Yakisoba Bento (288)

I was going absolutely bonkers last night trying and trying to figure out why the heck my comments re-direct was sending everyone to a 500 Internal Server Error page. I finally discovered that it was a comments plugin that was messing things up, so now things are back to normal. It’s a good thing too, I was almost out of hair.

Something else that’s new is my domain. I bought AIBento.net yesterday so that people didn’t have to type adventuresinbentomaking.com out. It’s got a nice double meaning. “Ai” means love in Japanese, making it “love bento” and then the AI obviously is an acronym for “adventures in” so that worked out nicely in my opinion. ^_^

Today I woke up on time for once, mostly because when I went to bed last night there were two munchkins spread out on it and one Mr. Pikko sleeping on 4 inches of bed space. Their sheets were still being dried after Baby Girl decided to have a pee pool party in their bed the other day. I huddled in and found myself a little space next to the wall where my head normally goes and proceeded to have a terrible night of sleep. Mr. Pikko didn’t fare any better by the look on his face this morning. I finally got a chance to use my Zojirushi Mr. Bento Stainless-Steel lined Lunch Jar, Silver that I got for Christmas. Woohoo!

We actually left the house at a decent time today, what a miracle! It’s a nice spread too, don’t you agree? Anyway, read on and I’ll show you how I made it.

I decided to try a package of yakisoba I saw at Marukai a while back. The instructions and front are entirely in Japanese, so I had to ask Susperia to tell me what it is actually called. I knew it was yakisoba from the picture, but she says the front says “Nisshin Yakisoba”. Thankfully, I was able to follow the instructions by the pictures. When I bought it I had no idea what was inside, so I was pretty surprised when I opened it up to find a package of instant ramen noodles. But hey, the picture looked good and I am a real sucker for instant noodles anyway, so I proceeded as planned.

You would think from the image that I’m making a Sapporo Ichiban Original flavor ramen (my favorite instant brand), but it’s not! It called for 200 ml of water and thank goodness my Pyrex measuring cup has ml on the side or I’d have been in trouble. Once the water was almost gone, I put it on the side and began to stir fry some sliced ham, bell pepper, carrot, and broccoli in olive oil in another pan.

If you’re looking at this picture and thinking how gross my frying pan is, quit it! This little pan has been with me since my dorming days at UH Manoa and in college you just don’t care what it looks like all that much. Or that you should be washing it instead of letting it stew in muck for a week. It has nostalgic value for me… Plus, it’s the only pan that I can cook eggs in without killing them. And yes, I’m standing in my light. I really should take a photography class…

I added the noodles and if you go back and look at the package, the noodles look really long. It was extremely difficult to mix everything, so I got out my shears and made some snips into the middle of the pile. After that, I packed it all in to the large container and topped it with two little sprigs of parsley from my pot of herbs out in the yard.

I was really surprised in the end how it looked. It came out  a lot better than I would have expected from instant dried noodles. I made one quick serving of miso soup. I had this old bag of instant miso soup packets from Costco which comes with the wakame, tofu, and green onions freeze dried in one packet and then the miso in the other. The first time I tried it I thought it tasted like ass, but I wanted to give it another try instead of wasting it. When I opened the miso however, it was black, so I tossed all the miso packets and kept the toppings. I used a tablespoon of akamiso, 1 cup of water, and 1/8 tsp of granulated dashi. I added the packet of toppings and ended up with a nice single serving of miso soup. It took me all of 5 minutes!

For my veggies layer I have defrosted edamame and baby carrots with the stumps cut off. This bag I got from Costco actually tastes good, probably because they were the carrot tips and taste younger. I really hate when I buy a bag of baby carrots and they all taste dry and bitter cause then I have to figure out some way to cook like a thousand carrots. (which I never do) For my fruits I have black grapes and sliced Fairchild tangerine, which is a type of tangerine that comes with a minimum of 50 seeds per fruit. I’m so skipping that Costco bag next time.

I took out my lunch not too long ago and just as promised by Zojirushi, my cold containers are cold and my hot containers are hot. Wewt!