Bear Box #2! Chickpea Omelette, Rice and Marinated Tofu

More bento! Bear was in the mood for Asian food for dinner again so I made another bento. I decided to play on some bento classics, white rice with umeboshi (pickled plums), omelettes, and marinated tofu. My version has brown rice, a chickpea omelette and tofu marinated without fish sauce.

Tofu marinade-

3 tbsp soy sauce

1 tsp grated ginger

1 tbsp chili sauce  

1 tsp Worcestershire 

Simply mix these together with the tofu and let it sit for at least 30 min. Cubing the tofu lets it soak in easier. Then I fried the tofu and set it on a bed of spinach.

Chickpea omelette-

1 part chickpea flour

1 part water

1 tsp baking powder

This is the basic ingredients for the omelette. However, this would be a bit pain. The great thing here is that chickpea omelettes are very easy to season in different ways so they can be eaten with a lot of different things. For this recipes I added sesame seeds, garlic powder, salt, and pepper. Then you just cook them like a pancake. 

I then shredded up some carrot and diced some onion and sliced a handful of mushrooms, sauteed them in sesame oil and garlic and then rolled them up inside. 

The rice was pretty simple. Brown rice cooked in the rice cooker, some pieces of nori, a hanful of shelled edamame and an umeboshi with the pit removed. Steam the soy beans and the rice and layer it all neatly into the box and you're done. 

Cute Cooking Is Best

This week I decided to really try and get back into cooking now that I have my own kitchen. It's not perfectly set up yet (pictures soon!) but it's still usable. So my first undertaking was to make bento. Bento is a style of japanese lunchbox packed with yummy and often cute foods. 

I bought myself a Nyanpire box with two levels and a small divider, made rice and then chopped up veggies and faux chicken. I used special cutters for the veggies to make them cute shapes and used rice molds to turn regular short grain brown rice into stars, hearts and even little bears! If you look closely you can even see my little bunny hot sauce container.

Now that I realized how fun it is to make cute lunches like this, all I want to do is get more bento stuff so I can make even more things! There's food picks, special food cutters, and dividers you can use to make your lunches special. I think taking the time to make a cute lunch is actually fun and in the end it's actually more satisfying then an ugly thrown together dish of leftovers.

These small silicone molds would be nice for making myself veggie sushi to bring to school.

I love these bunny food picks, they're cute and would be perfect for little fruit and veg skewers.

I love this three piece Pikachu bento box. I would put rice in the bottom layer, a veggie stir fry or curry on the middle and fill the top with fruit slices and nuts. 

Are any of you into making bento?