Bring on the Bentos

So lately I've gone on a bit of a bento binge. Watching lots of anime has inspired me to cook more japanese food, and to buy more bento boxes. (My favourite sites are Bentoland and Bento and Co). I recently bought a shikiri compartment bento (pictured below) and an adorable book-shaped one.

So while I haven't cooked anything new this week, I have enjoyed yummy lunches packed with various dishes I made during a day-long cooking frenzy last weekend.

Behold, my delicious lunches:

Peanuts, currants and pumpkin seeds, easy sesame carrot salad, nasu dengaku eggplant, and rice.

Carrot salad, tamagoyaki, shuumai dumpling, garlic spinach, Japanese potato salad, soy-lime tofu with coconut peanut sauce, and brown rice.

Dumplings steaming!

Omelettes are harder than they look...

Imo yokan jelly snack (from Daiso), tofu, currants, potato salad, spinach, tamagoyaki, pumpkin water chestnut wontons, and rice.

New Shikiri bento box!

Pesto risotto with garlic roast zucchini, spinach, tamagoyaki, tofu, potato salad, Bio cheese flowers, and mushroom steamed bun. 

For the buns, I used the sauce from Terry Romero's BBQ seitan buns to cook the mushrooms in, and the simple dough from Jamie Oliver that I featured in the Tofu Dim Sum post.

The dough for these is genius in its simplicity, the only hard part is getting the bloody things closed so they don't leak!

Pumpkin wonton, spinach, tofu, Bio cheese, carrot salad, and sweet potato latkes with apple sauce. I used Isa's regular latke recipe for these, swapping some of the potatoes for sweet potatoes.

Has anyone else ever made bentos? I would love to start up a vegan lunch box photo pool on Facebook. :-)

Week 7: Pumpkin Tomato Curry and Chandra Malai Kofta

Pumpkin curry

This was a surprisingly easy recipe from a random Penguin curry book I have, that I discovered when flipping through my cookbooks for something to do with the Pumpkin I had.

Oh man, I wish I could transmit scent through this blog because it smelled amazing, with just the Pumpkin, vegan butter and Cumin seeds. Mmm.

Quick, easy and delicious, this is going to be one of my new staples, along with the chickpea curry I love. The only ingredients in this really are Pumpkin, ghee, Cumin seeds, onion, ginger, garlic, tomatoes, turmeric and Chili. I also added amchoor powder because I had it and thought it might add to the flavour.

I was craving the Pumpkin Lakhnawi from my favourite Indian takeaway place and this really hit the spot.

Malai Kofta

This was actually a lot easier than I'd thought, providing you remember to soak the nuts or as Isa says "always be soaking"! Which I am not, but luckily I did remember.

I like that this is made mostly from ingredients I usually have on hand (except Panko Crumbs). :-)

The kofta mixture came out a little too wet, so I added some more Panko Crumbs, but then it didn't hold together super well when frying (side note: I am always frying with Coconut oil from now on. Yum.), maybe because I tried to chop the Zucchini instead of shredding it finely due to not being able to locate my grater. Oh well.

The sauce was super thick and creamy and amazing. If anything, maybe slightly too rich, but so worth the time put in. It would be equally as good just poured over some steamed veggies. Definitely making again!

Time for food porn photos:

Week 6: Black Rice and Cashews

This week's dish is from Robin Aisbell's Big Vegan. (I have a beloved sweet potato gnocchi recipe from this book that I make regularly, it is divine.)

Big Vegan

It's been a long week, so I decided to go for something a little easier - black rice with cashews. I also added in some other veggies (zucchini, red Bell peppers and mushrooms) for some colour, but the rice kind of overcame all their colour and in the end the whole thing was black. Oh well!

In the end it turned out a little too salty for me, what with the Miso as well as the vegetable stock. I probably wouldn't make this again, but I would like to try black rice in more dishes. :-) 

Week 4 - Green green risotto

Alas, time got away from me again last week, who would have thought just one new recipe a week was such a challenge?! But I did come through with another delicious dish from Isa Does It:

Pesto Risotto with Roast Zucchini

Isa is the first to admit that risotto can often go awry and though I haven't had a lot of experience with cooking risotto, this one turned out to be mostly foolproof. Like many Isa recipes, it takes a little longer, but is so worth it.

I always love recipes that are not only rich and delicious but also filled with things that are good for me (which doesn't always go hand in hand in my kitchen). I liked how green and appealing my shopping trolley looked with all the herbs and zucchinis!

There's several steps involved in this, but if you're good at multitasking (and make the pesto ahead) it shouldn't take much longer than 30-40 minutes.

The pesto hit a bit of a road bump when I got home and realised I'd picked up parsley instead of coriander by mistake, which is far too pungent to add into this kind of combination. I also couldn't find fresh thyme so I substituted fresh marjoram, which still seemed to work pretty well.

The zucchini went into the oven while I started the onion and rice mixture:

After that it was just alternating the adding of stock and pesto until they were all absorbed and it was very creamy:

I also had some pine nuts slowly toasting in a pan so I could add these for garnish with the zucchini on top of the risotto:

In a word: yum. The garlicky zucchini was simple but delicious, and the risotto so flavourful and pretty. Would definitely make it again, if I had some pesto pre-prepared. A great warm and hearty meal for cold days. What's your favourite winter recipe?