Backdated Bento #43 – Shortest day, longest night… I made something colorful!

This will be my last bento before the holidays, so merry christmas/hanukkah/whatever you celebrate at this time of year to you all!

Upper tier: Fried mixed veggies with a bit of chili sauce, decorated with cheese and a lime.
Lower tier: Herb tortilla christmas trees!, more cheese and a zucchini christmas tree.
Bowl: A bit of salsa and thick yoghurt (I prefer yoghurt to sourcream) in a minicontainer.

Not that festive… I had good ideas, but way too much to do to make many bentos recently. Oh well. See you after the twelfth day!
*waves*

;)

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Backdated Bento #42 – Totoro soup bento!

Guess who ordered herself an early christmas present from JList! It's the Totoro bentobox that comes with a bowl-shaped lid and a sealable container for soup and other liquid foods. So cute!

Upper tier: Curry cream soup decorated with fish, carrot and a thai basil twig.
Lower tier: Fried fish pieces (salmon, and two white fishes, no idea what. Cod and seti?), mint, carrot sticks and a slice of lime, and rice vermicelli hidden underneath.
Bowl: A Totoro (but he didn't get eaten!)

Curry soup is a really nice and easy thing to make. It's mainly shrimp soup with cocos curry and red thai paste. Cooking Cute has a quite good recipe for it, which is rather similar to the one I use myself.

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Backdated Bento #41 – Santa Lucia day

Happy Lucia from me, even though my lunch doesn't reflect it:

Teriyaki salmon pieces, rice, avocado, leek and carrot flowers (gonna bring some mayo or dressing to go with those).
Satsumas and a minipudding because I didn't know what I'd feel like for dessert yet.

My oven-broiled teriyaki salmon is almost as good as the one in the Japanese restaurant, although I should really use thinner pieces of salmon to give the sauce more chance to soak into the meat.
The sauce is made of soy, ginger, sesame oil, garlic (lots of it) and onions since I usually miss sake or sherry.

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Backdated Bento #40 – These are a few of my favourite things

I'm perpetuating a national stereotype here, I'm sure…
Next I'll put on a Dirndl, adopt seven children and their father and start a singing career. :P

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleighbells
And schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Well, I'm vegetarian so it's not Schnitzel but garlic-roasted zucchini with noodles. But the apple strudel is there!
I'm making an apple strudel for my colleagues at work's christmas party, because I wanted to bring something typically Austrian. So to test the ingredients (Swedes have different breadcrumbs! You learn something new every day) I made a test piece yesterday, and put some in my bento!

Oh, I forgot – the napkin by the way is a way of celebrating Devil's day, December 5th, and St. Nicolaus' day, Dec. 6th. The devil takes all the naughty children away so the nice children can get candy and fruit from St. Nicolaus, who of course is noone else but good old Santa :D

Old-fashioned Viennese Apfelstrudel recipe
For one strudel, I used:
3 leaves of filo (phyllo) dough, stacked, because I'm too lazy to make my own dough.
4 medium-sized Golden Delicious apples
About 2-3 cups of white breadcrumbs
Raisins, butter, floursugar, cinnamon, chopped walnuts, lemon juice

Peel the apples and cut them into thin leaves (best with a slicer). Mix them with a dash of lemon juice to prevent browning.
Add raisins (the recipe says to soak them in rum but I'm not too fond of that).
Roast the breadcrumbs in a dry pan without fat. When they are golden brown, take them off the heat, pour in 1/2 cup of melted butter, 1/2 cup of floursugar and some vanilla powder if you have it (I didn't).
Spread the filodough on a clean towel and brush some molten butter onto it. On the lowest third of it, spread out the breadcrumbs evenly. Spread the apples and raisins on top of the breadcrumbs, then sprinkle the walnuts and another 1/4-1/2 cup of floursugar mixed with a teaspoon of cinnamon on top.
Roll the dough with the help of the towel, fold in the edges.Brush molten butter on top. Place the strudel on top of a cookie sheet in an oven pan and bake for about 30 minutes (or until golden brown) at 200°Celsius (~400°F). If you let it rest for a bit it'll taste even better than fresh out of the oven! Serve warm or cold – it's very good with cream or vanilla icecream, too.

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Backdated Bento #38&39 – Turkish breakfast, mideast lunch

Oooh, those last weeks were madness. But now they are over, all code coded, checked in and hopefully now we're gonna get some christmas peace at work :D
So this weekend I prescribed myself a de-stressing sleepin, only did a little work from home and managed to be awake enough to make a bento for monday, and one today!

• Top tier: Turkish breakfast-food: I don't know the original name of it, but my dad brought the recipe from a vacation in Turkey. It's fried tomatoes (I used grape tomatoes) with onions and egg, salt and pepper, and we also add a lot of french herbs because they make everything better :D
  Carrot flowers as separator and decoration, and lightly toasted bread with a bit of butter between the slices.

• Bottom tier: Fruit salad! And a gingerbread heart. Here in Sweden they say it makes you nice, so I brought the whole box and shared it with my colleagues ;)

Bad lighting in this one because I took it late at night

Top tier: Couscous salad with mint, feta cheese, onions and tomatoes, decorated with baby salad.

Bottom tier: Dumplings (they are still frozen in the picture, I fried them quickly in the morning. They fit better into the box then.), dip sauce, a Lindt dark chocolate ball and mixed nuts and raisins.

Snack: A banana

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