacked it with sushi vinegar or anything. By its nature it tends to be more sticky when cooked, and doesn't have the dryness of the reheated brown rice.

I've started taking liberties with recipes, though. Some accidental, some deliberate. A couple of the recipes called for sake, but when I went to get my never-used bottle of cooking sake out of the cupboard it turned out it was actually a never-used bottle of Chinese rice wine. Which is quite different. I went ahead and used it anyway.

Cooking the vegetable confetti, I missed out the soy sauce (see earlier concerns about salt); I had intended to taste the confetti when it was cold and add as much soy sauce as I thought necessary, but forgot. As it was, the dashi gave it a subtle, smokey taste which would have been quite overwhelmed by soy sauce. (Mind you, in addition to the red pepper, yellow pepper, carrot, spring onion and chilli I also added a small piece of thumb. That wasn't in the recipe.)

Today's vegetable selection was, altogether, fairly unadorned. The peas and radishes just tasted of themselves. Which is fine with me, because I quite like vegetables. Although last week's side dishes were exciting, I found myself missing the just-plain-vegetabliness that usually ends up in my lunches. I'm not banning exciting vegetables, I just feel they might need to be moderated with some boringness now and again.

This morning I nuked the rice, fried the marinated chicken, boiled (briefly) the sugar snaps, top-and-tailed the radishes and dolloped out the confetti. 20 minutes, including time to load the dishwasher and to get breakfast ready while I waited for the sugar snaps to finish cooking and the chicken to cool down. I still feel there's a fair proportion of faffing time that could be eliminated.