Advent!

A very happy First of Advent to you.

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Bento #303

Nothing too elaborate for a monday. Ovenbaked potato, carrot, onion and eggplant from dinner, spinach-feta rolls, rucola and freezer staple inarizushi and dumpling.
I hope this will be enough food for tomorrow…

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Happy holidays!

Have a merry Christmas harvest! Or at least a good celebration, lots of presents and lots of good food!

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Bento #265

Couscous with raisins for some extra sweetness, broccoli, phyllo rolls with spinach and feta (I bought those recently thinking they’d be perfect for bento), cherry tomatos and a slice of pomegranate.

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Happy midsummer!

And a few random summery pictures for you:

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Go ahead, complete that cliché – Mini quiches

This is a guest post I wrote for Just Bento last month. Now that it’s up, I figure it’s OK to post on my ow blog as well!
(If you don’t know Just Bento yet, check it out – it’s a lovely site!)

“Go ahead, bake my quiche.”

Queen Magrat, Lords and Ladies

As a pescetarian leaning heavily towards full-time vegetarianism, finding the right protein for my bento is often a strain. I’m not a fan of soy meat replacements to boot, so often I look to eggs as a handy protein packet to put in my bento. Luckily, scientists now say that eggs are good for you again, so I’m not worried about cholesterol.
These mini-quiches are a tasty and healthy freezer staple for those times when boiling an egg or making tamagoyaki seems like too much effort. Each one of them contains about 1-2 tablespoons of egg-vegetable mixture, equivalent to about half an egg (plus a bit of milk).
Here are a few bentos I have used them in:

Now, how to easily make bento-sized quiches? It’s actually quite simple – I bake them in a silicone muffin tin!

You can technically use any dough for it. I used premade butter dough (that’s a local type of puff pastry) for a mediterranean flavour and because you can buy it in handy little rolls that fit 8 muffins :).
Preheat the oven to 250 degrees Celsius.
Cut the dough into 6 squares and line the muffin form with the pieces.

Hint: Put some aluminium foil (or, as my old-fashioned cookbook recommends, dried peas) along the edges of the dough to prevent it from shrinking into the moulds.

Put them in the oven to pre-bake and poof up a little for 5-10 minutes. The dough shouldn’t get brown yet, just a little poofier!

Mix together the filling ingredients and stir well. Spoon 1-2 Tsp. of the mixture into each muffin.

Here are some of my favourite filling recipes:

Vegetarian Quiche Lorraine (makes about 12 muffin-sized pies)
3 eggs
2-3 Tsp. Greek yoghurt or sour cream
1/3-1/2 zucchini, shredded and drained on a towel
1 cup of grated cheese (anything yellow and tasty)
1 cup of chopped leek or spring onions
1 tsp Dijon mustard
Salt, pepper, thyme to taste

Feta-and-tomato quiche (makes 6)
3 eggs
125g feta (or more), crumbled
4 pieces of sundried tomato, cut into small pieces
fresh herbs, e.g. thyme, basil, oregano, rosemary (I used all 4, and it got really spicy!)
Salt, pepper to taste

Turn down the oven to 200 degrees Celsius for baking the egg mixture. They bake in 10-15 minutes (do a test to see if the egg has solidified completely).
Let them cool thoroughly on a wire rack so that no moisture can form underneath and ruin their crispyness.

You can stack them in plastic boxes and freeze them after cooling. They warm in the microwave in just 1,5-2 minutes.

Happy bentoing!

PS: It’s pronounced keesh, not kishay. The quote above always gave me troubles in Lords and Ladies. ;)

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Christmas vacation!

I forgot to say on Thursday – but this was the last bento for the year! Thanks for a very successful year and lots of bentos!

The WereRabbit will be back on January 12th with bentos (hopefully) and other stories.

Have a good winter holiday of your choice and a happy new year!

;)

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Quick update

Notexactlybento.com’s photo contest is up for voting now!

Go give it a look and vote (and of course I’d be happy if it was for me! *grins*)
For the record, my entries are this and this.

;)

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Notexactlybento.com 2008 photo contest

Not Exactly Bento is holding a bento photo contest, and of course I couldn’t help entering.

The premise is simple and one that I heartily agree with:

The purpose of this contest is to share with everyone what you feel is your most visually appealing bento…the bento picture you’ve taken! This is the bento you sometimes think, “Boy, that one was really good. I should do that one again.” Or it is the bento that when you see the picture again you think how great that bento looked and then you begin to salivate.

It took me a while to decide on which bentos to share. In the end, I decided on one for the contents specifically, and one for the absolutely sexy closeup photo.
Interestingly enough, the two have similar contents. Hm, do I sense a theme?

Bento #82 – Tapas Olé!

Tapas prawns, spanish omelette, olives, roast mushrooms, aioli, salsa, asparagus spears, raw bell peppers, tomatos and salad.

Bento # 89: Fruits of the forest

Spanish potato omelette again, freshly picked forest berries on yoghurt (frozen to keep better), cherry tomato salad and olives.
This one always makes me hungry when I see it =.= It’s not such a great photo but I love it anyway.

There were some runners-up that didn’t make it in. If you think I should switch at the last minute, kick me!

;)

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I aten’t dead

Not dead yet. I’ve been moving apartments in the last weeks and didn’t have the opportunity to cook, much less post.

There will be a bento post up tonight, and I had another bento last week that I haven’t posted because it seemed kind of runty on its own.

In the meanwhile, does anyone have good resources or blogs about indoor gardening?

-the were rabbit

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