Salmon Fried Rice Bento (276)

I’ve been using Twitter now for a few months and I’m pretty addicted. If any of you want to get my silly tweets, I’m Pikko (durr) over there. Occasionally I post while shopping at Marukai, but mostly I twitter while bored. I’ll try to post more bento related things in the coming months.

This morning I actually got up with only one snooze session, so I was actually able to cook a decent amount AND eat breakfast to boot. I’d found some pre-prepared (yeah, that doesn’t make much sense) packets of random stuff at Marukai. Some have Japanese-only instructions, so I usually take a picture and make Erika look at it to tell me what to do. Yes, I am a pathetic excuse for a Japanese American.

I used two of them this morning; one tamagoyaki packet and one salmon fried rice packet.

Marukai has started a newsletter that comes with their ads and included in the newsletter are these really cool instruction sheets for using their featured products. BITCHIN! I am quite proud to say that I have actually been USING my Marukai membership this year, unlike previous years when I’d buy the $10 membership then forget to go back for approximately 13 months, at which point I’d have to renew again. Grrr!

Mixing this up was really easy, though I didn’t do so well cooking it. I used a regular skillet that was way too big and had a little hill in the middle, causing the egg to ring around the edges. The egg curse is obviously still alive and well.

My first mistake was to not squish the crab to be a bit more round. I’ll have to experiment again. My next mistake was to let the egg cook too much, so it didn’t stick very well to each layer and to the crab. On a positive note, it was really tasty!

The salmon fried rice was really easy. I cooked one cup of rice (to get two cups rice) and fried an egg in oil, scrambling it up in the pan to get the little egg bits. I added the rice, then sprinkled the seasoning pack onto it. The package came with 3 packs, so it’s got a good amount of usage in each. I added fish sausage hearts. Buddy asked for one heart after I snapped the picture and then happily proclaimed, “I LIKE IT!” Awww!

I used a Putifresh banana box today and have one for sale:

These two items together will be $6, but I think I might have a matching set of chopsticks as well. If I do, the set will be $8. Comment if you want it! I still have one more box from previous sales to send out since me being a total noob, sent the wrong boxes to two people. For this reason, I’m only going to put another one up after I send the previous one out. >.< Though I only have one tier shown here (I ran out of time), the box has two tiers. It has no strap, so if you need one, I recommend using either a recycled produce rubberband or buy a strap from Ichiban Kan.

Christmas is coming up soon, which has me panicking. With the state of the economy, I feel under pressure to provide gifts with more meaning and usefulness. Of course, the bento freak in me says that bento makes for a perfect gift because it encourages home lunches as opposed to expensive plate lunches. I’ve added one of the new Amazon widgets, check it out and see if you can get someone new to bento one of the goodies I have on my list!