His and Her Bentos (407)

Sigh, I was doing so good with my Halloween theme and then I had to go and sit on the couch last night… Before I knew it, I was asleep and there was no more time to bento or sketch. Only time to hazily tell Mr. Pikko to please notify me when I should move to the bed. And then as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Peepee Boy comes to me in the middle of the night to inform me that after five nights of dry pull-ups, he’s gone and peed right through a pillow and blanket on the first night back to underpants. >.<

With two slices of pork in the fridge left from making the tonkatsu yesterday, I decided to make another recipe from Easy Japanese Cooking: Bento Love. I’d bought a small head of cabbage to try making tsukemono and since it was probably too much anyway, taking four leaves off for two bento seemed like a nice way to make use of it all.

Lately I’ve been trying a lot harder to make use of all the food in my fridge and have been doing pretty good. Before, my eggs would go bad before I was ready to use them, my bags of veggies would rot, my tomatoes would be no good when I remembered them, etc. Now that I’m making Mr. Pikko bento every day, it seems much easier to use up the food. It feels nice!

Since I was making two lunches, you’d think I’d cook this together, but I ended up cooking two separate single serving batches. Mine had rice with ume, pork and cabbage stir fry, crab tamagoyaki, and simmered kabocha. I had made the kabocha last night and this morning, with my trusty new Tamagoyaki Pan & Spatula, I made a tamagoyaki roll in FIVE MINUTES. This is totally unheard of for me, but it happened. This pan is a wonderful thing.

Mr. Pikko doesn’t like ume, so I just left his rice white and added a tomato for red. The bentos definitely needed more green, but I was late already because I accidentally slept in til 6. The recipe didn’t call for grated carrot, but I wanted more color than the stir fry provided and it was quick. I simply grated two baby carrots over each batch. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have a themed lunch for both of us. It will amuse me greatly for him to open up a cutesy lunch by surprise. *snicker*

My new lens should be arriving today, woohoo!