Back to basics
Sometimes it's easy to lose track of some of the basic principles that I set out in my early rules. Simplicity and budget are the biggest offenders, health is always on the forefront of my mind. Lots of bento bloggers are all about speed of preparation and trying to economize from what you have, be it leftovers or stock stuff from the freezer. My wife and I had a pumkin carving party so I really had to ratchet back and think really hard on how to make the fastest lunch for 5 people. I have been really skating the edge of the budget lately too, so I considered what all I had on hand.
We start with this Miso marinated chicken. Wonderful recipe, very simple miso, brown sugar and a bit of rice wine to marinate some chicken thighs over night. I picked this for two reasons, first, it's fast, second, I got a chance to break out the indoor grill again. I'm still pretty happy with the grill, it cleans up pretty fast, the heat consistency isn't as good as real fire. I really had to use to lid to get the chicken to cook, it still turned out yummy, but if getting my grill going wasn't so difficult I probably would have done it outside.
I dug through the pantry found some brown texmati rice, checked the fridge and freezer for some inspiration. I came up with basically an egg fried rice, the only difference is the egg to rice ratio I chose to use. After cooking up the rice I started the pan with just a little bit of rice, I then immediately drowned the rice in a bunch of egg. The idea was to continue to add rice to this mixture (quickly) such that each grain was coated with liquid egg. I call it eggy fried rice. Usually you have large bits of eggs in a egg fried rice, in this case every grain is coated and fried with the egg. It was an interesting experiment. The rice came out with some good moisture (more than brown rice would normally produce) with the same aroma of fried rice. It also allowed me to cut down on oil used as the egg helped with the moisture content. I sprinkled on some furikake I had on hand and voila instant side.
I kinda phoned it in with the last bits. Cherry tomatos, some lite ranch dip from the packet I had on hand. I rounded it out with dessert, a fortune cookie and a ginger chew candy.
Have to say this was one of the fastest bentos start to finish cook+box time (not counting marinating), probably 30-40 mins. Not bad for all the lunches plus some leftover for me during the week :) Hopefully my eaters still enjoyed it. I'll post carved pumkin pics when halloween rolls around. Happy eating, and thanks for stopping by!
Box Contents
- Miso marinated Chicken
- Eggy Fried brown rice
- Cherry tomatos and lite ranch dip
- Fortune Cookie with ginger chew
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