A Bento Tragedy and Two Salmon Bentos

This morning a terrible thing happened. I made my bento for the day and was putting the strap around the box when suddenly the lunch, clearly distraught and sick of its rather short life, launched itself out of my hands and plummeted down three feet to the kitchen floor below. I feel terrible, like I should have done more. Would therapy have helped? Add to that, my tummy is rumbling…

Naturally, I was pretty pissed at myself. I managed to shriek and scoop up the rice, salmon, and one asparagus spear within a few seconds, but the rest I had to let go. I angrily shoved my salvaged food into a Ziploc bag and took it to work in my purse, muttering under my breath.

I have to be honest though, it was my own fault. This box is very similar to this one on Amazon and it is two tiers with a cover. The cover completely covers the top tier, which means that it is also held in place by that tier. I did not have time to fill the top tier and the corn wasn’t fitting. Late as it is, I didn’t have time to take out the corn and slice the bottom off, so I just tried to pack the cover on without the top tier. This made the cover slip right off and the bottom tier suffered its tragic fall.

I went out and bought some miso soup to help make up for the loss of veggies, but I’m still upset over it. Poor box choice, poor packing, sigh.

Before it met its end, the box consisted of salmon pan fried in olive oil, salt, and pepper. I used some nuked frozen Gen-Ji-Mai rice, garlic asparagus, corn slice, sweet potato, and baby Roma tomato for the rest. What I learned from this is that I should cut the salmon before I fry it because the cuts looked terrible when I cut it cooked. I managed it hide it by arranging the pieces a certain way.

Going back to the rice, I tried out the Gen-Ji-Mai rice last week in a musubi.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I despise brown rice. I find it nasty, course, and generally “not white rice”. Gen-Ji-Mai rice, however, is actually tolerable for me, enough where I’ve actually cooked entire pots of it to go with stew or other saucy foods. The bag boasts that it’s “quick cooking”, which is something I also hate about brown rice, how LONG it takes to cook. I made this in my rice cooker on the quick cook setting and shockingly, at the end of the 20 minutes, my rice was done. It was soft and fluffy enough to make a good musubi and tasted pretty good.

Besides the musubi, I have 1 1/2 fish patties that my sis-in-law bought from a market for dinner along with some broccoli, Okinawan sweet potato, leftover potato salad, yellow tomato, and a strawberry. I ended up pretty stuffed, so I think next time I’ll only take 1 patty and add more veggies or fruit.

If you’re interested in the box I used, there’s a similar one available on Amazon. Mine is a Doraemon box and I can’t recall where I got it. I recently looked through my bento box collection and I really have a serious addiction problem with boxes. I haven’t counted them, but I’m pretty sure I have over a hundred by now and I haven’t used maybe 10 of them yet. I’ll take a picture of all of them eventually to scare all of you.