Spontaneous ∂erivation

I went into work yesterday and got sicker today as a result. Sigh. So this morning I cooked two cups of rice and made onigiri for breakfast and lunch. And possibly dinner.

But I got to do a little shopping in Seattle (for there aren’t any decent Asian groceries on the island)….

Yeah, baby! Furikake! That’s what I’m taking about! (Preserved bits of shrimp or salmon or egg mixed with salt and nori, goes a treat with the moistness of rice.) I ended up using twice the amount shown above.

You can mix in furikake (my favorite), roll a formed rice ball in it (certainly makes them less sticky on the outside), or use furikake as a filling.

Here’s my second-favorite rice ball mold, which makes three large cylinders all at once. ‘Tis awesome.

There are two “levers” at the sides of the mold (the pink tabs). After you fill and press the top of the mold down, you then press down on these tabs to help release the top of the mold again. Very nice!

Tada! And they’re actually pretty well separated into three rolls, too. Just remember not to pack the rice in too tightly into the mold, just fill it—the mold top will press the rice properly.

Then wrap in nori sheets! I’m so bad at wrapping things in nori. Even if the sheets of nori have perforations so that you can measure out appropriate widths for wrapping rice balls….

These two rice balls have tamago furikake in them (egg). The above rolls have ebi (shrimp) and salmon. On the left is my very bad nori wrapping.

I thought that the peanut butter onigiri yesterday were pretty good, so I did two more today. I didn’t wrap them in nori, however, because I don’t think roasted seaweed would go well with peanut butter. But I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I have one for breakfast, and one wrapped in plastic for later today.

I’m not putting this stuff in the fridge; I put the ones for lunch into a plastic container after letting them cool down so that condensation doesn’t form inside the container when I put the lid on. Standard obento procedure.

It’s so nice to get lunch out of the way, because I am so tired….

Right now my stomach is still delicate, so I really need to make my own breakfast and lunch. Where I work is full of tech geeks, so we are surrounded by a variety of greasy fast food places. Not going to work well for me.

So here are some extra boring bentos. Although peanut and apple butter are used, so it’s not a totally lost cause. (Right now anything with real dairy cream in it makes me sick. I don’t know why butter is fine.)

My giraffe box, with table water crackers, the end. I put a dollop of peanut butter in later, though.

Next I wanted to make rice balls (onigiri if I’m spelling that right). It doesn’t take long to cook a cup of rice in an on/off rice cooker, and then let it cool a bit.

Usually you want something salty and not likely to go rotten in them.¹

Salmon (cooked, the kind you find in those packets these days) is a favorite filling. But all of mine had expired.

Next favorite is rolling or filling a rice ball in some preserved sprinkes of nori plus stuff like little bits of dried shrimp or egg (tastes better than it sounds). All expired.

Okay, next is pushing a preserved, tart, bitter plum in. Got none.

Desperate times call for desperate measures….

I use molds for my rice balls, because I am lazy. This is my favorite brand because it lets you do two triangular balls at a time. I half-filled each part with rice, and then used peanut butter for the filling! Preserves well, is a protein, yummy, a little salty. Works for me.

The little, ah, tits² in the top of the mold are there is you want a little dent to push the plum in. You can pop them out if you wish.

Fill up with rice.

Push the top of the mold down, which does all the packing and squeezing for you.

There are flexible triangles in the bottom of the mold. Remove the mold top, turn over, push the triangles to push out the nicely formed rice balls.

There they are!

I like triangles because they are flattish and fit into corners. I didn’t have any non-expired nori sheets to wrap the rice balls, so I used plastic cling wrap (the approved alternative in these modern times). Either option keeps them moist.

Plenty of I Love Lemon for my throat. More water crackers. The little sauce container has apple butter for the crackers.

And that’s lunch. And probably tomorrow’s lunch. Although by then I may have new packets of cooked salmon.

1. Although for some reason mayo is a hit with the Japanese. It doesn’t make for a well-preserving meal without insulated cold storage, though, which Japanese bentos did not, until recently, have. So. Um. [↩]
2. Not an official term. [↩]

There is this thingy, instant flavored mashed potato packages. Boil water in the electric kettle, then pour it into bowl, then pour in flakes. The brand I buy, Idahoan, comes in a few flavors, some bland but also “Loaded Baked” which has little bacon pieces in it and four kinds of cheese (probably not good for nausea). Idahoan is supposedly among the most decent of the instant mashed potato brands.

The following Idahoan flavors seem to work when you’ve gotten back to medium nausea:

• Baby Reds
• Butter & Herb
• Roasted Garlic
• Original (of course)

Other flavors include “Southwest” and “Four Cheese.”

This is so nice. It takes less effort than rice or rice porridge, and it’s more variety, of a sort. Recently my diet consists of table water crackers, rice with butter and salt, instant chicken noodle soup, and plain digestive biscuits. Today (well, yesterday now) I ate one of the Nile Spice instant soups (chicken-flavored vegetable) and I haven’t thrown up, which is a vast improvement.

I plan on working my way up to pasta with butter and soy sauce, the spicier Nile Spice soups, flavored yogurt, toasted home-made bread with yogurt-based spread, and then back to normal. I’m going to so want pizza after all this, even greasy fast foods in general—teriyaki chicken and dumplings in particular—but I daren’t eat anything even remotely rich for a while. I remember the last time I got flu, even after I got better (or… something), I still threw up in the evenings for about three weeks after.

On my very bland diet, I haven’t thrown up, even when codeine is tossed at me. So… I guess more of this.

Sigh. I guess an upside is that when I eat bland food, I don’t care very much about it, and don’t eat very much of it. It becomes fuel and nothing more. I do need to eat more fruit soon. I tend to binge on it though—good fruit is very flavorful and hella snackable. There are few things I love more than those little mandarin oranges, home-made applesauce, and little strawberries.

I also used to experiment with veggies for dinner, like take home anything and cut it up and microwave it according to that red-checkered Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook, which has all the basic American cookery stuff in it. Tasted very nice; I started to crave turnips, kind of strange. I lost a lot of weight, and should look into doing that again. Every night’s dinner was a fillet of salmon, half a cup of cooked rice, and a veggie experiment.

And bento lunches… I want to get back to those. Especially with the Laptop Lunch containers, they were perfect for a not-too-large lunch and some snackery during the day… also bento breakfasts. I miss that stuff!

Early post for a change. Breakfast is a smoothie because they still fascinate me.

Lunch: Indian curried potatoe cauliflour coconut milk stew (from The Vegetarian Slow Cooker), store-bought naaaaaaan, two gyoza and plum sauce, and orange slices in the current drought of applesauce. (Trust me, that’s getting fixed this weekend.)

Note about the little sauce container that comes with a laptop lunch kit: it can hold enough sauce for dipping somewhere over half-a-dozen gyozas. This is better than a lot of sauce containers that can be found for more traditional bento.

I’m starting to like my lunches (and even breakfasts) now that I have more of a clue as to what I like. At this point they’re nicer than a lot of the quickie lunch places.

It’s been a shake for breakfast these days, because I adore my new blender. (For the curious, the Strawberry Oatmeal Smoothie recipe generates about 600+ ml of yummy morning goodness. This is the normal size for
smoothies in America, land of the quarter-pound cheeseburger.)

On the bright side of things lately, bento does get me into work on otherwise rather difficult days. (Yesterday was a little bit harder than most, so it had no bento in it. On the other hand, someone not incompetent now holds my mortgage, or nearly so, YIPPEE.)

Lunch: rice, mabo tofu (it does have meat in most versions too; this has vegetarian crumbles instead), mandarin orange slices (because there is no more applesauce), and adhock microwaved eggs, emphasis on the hock.

Note on the rice: I have a fuzzy logic rice cooker (two, actually) so I put rice and water in it the night before and set it to finish in the morning. And as per the usual with bento involving rice, let the rice cool down before closing the bento (or, as the case may be, laptop lunch) box.

Note on the mabo tofu: in this case it’s made from the Asian version of “Hamburger Helper”; you can buy pre-made sauce (variety of hotness and brands available; mine is the mild House Foods version) and then just add browned ground pork/chicken/etc and cubed firm tofu. Like many things, mabo tofu is probably best made from scratch, but this is a pretty good approximation.

Today involves a doctor’s appointment, so I’ll just eat lunch out. So I made a Strawberry Oatmeal Breakfast Smoothie. (It’s surprisingly good, even with the oatmeal in it!)

The lunchbox is a more traditional one I had hanging about.

I finally found a replacement for bread with respect to vegan pate! (I still have the mouth problem that’s keeping bread and, I guess, tougher starches in general off the menu.)

Breakfast: omelette with green onions, the almost last of the McIntosh applesauce, mandarin slices, and toasted (well… burnt, on places) cashews. Toasted nuts are awesome, definitely cashews benefit.

Breakfast bentos are surprisingly fun to assemble for some reason. Next time is gonna be breakfast links for sure.

Lunch: simplest rice pancakes ever (I suspect they look a little like latkes), cubed very squishy ripe pear, vegan pate overlaid with sliced boiled egg, and the absolute last of the McIntosh applesauce (the Winesap having been devoured over the weekend).

Note to self: I bought the Bento Buddies add-on, and I should have used the extra covered container for the pears. The rice pancakes were still okay, but slightly fruity and not as sharp as they usually are.

I have little menus drawn up for the next bentos (which aren’t tomorrow, since tomorrow… well… will be busy with doctors). I knew there was a good use for the magnetic dry-erase board.

So, my mouth is very soft, okay? It gets badly cut up by crackers, chips, and French bread. Naturally these are all things I love.

Unfortunately, due to some accident involving crackers, or maybe chips, and an infection, I am on softer food. Even soft bread is too stiff for some reason, something to do with starches. Good thing I’ve got vegan pate and meatloaf.

Breakfast: a rolled omelet with green onions, which was easier to make than I thought it would be; McIntosh applesauce sans muesli; cashews for snacking on (it’s a softer nut than peanuts, and I also left them untoasted, sigh); and peeled mandarin slices.

Maybe I’ll toast some cashews and see if they’re soft enough still, but argh.

Still, a good breakfast.

Lunch: steamed gyoza dumplings with plum sauce for dipping; vegan meatloaf slice with parsley garnish that of course never gets eaten; very sweet white corn (no butter, I just microwaved the frozen kernals in the morning); Winesap applesauce. One of the more satisfying lunches I’ve had.

Next week: figure out what goes with pate instead of bread.

Stupid soft mouth….

So I went insane and got another Laptop Lunch bento for breakfasts. It’s difficult to put bread into the more cramped traditonal bento boxes.

Breakfast:

McIntosh Applesauce, muesli on top with a heart cutout that actually survived transit via the container being full up to the lid. Sally Lunn bread sliced up for strawberry-rhuburb jam dippin’. I really look forwards to this kind of breakfast.

Lunch came with vegan protein:

I mixed up the applesauce (small) container with the, well, random small items container. The stripes did not survive, alas.

The vegan pate (baked eggplant, cooked lentils, finely chopped walnuts, tofu, parsley, spices) tastes pretty much like meat pate, almost indistinguishable. The honey bread was a fine accompliant. The tiny meatloafs are obscured by the sliced egg—really, they should have been in the applesauce container, with glazed carrots or something.

Currently my burden. Pink goes in the laptop bag, green is for ferry breakfast enjoyment.

I need more fruit, dammit. I could fit in fruit for snacks in the extra space in either box.

Also, I need my blender to come in the post so I can try making this vegan mayonaise and then have fun with egg and waldorf salad. And hopefully the next vegan meatloaf batch will work out well enough to make scotch eggs with.

Breakfast Bento: one of my two-tiered bento affairs, because it would be cruel to cram the Sally Lunn bread into a round container.

McIntosh homemade applesauce in the top container (which has a fitted plastic lid), laid over muesli—you can’t see the muesli here, but by the time I opened the bento on the ferry, the muesli was nicely infused in the applesauce.

The bottom tier has Sally Lunn bread, crusts off, with a teeny container of strawberry jam. The Sally Lunn is a recipe from Bread Machine Magic, and really does taste like a bread version of a poundcake.

This a much more traditional—well, as much as “modern” can be traditional—bento box, the tiers held together by a band. The cloth bag is traditionalish too, though not the spoon.

Lunch Bento: thawed squash/yam bisque, random teriyaki noodle leftovers, a boiled egg (I bought a cheap egg slicer for the first time ever the past weekend), and the sinful applesauce, which is made from Winesaps. And is an awesome dessert applesauce.

Maybe I’ll try for artistic this week. I made tiny vegan meatloaves over the weekend (ground walnuts, ground toasted cashews, lentils, parsley, spices, bread crumbs, and almond butter. They’re really quite good…).