Pink Ribbon Bento (399)

Well, it’s been an exciting morning watching the Twitter frenzy over the Balloon Boy, who it turns out, isn’t a Balloon Boy. At least, I’m hoping not. I hope we hear later today that him and his punk brother decided to prank their parents for not letting them watch a late movie or something. That would sure be a heck of a lot better than the alternative. I’ll take almost losing Buddy in Sears over thinking my son was in a helium balloon I stupidly left in my backyard any day.

As many of you may know, October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so in honor of that, I present my 399th bento.

I got the idea for this the other day as I was experimenting with usuyaki tamago sheets. I was practicing making some for Bento 400 and ending up thinking this one up. It came out just how I wanted it to, hooray!

Since making a bento with a pink ribbon on it doesn’t really do much, I’d like to take this a little further by offering to donate $0.25 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure for every comment made on this blog posting. (One comment per person.) I’d love to get at least a hundred comments, so please spread the word! I’ll take entries until the end of the month.

I wish I could make it more, but we just got word of a 5% paycut/furloughs. Ouch.

I actually had to make two omelets this morning because my first one bought a one-way ticket on the Fail Plane to Sucksville. I used a whole beaten egg and added one drop of red food coloring. This left me with a great, thick omelet and I was quite amazed at myself for not screwing it up. The only problem was it was freaking ORANGE. Damned yolk. I cracked yet another egg and this time used only the egg white.

After I beat it and strained it in a sieve, I didn’t have much egg, so I thought one drop might be too much. I put the drop of food coloring on my finger and let some of it drip off, then dipped my finger in (it was clean!) the egg whites to add the color. I then added about 1/2 a teaspoon of potato starch and some water. I’d read about making these egg sheets somewhere online after seeing them in a Japanese bento book and the recipes said to use potato starch or cornstarch. I’ve since found that potato starch is much better than cornstarch. I’m in love with the stuff!!

I heated a pan on medium heat, then added oil, then lowered the heat down to 2. The omelet with the yolk in it was much thicker and hardier than the egg white one, but the color combo turned out just right for the color I wanted and in the end, the thinner omelet made it easier to make the ribbon stick without having to hold it down with a piece of raw spaghetti.

The ribbon rests on top of a brown rice musubi wrapped in nori. The food around it consists of the rest of yesterday’s salmon, Okinawan sweet potato, asparagus, a grape tomato, and some mandarin orange slices. I thought the ribbon turned out quite nicely. It was easy to make, so if you want to give it a try, please do!

In other news, I’ve got some food that I tried out from Asian Food Grocer. The Foodbuzz Tastemaker Program gave us $30 to spend and it’s a good thing because their shipping prices to Hawaii are ridiculous. I stated as much and I guess I made them feel bad because my order arrived with some complimentary tea cups. Those things were so heavy that the shipping ended up even more than what I paid.

I bought four items including udon noodles, zaru soba noodles, memmi sauce, and ume paste. The Memmi sauce is something I hadn’t even heard of until a few months ago from a bento buddy of mine in Japan. I saw it on Amazon and then when this Tastemaker thing came along I thought I would finally try it out.

Of course, I found it at Foodland over the weekend. Figures.

Memmi is called “mentsuyu” in Japan and it’s a noodle soup base that you dilute with water to make soup for your udon, soba, somen, or for tempura sauce. I’ve used it for both the udon and the zarusoba so far and am totally loving the taste.

Here we have a rather unglamorous photo of my udon, which I ate for breakfast yesterday. It’s supposed to have a lot more soup in it, obviously, but I found myself feeling rather stingy, so I only made half the broth I made the first time. As a result, my kake udon looks like a bowl of noodles with no broth. I can assure you it was quite yummy though. I haven’t used the ume paste yet, though I probably could have put some into my musubi this morning. I tasted a bit of it and it’s wonderful! I loooove ume.

Next up is Bento 400, which I might do over the weekend. I’m trying to convince Mr. Pikko that we should go see Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (Lost writers) at the HIFF this Saturday, but so far he doesn’t seem too thrilled about it. *sob*