Chicken Katsu Bento (297)

This weekend is your last chance to enter my 200k Bento Contest! Please don’t be intimidated by last year’s entries. If you have a bento of yours that you want to enter and the photo quality is decent, please send it in and try your luck. 🙂

The other day, Baby Girl was drawing with a sharpie pen and suddenly decided she wanted to draw on her stomach. She decided to draw a capital ‘I’ for some reason. So what does this mean? This means I have been getting a kick out of telling people that she’s got a black eye. GET IT? A black ‘I’? HAHA! Mr. Pikko gave me the “Oh yes, that’s… hilarious…” weird look, but I still think it’s a riot.

I’m having chicken katsu leftovers today. No pigs, but I see elephants! And a bear! I’ve even got a spiffy graphic showing how I put this together!

The chicken katsu is very simple to make. Simple enough where I can just make it without following any recipe. For those not as familiar with it as me though:

Chicken Katsu

boneless, skinless chicken thighs
eggs, beaten
flour for dredging
1 bag panko (Japanese bread crumbs)
salt to taste
pepper to taste
oil for frying

1. Remove fat from chicken and pound until flat. Season with salt and pepper.
2. Prepare dishes for dipping: one with eggs, one with flour, one with panko. How many eggs you need depends on how much chicken you are frying.
3. Dredge the chicken in the flour, then the egg, then the panko. Fry in oil until golden brown.
4. Slice into strips.

Easy peasy Japanesey! Works exactly the same with pork cutlets, only you don’t have to pound those. I like to use the thin ones but you can use thicker boneless chops. Don’t even make katsu with bones. Just no.

Here is my little bento tutorial picture. If people like these, maybe I’ll do them more often. I’m not too happy that I got the tilt wrong in the last photo though. Anyway, after the last step, I added the raspberries in a little paper cup. The sauce container was in the way, so I lifted that up and put part of the cup under it. Finally, I sprinkled furikake onto the rice.

To make the asparagus, I simply chop it to the sizes I want with the slant for a nice look, then add it to a small frying pan with olive oil. I sprinkle garlic salt on and fry it until it turns a nice bright green, removing it from the heat soon after.

Back when I was doing Weight Watchers, you were required to eat like a tablespoon of healthy oil per day, so this stuff fried in olive oil was tasty and fit right into the Core diet. Take care not to overcook it, or the leftover heat will make it limp and gross.

This weekend is UFC 94, BJ Penn vs Georges St. Pierre. Needless to say, I’m terribly excited. As much as I like GSP, I have to support the local Hilo boy. I hope they show footage of Hilo during the promos, that always pleases me greatly.