The ideal bento recipe has several qualities:
Quick Bento Recipes
Fried polenta: Logs of premade polenta are cheap and keep for ages unrefrigerated, even if you initally bought them in the refrigerated section. To make fried polenta, just slice off what you need in 1/4" to 1/2" slices and fry them in butter or olive oil. If you fry them for a little while, they'll soften. If you keep frying them, they'll become crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside. Serve plain, with a little salt, or topped with cheese, tomatoes, or pesto. Because uncooked polenta is so dense, you can cut it into shapes before you fry it.
Champagne grapes and sliced kiwifruit: A simple combination that looks stunning and utterly decadent together.
Fried shumai
Fried or baked crab cake: If you thaw an unbreaded crab cake before you cook it, you can shape it into anything you want. Fry it in butter or olive oil, or bake it plain or topped with cheese.
Roast beef, mascarpone, and fig jam rolls: Lay out a slice or a half-slice of cold roast beef. Spread a line of mascarpone cheese and fig jam (or any other dense jam) near one end. Roll up. Mascarpone is a delightfully decadent soft cheese that Trader Joe's sells for under $3 a container; you can get it elsewhere, but it will cost a lot more.
Couscous: This tiny pasta cooks up in under 10 minutes and can be endlessly varied with cheese, nuts, dried fruit, and spices. There are dozens of excellent box mixes. Keep a few on hand so that you always have a grain dish when you don't have time to make rice.
Fried bananas: Slice the bananas, sprinkle them with brown sugar, and fry them in butter over low heat. Slow cooking is essential to soften them. Good hot or cold.
Carrot sticks with hummus: Hummus keeps better than salad dressing and dairy-based dips without refrigeration.
Bento Decadence
Slightly more challenging recipes. But only slightly more challenging. If I can make these, you can, too.
Quite a few of these are historical recipes from the 15th to 18th centuries. Don't let that scare you off. Cooks in the past had kitchen equipment so basic that the contents of a crappy studio galley kitchen would make them pant with lust; making these recipes in a modern kitchen isn't hard at all. I've even given substitutes for hard-to-find ingredients and altered recipes to suit modern tastes.
Tiny pies: A cupcake pan is exactly the right size for a mini-pie that
fits perfectly into the top compartment of a Lube Sheep bento box. When you
make your pies, take care that the entire pie fits under the rim of the cupcake
cup--if you give in to the temptation to run the crust around the top of the
rim so it looks exactly like a regular pie, or you overfill the pie so that
it puffs over the edge when it cooks, you're going to have to smush the pie
when you put it in your bento.
An average pie recipe will fill about 15-16 cupcake-sized pies and will require about twice the pie crust. If you use premade crust, cut out the bottoms first and use the scraps for the top crusts. The rim of a 300-ml Pyrex bowl is ideal for cutting out the bottom crusts.
Recipes with finely chopped ingredients work better for mini-pies because you don't have to work around, say, huge wodges of potato or apple when you try to fit everything into a smaller space. If the recipe calls for coarsely chopped ingredients, you can usually alter it by chopping the ingredients smaller without changing the taste of the recipe.
Sweet cheese fritters: Fritters so delicious that you'd never believe
they're made from cottage cheese. The recipe is based on longe frutours, a
15th-century recipe for fresh cheese fritters. The original recipe calls for
the fritters to be fried in a sheet, then cut into fingers, but you can fry
them in patties or cut them into shapes after they're cooked. [insert recipe
here]
Eggs in mustard sauce: Quartered hard-boiled eggs in a delicious sauce
based on an 18th-century recipe. The sauce recipe is given per egg, so you
can make as little or as much as you need. [insert recipe here]
Tamago rolls: Japanese sweetened omelet. [recipe here]
Tea eggs: Hardboiled eggs cooked briefly in a broth of black tea and ***.
[recipe here]
Coconut sticky rice with mango: This Thai summer dessert is nutritious enough
to pack as a regular lunch dish. [recipe here]
Cute Bento Boxes: Lube Sheep · Cute characters · Hello Kitty · Sakura
Charming
but grown-up bento boxes · Sleek
and sophisticated bento boxes · Plain and functional bento boxes
Bento supplies · Bento
recipes · Japanese snacks
· Living la vida bento