Last post I talked about how having a good bento stash is instrumental in making sure you actually make bento on a regular basis. To highlight what I talked about I decided to just show you how to slap together a delicious and healthy bento meal. Total cooking time, plus the time it took to setup my camera and pose the food: <30 minutes.
These are all the raw ingredients I used.
Clockwise from top: Hon-dashi, Asian pesto, frozen home-salted salmon, frozen edamame.
The hon-dashi is to flavor the water for the frozen edamame. The Asian pesto is to flavor the edamame and the salted salmon is the protein in this meal.
How I turned it into food:
1. The frozen edamame went into a post of boiling water. The hon-dashi quickly followed it and after a quick swirl, I let it boil on medium for five minutes.
2. Meanwhile, the salted salmon went into frying pan which I warmed up on medium-high. When salmon started smoking I doused it in a couple tablespoons of white wine (sake would have worked too) and covered it tightly. Five minutes later is was done.
3. The edamame got done first so I pulled it off the heat, drained it with a spoon and then combined it with the Asian pesto in a small bowl (on reflection it would have been better if I just mixed it in the pot). By the time I plated it the salmon was ready and slipped that on top.
4. Took pictures and then immediately consumed everything.
If I was making this for lunch I would have nuked some frozen rice and stuffed everything in a tupperware/bento box. If I wanted to get extra fancy I would have used some silicon cupcake liners to keep everything separated.
So there you go. Much like any kind of cooking; if you take the time to prep when you have the time, you can throw a meal together in minutes rather than hours.
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