Zojirushi Mini Bento Giveaway

Last year, I made you guys tell me what you’d pack in a Zojirushi Ms. Bento in order to win one and then later asked you to fill out a survey to win a Mr. Bento. This year, the folks at Zojirushi were kind enough to send me some of their brand spanking new Zojirushi Mini Bento Stainless Lunch Jars!

Before you squeal, back off! This one’s mine! Their PR rep was kind enough to send me one of each of their new designs, so the giveaway will be for the just-as-gorgeous green fruit and flower set. Baby Girl kept asking to have this one, but since I already have a different green mini bento set, I chose to go for color diversity. But before I get to the details on how you enter, let’s take a look at my lunch.

The capacity for the two side dishes seems to be bigger than the original mini bento, which may have been discontinued because I don’t see it on Amazon. That’s a shame, since we used that one to make the miniature loco moco bento in Yum-Yum Bento Box: Fresh Recipes for Adorable Lunches.

I thought about doing a charaben for this one, but decided I’d better start with something simple, since people serious about packing home lunch but not necessarily about the cute factor might be more likely to get this jar than a kawaii box. It took me about 10 minutes to pack this, since I had to boil the quail egg. I ripped chicken off of a leftover Costco chicken, then added slices of cucumber kim chee, a quail egg, and a grape tomato. In the other half, I have cherry and watermelon, a sure sign of the arrival of summer. In the thermal jar, there’s fresh rice topped with ume furikake.

I have to talk about the bag because the bag is just too cool. It’s fairly large at about 11″ wide, so it’s basically the size of a small purse. There’s a pretty zipper that goes all across the top and inside is enough space for all three sections of the bento and a little foldaway holder for your drink, kept snugly in place. There’s a matching set of chopsticks and a cute little inner pocket to tuck it into along with a small snack.

To enter, I’ll need you to tell me what your favorite Zojirushi product is. It doesn’t have to be something you own because as we all know, Zojirushi is on the higher end of the product line and therefore costs more. Are you like me and gaze lovingly at their rice cookers? (I am waiting until my Panasonic dies, but the dang thing still works.) If there’s something of theirs that you’ve always loved, tell me what it is and why! I’ll close this drawing in one week and hopefully announce a winner around the 14th. Good luck!

Yesterday, while shopping for chocolate won ton ingredients, I passed by the Foodland deli and saw some menpachi. I immediately had flashbacks to our family vacations to Kapoho, where our grandpa, who we called Jichan, would do all sorts of grandpa things. For instance, he’d wade across the channel to go catch opai for us to use as bait for fishing. He was a gruff old guy who called all his female grandchildren by one name, Girl. Except for my brother, the lone boy, he was either his name or just “Boy”.

At the time, I think all of us girls were annoyed at least a couple times by that, but now, years later when Jichan is gone, we’d all crack up laughing now if anyone pretended to be him by calling someone with, “Eh! Girl!”

One of the things I remember about him was his menpachi miso soup. Menpachi was a really fun fish to catch because it fought so hard and was a nice, bright, pretty red and Jichan loved to throw them in a pot of miso soup and then gross us all out by sucking the eyeballs. I have no idea if I ever ate a bowl of his soup in my life, but suddenly while standing in Foodland, I just had to have some. Memories do that to you, I guess.

I went home and looked online and found out that it’s dirt easy to make. You basically just simmer the fish and add miso.

I couldn’t find my scaling thinger and it was 9 at night, so I actually scaled the fish with my fingers and a butter knife, slowly peeling them away so that I wouldn’t flick them all over the kitchen. This took forever.

I stuck them in a pot of boiling water and they cooked pretty fast, within 5 minutes or so. I lowered the heat and let it simmer for half an hour, then came back to peel out bones.

Next to opakapaka, I think menpachi is my next favorite fish, simply because it’s sooo soft. The downside is that it’s got like 500 bones in it, but to me, it’s still worth eating. I added miso and let it simmer more to break up the miso.

I packed some for breakfast today in a.. oh! What’s this? Is that a pink Zojirushi Stainless Steel Food Jar? Why, yes it is! I also have one of these to giveaway too, for those of you that stuck around to read my story about Jichan’s soup.

To enter to win this jar, tell me what you’d pack in here. Soup? Tea? Something cold?

I put hot soup into this jar this morning and forgot that I should just leave it out and I stuck it in the fridge. When I took the jar out at 11:30 to eat the soup, it was actually still warm, which boggled my mind, since I’d packed it 4 1/2 hours earlier.

Many thanks to Zojirushi for sponsoring this giveaway and for giving me two awesome thermal products to review and use!