Bento for a long trip

I've been sooooo busy running around town and other towns over bureaucracy I haven't posted much, but it'll soon be over!

Last week I packed these bentos around 2 am to get up at 6. Due to some paperwork, I had to travel to Porto, one of the major towns in Portugal. It was a 7 hour trip. Just for paperwork you might ask?

Nope! The only store that sell bento related items is located there, by coincidence :) not like I planned it on purpose.

My lunch consisted of peach, kiwi, hard boiled eggs, broccoli, carrot and rice with flavours and nori.

 

His lunch: same thing except instead of eggs he got some teriyaki salmon with a pinch of miso.

For the onigiris I bought 3 different flavour packs:

- wakame and salmon;

- arame and shiitake;

- nori, bonito and ume.

I enjoyed them while the onigiris were warm, but while cold, I couldn't eat it.

I was very excited to go to the store because they sell tamagoyaki frying pans and powdered green tea, had actually saved up some money for wasting at the store but they had ran out of both things and the variety was a bit limited. The owner had one of those furry rabbits walking around the store, it was so adorable!

I ended up buying...

Strawberry flavoured pocky~ There was one "for men" with dark chocolate but the price wasn't worth it.

I loved the inside package :D it has a dog, a cat and a hamster.

and here's the back side:

I guess there's no other way than to order on the web.

Egg pudding

This was my weekend experiment!

I know, it doesn't look like an egg pudding at all.. that's because I used brown sugar instead of refined sugar. I have tried in so many ways to replace sugar with fructose or another kind of sugar that is not so harmful, but the cakes and puddings fall a lot as you can see. The recipe I used contained sugar,eggs,milk and lemon zest, nothing else, the only change I did was on the sugar.

A little note to anyone who uses brown sugar, it is sweeter than normal one! Lucky me, the pudding mold I have is small so the top less sweet part of the pudding mix went first and I used a pan for the rest.

This is how it looked in the middle of cooking. It's a very handy mold that came with the pan so I can just pull it out and it fits perfectly. As for the pan cooking.... It didn't go so well

I managed to make the upper pot not touch the lower one and stay in place like this, but the heat didn't go through and it still looked the same after two hours. I gave up and as soon as it cooled off we ate it, and at the first bite... ugh too sweet for me! I was so sad because I love egg pudding but it was horribly sweet and just thinking I had another one in the fridge waiting to be eaten :( My bf loved it which made me a bit relieved because at least I wasn't going to waste too much food. The next day, we tried the pudding that actually cooked and it wasn't that unpleasant, I guess the sugar stayed on the bottom of the mix and all of it went to the pot mold.

It shrank but it was tasty and consistent with no bubbles inside :) Next time I'll simply adjust the sugar to 1/3 of what I used.

Bon apetit!

Springy bentos

Oh lovely spring! And sweet tasty strawberries! These were my first strawberries of this year, I was dieing to get some strawberries :D

This bento was unexpectedly fun to make. I boiled a few eggs because usually either I break one, ruin them pealing or they weren't so okay. My grandparents brought SO MANY eggs I don't know what to do with them! Maybe cake or pudding?

Anyway, when I peeled them one of them got ruined so I used the egg yolk only. It suddenly occurred me, why not make chicken ou of the eggs? I've seen it made, I can always try and hope it'll go okay. Usually when I learn something I like to watch people make it and then I can recreate it much better than from reading a recipe alone. And it turned out the way it did.

Some couscous with nori on top, decorated eggs with carrot and nori and a little green to add colour. And of course, the strawberries!! I did get hungry in the afternoon but it's okay :P

I also packed one for my dear with roughly the same things:



Omelet, strawberries, carrot, couscous and meatloaf (or i think it's called that)

I thought the chicken wouldn't be such a good approach to his lunch. It's quite nice to make 2 bentos because I can make one a bit more childish and the other one a little elegant.

Also, this last weekend I made gyoza but forgot to take pictures at he final product. When I use them I'll make sure to show you ^_^

Two meals

It's been a long week and too many things to do/places to go. I did some cooking but nothing too complicated:

Thursday's lunch

I had to use up the eggplants on my fridge but I didn't expect to suddenly have my bf say he wanted the ones I made for myself.  I added the furikake because it had no colour but still... It has been awfully cold here (for me of course, it's about 2ºC and I think I'm going to die already) and the problem of having a big kitchen is the cold. No matter what I put there, it'll get me freezing and running back to the very warm bedroom. So I avoid cooking too much at this time.

The lunch consists on eggplant with turkey sauté'd, plain rice topped with furikake and the eggplant I showed the recipe on a previous post. This time I put the chili peppers and it was wonderful. I never liked eggplant because my mum didn't know that the sour flavour could be removed and it was always so yucky... Now I love it and I can cook with it with pleasure.

Friday's lunch

Friday was also a rush thing... I only remembered to make next day's lunch at midnight and by then I was in bed, ready to sleep. This was one of the few I made in the morning; I find it too hard for me to wake up and start going at it in the kitchen. Took me around 5 to 7 minutes to scramble the eggs, warm up the rice, slice the tomato and fry the korokke. After cooling/packing, I went right back to bed with my cats.

This week I didn't put much veggies because the supermarket's veggies were in very bad shape. It annoys me a lot to have to go through 30 zucchini to find that 29 are rotten or almost there and 1 is old but still not rotting. I have tried finding other places to get my veggies but they don't really change much. It depends on the week I guess.

If I'm lucky, I'll get a few things from Japan on Monday so I'll save the rest for when I can talk about those ^^

Have a wonderful weekend!

Omurice

I've done this before but not for lunch ^^

I messed up the ketchup but didn't have time to re-make it :P

For veggies, there's cucumber, carrot, broccoli and cherry tomatoes. For the omurice I followed another Cooking with dog recipe which works quite nicely. I messed up at first, forgot to mix the rice >.< with the rest.

There's something I want to try for a bento but I'm not sure how to get blue colouring, not using artificial food colouring.  Do you have any advice about how, and what to colour to get a nice blue colour?

Thanks for reading :D

Ponyo

We saw "Gake no Ue no Ponyo" this weekend and I really wanted to do something related to the movie. This is what it turned out to be:

Red bell pepper for the body with a hard-boiled egg, turkey ham for the face, carrot for the hair and tongue, nori for the mouth, nose and eye. Underneath it there's shrimp rice. I found it funny to stuff the cherry tomato with broccoli inside :D

At first I wanted to do the girl version but I wasn't sure how to but after scrolling through the movie a few times, I came across one of the parts where I wanted to squeeze the screen.

I was planning to make something for Valentine's day and join the valentine's with red colours to try and enter this month's B.O.M.B Challenge, but something came up and I won't be able to do anything for Valentine's, so I made this. Hopefully you'll be able to recognize it as Ponyo xD.

This was my second attempt on making a character and I will remind myself to either get a surgeon's knife next time, or never cut things out of bell peppers again. It took me about 40 minutes because I messed up the bellpepper and cut it in the wrong direction (the hand should be on the upper part and the eye on the lower part, not the other way around. Then the ham on her face ripped about 2 times so I put 2 slices instead of one and I could go on complaining more but it's pointless. Before posting this I asked 2 friends of mine to tell me what it was, and they guessed it right, so it can't be THAT bad.

I've got the rest of the week planned already so I'll be sure to post some more foodies ^^ Have a nice week!

How to cook farinheira

First of all I'd like to wish you all a Happy new year!! As promised, here is the farinheira with scrambled eggs:

This is one of the various versions you can cook farinheira.





We were so hungry this was the only picutre I remembered to take before eating it.
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For those who don't know what farinheira is here's a rough explanation of how it's made and what's in it:

Mix in a bowl: wheat flour, corn flower, garlic, melted lard, paprika, ground pepper, orange juice, vinegar and water until the consistency is right. Then you grab a pork's dry intestines (used for home-made farinheiras) or plastic that resembles the same texture elasticity of the pork's intestines (use in d Industrial) and fill it to 2/3 of the total size. After separating and closing them up, they are smoked for 2-3 days and end up drying in the sun. They're still not cooked at this point, just smoked, you should cook them after this or rub in olive oil and they preserve for a year. I prefer to freeze mine since I don't have a dry dark place to put them. I do not make my own because it's a very big mess and the amount of lard is not so healthy at all.





Since mine was frozen I put it in the microwave (after cutting the metal clips on each tip) for about 2 minutes until I can remove the skin.





You should carefully remove it with a sharpen knife or rip it with your fingers. Don't try to squeeze it out or you'll lose half of the content that glues to the skin. Remember, the skin is NOT edible so make sure to remove it.



When all of it is removed, mash or cut the farinheira into chunks. Don't worry if they're too big, you'll be crushing them almost until it's ready sothe bits will get smaller.Turn on the heat. You won't need oil, even with a sticking pan like mine,because of all the lard the farinheira has.







Keep it on medium-high heat until the bits are small and it looks like this. As you can see, I did not add anything else to the pan and you can see the lard. At this point, drop some eggs inside. I used the ones I had at home at the moment but you can use more or less depending on your taste.







You can beat the eggs first if you want an even colour or put them in like this for yellow/white chunks in the middle. I didn't have time to beat them beforehand so I dropped them inside. The different colour of the egg yolks is because the large yolks were from the supermarket and the smaller ones from my grandparents' chickens which are from a smaller race, therefore lay smaller eggs.

Keep the heat on medium-high and mix it well until the egg is almost cooked. You can leave it moister or dryer by adjusting the cooking time here. I like mine well cooked. And the final version is on the top (the first picture I showed) since as I said before, hunger was stronger and soon after it was all gone.

Farinheira can also be boiled or put in a stew, but I don't use it like that so, if I eat it at some relatives' house, I'll be sure to take pictures!



Enjoy your kitchen time!



And if anyone wants the recipe for how to make the farinheira by themselves, leave a comment and I'll e-mail you with the values. I do not own the recipe but I'll translate it for you if asked.

Onigiri

As I was making dinner for myself, I entertained myself doing tomorrow's lunch, about the third one I make for myself:

half an egg, some sauté'd vegetables, fried shrimp with garlic and the last piece of japanese rice I had in the freezer. It was kind of...not cute whatsoever so I shaped the rice and cut some nori. Next time I'll remember to cut the nori but not to put it in there before morning! But now it's done, I guess I was in a rush to take the picture and forgot that part. I didn't fill up the tupperware because it's quite big (about 1000ml) which I don't fill for my bf, so I put in a little less for me than his usual.

Let's see if I keep the "cooking for myself" mood :D I'm quite enjoying it.

Little Nest

I am pretty bored today, and my attempts in the kitchen have been a failure because I'm alone. It seems I can only cook well when I have someone else to eat what I'm making. So I decided to contradict that and tried this out:

I'm not really sure why it came into my mind but I made a list of things I had home and the idea popped into my head. Why not? So, this is my dinner with a couple more things, but I wanted to cook this in specific.

It actually turned out differently than I expected so I had to put the peas by the side instead of in the egg because I used small eggs which have almost no white part.

Blue!

Yesterday I was on a cooking spree! I even decided to dye an egg and some cauliflower blue ^^

 

Tho, I forgot to and used the blue tupperware, which makes it a lot of blue for the eye, more than I expected when I started taking pictures and noticed.

We have:

- Hard boiled egg dyed with red cabbage;

- cooked cow ribs;

- Broccoli and cauliflower;

- Japanese rice with sesame seeds on top.

I started the spree with the pie, followed by a big pan of rice:

I don't have a rice cooker and I know it doesn't taste the same, but I really like short grained rice and the restaurant I used to work in made rice this way and only used the rice cooker to keep it warm. It turned out really well, much better than the last 2 times so we used up some wamr before freezing the rest. Here is the rice in the freezer (I forgot to take pictures of it outside the freezer)

1kg of rice gave about 26 portions of rice (I shape them in onigiris because it keeps the rice from getting squished and looking like purée. Whenever we want rice, we grab some and defrost it so it saves up a lot of time.

Farinheira with scrambled eggs

Hi everyone, it's finally starting to rain! I really love the rain and it's started to cool too. I don't usually buy farinheira but my grandparents offered me some and they were calling for me from the freezer so I used them up.

This is a VERY high caloric dish, traditional from my country Portugal. I usually do it when I need something done quickly but only when someone brings the farinheiras for me, or else I just don't do it (last time i did this was on Spring). Farinheira with scrambled eggs is usually an appetizer and people don't make meals out of it (at least not traditionally, I know a couple of people who cook this for meals).

You can see in the picture that the balance is completely off: I made too much protein and too little vegetables. Well, the veggies shrank as I sauté'd them and the couscous was put in there in a hurry. So from left to right we have:

- Sauté'd vegetable mix;

- Couscous with 2 olives on top;

- Farinheira with scrambled eggs.

I was satisfied with how fast I could assemble this and how much I enjoyed multi-tasking in the kitchen while the bf washed the dishes. I have to start thinking of next week's dishes >.<

Kirby

Something I do not own but tried to make it out of an image:

 

First of all I had no idea what I was going to do because since last week was a bit busy, I couldn't manage to get all the ingredients for what I planned, so I had to adapt something and remembered this image I wanted to do some time ago. You can still tell I was missing stuff like the nori. I tried making Kirby's eyes with some egg but they looked too weird so i grabbed some Tonkatsu sauce and a fork and "painted" them on the ham.

Here we have:

- Pasta;

- Turkey strogonoff;

- Egg for the stars;

- Turkey ham, carrot, tonkatsu sauce and ketchup for Kirby;

- Cucumber.

That's all for today!

Bento lunch

I've been wanting to do this for a looong long time, and I didn't do so bad.

 

Please ignore the yellow broccoli, I completely forgot about it while I was cooking the rest so it overcooked

From left to right we have:

- Shrimp with tomato sauce and lettuce underneath to make a change of color from the silicone cupcakes;

- Red cabbage with a pinch of salt and vinegar;

- Tamagoyaki (without the dashi because I haven't found it in my city yet)

- Broccoli;

- Rice with carrot on top.

Also, this week I have planned all week days with food so you should expect some new posts this week. (last week I completely forgot to plan, so i had to think on the clock, it didn't turn out well)

Codfish with eggs and potatoes

A traditional portuguese dish that is quite fast to made but very high caloric. I hadn't made it in months and since I've been running short on ideas, I had to cook something.

 

In the end, it came up quite funny. I cut the tomato and blanched the greenies there. For more color I cut some carrot and started making a little garden. I know it's autumn, it was something spontaneous.