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Yesterday I had my first bento lunch in a long time. That makes me happy. :)
Meatless Monday Bihun Bento
Curious about the contents of this bento?
Right tier
Mihoen (bihun) goreng with faux chick’n leftovers from Soy, my local Chinese vegetarian restaurant, topped with fried courgette and parsley.
Left tier
Red Batavia lettuce, tomato, creamy borlotti-balsamic bean spread (recipe from Think! Eat! Act! A Sea Shepard’s Chef Vegan Recipes by Raffaella Tolicetti), pickles, kalamata olives, and a spoonful of capers.
On the side
Rosemary crackers.
Where from?
I won the Sea Shepard’s vegan cookbook I few months ago on Lisa’s Project Vegan blog and the recipes I’ve tried so far are all thumbs up! I hope to spend a post on the book sometime soon so I can link it up to Trish’s Cook It Up — but let’s not get ahead of myself. I used local borlotti beans out of our organic CSA haul for the bean spread this past weekend. Other local and organic ingredients in this lunch are zucchini, lettuce, tomato and parsley.
I hope I’ll be presenting my next bento again soon… See you then?
A quick share of my most recent bento. It contained leftovers from our “yogi dinner” the previous night: recipes from the cookbook Yogifood1 by Jet Eikelboom and Seth Jansen.
Yogi lentil salad with hazelnuts, parsley, red cabbage, corn lettuce and a maple-balsamic dressing, mini plum tomatoes, cucumber, carrot, and more tomato with almond butter dip from my Lithuanian Foodie Penpal, yogi potato mash with thyme and a sea-buckthorn candy from my visit to Vlieland.
On the side: 2 clementines, santana apple and 3 sandwiches (apple-pear butter & houmous).
Local/CSA: corn lettuce, cabbage, carrot, potato, thyme, apple.
Office lunch on Thursday 13-12-2012.
I had planned a nice bento in orange colours last week, but unfortunately I had to skip it. But here’s a green one today instead!
First tier
Pasta salad with avocado sauce, peas, corn & sun-dried tomatoes, escarole and tiny tomato from the balcony.
Second tier
Pecans for the salad, courgette fritter, cucumber to dip in spicy houmous, and (Gnoe getting frivolous here ;) gherkin hearts.
On the side
Gingerbread with soy margarine & agave syrup and fruit salad for dessert: apple, satsuma and mango in a lemon-ginger dressing with cinnamon.
I’ve been looking for a good pasta salad recipe and now I’ve found it! I use Chloe Coscarelli’s avocado-pesto sauce, either leftovers of dinner like today, or made afresh. The sun-dried tomatoes are a must but for the rest it’s just what I have at hand. Made it with young broad beans once — ’t was great!
Bento submitted to What’s for Lunch Wednesday on Bentolunch.net
This is the first time in my 5 years of bento-ing that I’ve actually heated up an office lunch. One of the tiers anyway. Fall has definitely started so it was comforting to have a warm meal!
Left(over) tier
Turkish rice with chickpeas, red lentil-cauliflower curry and briami (Greek layered vegetables from the oven). All leftovers from this week’s menu.
Right tier
Cumin spiced quick bread, dried apple and date, mixed sprouts, lettuce, mini plum tomatoes, corn on the cob and cucumber.
On our journey to the Hautes Alpes we had an Asian style lunch along the autoroute. All leftovers, packed by Mr Gnoe.
The second tier from the left was actually more fanciful than it looks now, but we dropped the box when getting it out of the car. We were a bit impatient to have lunch, hence the carelessness. ;)
From left to right
- Homemade atjar ketimoen (cucumber pickles) with pickled white onions, gherkins, caperberries and a super chilli from the balcony. A small yellow heirloom tomato.
- Tempé goreng and a variation of heirloom tomatoes.
- Gado-gado leftovers: salad, cabbage, steamed carrots & green beans, baked tofu, spring onion and pecans for lack of peanut sauce.
- Can’t remember exactly what was in this tier but it must have been something like a salad with tofu, cucumber, spring onion and sesame seeds. Dressing in the small container. No need to mention the carrot – that one’s obvious!
But that was not all. We had a long way to travel so we’d also made some Thai carrot soup. Contrary to what the thermos says, it was chilled. Yum! In celebration of summer we also had a huge snack box full of fruit: seedless grapes, strawberries and cherries.
Of course we brought lots of other provisions -kind of a vegan emergency kit- but our main ‘meals on wheels’ consisted of the above. And then there were foods we bought along the road, but that’s something for another post. VeganMoFo is coming up soon!
What do you bring when you’re travelling?
Do you have any suggestions for our next trip?
Our Sunday dinner with guests provided some more leftovers for August 7’s office lunch.
Toast, spinach pesto, white bean pate, crudités (radish, aragula, cucumber) and a courgette flower from the balcony! In the beginning our -first ever- zucchini plant just produced male blossoms but today #3 of the courgettes is getting bigger by the day! :)
Although the bean spread made this bento pretty filling, it was not enough to get through the day so I brought a sammy on the side.
I love this round usagi box but don’t often use it because of the rectangular bag I bring to the office. Right-angled bentos are a better fit. ;) But this Wednesday I had a lot to carry so I took a backpack — and chose a container shaped accordingly!
Clockwise:
- Green salad (Romaine lettuce, cabbage, leek sprouts, snow peas, cucumber) and a cherry tomato.
- Strawberry-rhubarb muffin.
- Red berries.
- Olive crackers, sesame dressing for my salad, tip-top-tofu loaf, parsley, chili sauce and cucumber spread with dill & nori blossoms.
Obviously this bento was a bit too high on proteins and too low on carbs. But I made do with what I had in the fridge. It was delish so why complain? :)
Here’s today’s lunch!
Fruit tier
Cherries, red berries and nectarine.
Middle tier
Cucumber, lettuce, asem manis tempeh, roasted red paprika stuffed with nasi goreng and extra fried rice.
Bottom tier
Slices of gherkin & icicle radish and tahini sauce for the steamed green beans with seroendeng.
Except for the fruit and raw veggies these are all leftovers.
NOM! :)
On Tuesday I brought this sunny bento to the office.
The main tier contains cooked pasta with avocado sauce from La Dolce Vegan! Chloe’s Kitchen, topped with broad beans, sun-dried tomatoes and parsley, lollo rosso baran, and minty cucumber, tomato, capers salad with soygurt dressing (La Dolce Vegan!).
In the other tier there’s a mini crustless tofu quiche, extra parsley, a cranberry muffin, radish and slices of walnut-filled date.
On the side a fruit container with nectarine and honey melon.
No need to say I very much enjoyed my lunch. :) The only thing missing was a spot outside to eat this bento in the sun. ;)
Leftovers: pasta & sauce, broad beans, dressing, crustless quiche, melon and date.
Freezer stash: muffin.
Do you know the Evernote Food app? I’m creating a food photo diary with it — easy and fun! I only wish I could also edit entries in the equally handy all-round Evernote application, but maybe I’m missing something obvious?
On Saturday May 19th Evernote organized its first ever Evernote cook-along. ‘Chef’ Lauren Atkins provided us with the task to make crêpes.
You all know how I love challenges — and food! So I decided to take this up, even though I hadn’t baked any crêpes since going ExtraVeganza over a year ago… Pancakes? Yes. Crêpes? No. And I really even don’t like pancakes that much, but I just LUUUURV crêpes!
So the first question to tackle was: sweet or savoury?
As we had no dinner plans yet (and would be hiking during lunchtime), I chose the latter and picked Asian style rice crêpes with a mushroom-tofu filling.
It actually proved to be quite the dare! I had to adapt a basic vegan sweet crêpe recipe and combine it with the savoury dairy mushroom-tofu one from my vegetarian cookbook Het Grote Vegetarische Kookboek (p.138). Not a smart project to take on for a first attempt… So how did it turn out???
Rice Crêpes with Tofu-Mushroom Filling
Serves 2 (4 pieces).
I started out with this vegan crêpe recipe in my Vegweb iPhone app (substituting vanilla for a pinch of salt): whisking 1 cup of all-purpose flour (about 150 grams) with 1 1/2 cup rice milk (350 ml) and 2 heaped teaspoons of No-egg with 4 tablespoons of water mixed beforehand (note that the ratio for 2 ‘eggs’ is different from Ener-G egg-replacer). Adding 2 tbsp of sunflower oil and a pinch of salt.
I then continued putting additional ingredients in the batter that the non-vegan recipe in my cookbook called for: 1 tbsp kecap manis, 1 tbsp chopped cilantro, 50 grams of cooked rice (a combination of red, black and unpolished) and a mix of chopped and stir-fried fresh ginger (2 cm), 1 chilli pepper and 1 green onion.
Cooking rice in the morning
You’ll have to cook the rice in advance or -preferably- use leftovers!
Each pancake was baked for about 3 minutes on one side and 1 more after having flipped them over.
The filling consisted of 100 grams of tofu sautéed for about 5 minutes in a combination of sunflower & sesame oil, then adding 150 grams mixed mushrooms, a clove of garlic (crushed), 1 tsp of white miso, 1 tbsp kecap manis and 1/2 tbsp lime juice, stirring for about 1 more minute.
Result
We had a great dinner! Two crêpes each plus a large portion of salad.
I’ll admit the recipe needs a little tweaking because the pancakes were difficult to flip over — and stay in one piece at the same time. ;) My batter was probably a bit too thin from adding the extra ingredients. Next time I’ll adjust the amount of ‘milk’ accordingly and/or add some cornstarch.
Or maybe… I should just make sure to have a foolproof vegan crêpe recipe first?! Off to make some crêpes for lunch!!!
Here’s how the meal looks in Evernote…
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Join Beth Fish’s Weekend Cooking with a food-related post!
Graasland 