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Well, guess what we had for dinner yesterday… Gado-gado! Since my first — and very succesful — attempt to grow my own bean sprouts (taugeh) we have to think of recipes to use it all. LOL Gado-gado is an all-time favourite and had to go on the menu. It’s a salad of either raw or blanched vegetables, served with peanut sauce as a dressing and emping and (dried) fried onions as toppings. Fried tofu and boiled egg are essential ingredients as well. Can’t get any easier, can it? :)
Our meal was (of course) delicious and I had made enough to put some in bento #50. Yay, a real feast! Unfortunately we were out of fried onions and ate all the emping at dinner :\ In my bento I took a Japanese sesame-soy rice cracker instead; not the same — I knoooow — but something crunchy to bite anyway ;)
For those of you who’ve never heard of emping: it’s a type of krupuk (or kroepoek, as we say) that is made of melinjo nuts. No shrimp, so it’s a good alternative for vegetarians like me :) It seems you have to love it or to hate it (it has a bit of a bitter taste) but I really can’t understand that anyone wouldn’t like it! :\
About my jubilee bento. Gado-gado is a great bento filler because it should be eaten at room temperature. The veggies are either blanched or raw so it’s easy to use leftovers ;) Of course it can be nice to have a hot peanut sauce with it, but roomtemp or cold is fine. So what do you see in my bento?
Top tier (which is actually the bottom tier :\ )
- Japanese grape sweet (Anpanman mix fruit hard candy)
- 3 stars of dried apricot & wild berries snack
- mix of cashews and dried cranberries
sesame-soy rice cracker- container with peanut sauce
- strips of fried tofu for the gado-gado
- homegrown mustard cress
- little radish stars
The bottom tier contains a mix of the following
- red leaf salad (raw)
- white cabbage (blanched by pouring some hot water over it)
- bean sprouts (raw, but can be poured over with some hot water as well)
- cucumber (raw)
- carrots (blanched)
- green beans and haricots verts (blanched)
- slices of boiled egg (obviously)
- more radish stars
- radishes with gherkin stars
I’ll post a more precise recipe of gado-gado sometime soon… (oh, me and my promises..! :\ )
Tonight we will be having more Indonesian food with taugeh on the menu: loempia (spring rolls) and lalab taugé! Spring rolls and mushroom soup as a matter of fact, because I ran out of bean sprouts! :-o
I’m afraid the recipes are in Dutch (one of them is really Flemish, to be exact ;)
Today’s bento was not completely Indonesian (as you see) but Indonesian-hinted ;) It was really good though and I was still so full when I went home that I didn’t even eat the big rice cracker that was left (and is not on the picture so it might have been fate ;)
On the side some melon. The tier in the middle contains roasted almonds, soy sauce, peanut sauce, steamed carrots, onigiri of plain rice, some rice vinegar and plum furikake, and finally some not very Indonesian cherry tomatoes filled with Boursin herb cheese and a basil leaf ;)
The right tier: ingredients to make gado-gado with the peanut sauce! Sugar snap peas, baked tofu, steamed carrots, (more tofu), brussels sprouts trying to hide behind some salad, boiled egg and serundeng (baked coconut topping). Yummy!
My bento’s are usually ‘four o’clock bento’s‘ as I also take some sandwiches for earlier in the day (10-12 o’clock). I started taking bento’s to work because I was too hungry around four and I would snack too much, but it isn’t working the way it should because now I am often still a bit too full when I get home…
So I think I should change my eating pattern. Maybe I am just going to take one sandwich for 10 o’clock, then have my bento at midday and leave a snack (like the rice cracker I didn’t ate) for the afternoon.
Something else I am thinking about is Bento #25. Of course I would like to do something special again but I don’t have any real ideas yet… (And I am not very crafty ;) I might do something with a silver theme but that won’t be easy! Suggestions are very welcome – as always :)
Graasland 