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narcasseI have two official bento containers that are actually of Japanese make, in opposed to the air-tight containers I have that I’ve just picked up here. This morning I made the trip to the ParcelForce depot to pick up the second one which had arrived yesterday while I was at work and after figuring out what ‘open’ and ‘close’ are in Japanese I discovered that it actually came with an English-language instruction leaflet as well as a Japanese one.
The thing with actual Japanese bento containers is that they are designed for a diet that consists of variety or at least of three main food groups. This sort of thing is fine in principle since a standard Burmese meal for me would consist of rice, a curry and vegetables of some variety with some alternation in vegetables in a meat curry or lentil combinations and so on. But while that is fair enough on a plate, that’s not the sort of thing I tend to pack for a work lunch, not least of all because that’s not the sort of thing I cook for myself. Pater will take the effort to cook several dishes to make up one meal, using up just about as many pans as he can lay hands on in the process: I on the other hand am a fan of one pot meals or at least reusing as few pans as possible until my mash has inadvertent bits of broccoli incorporated into it to match with the broccoli that I boiled to go on the side. I make things like goulash, paella, pasta salad and spanakopita. I’m loathed to use more than one pot, pan or oven tray. I can just about manage two on occasion but this usually consists of the grill as well as a pan or straining out soup into a jug. Possibly this all comes down to my inability to multitask: I can’t type and talk at the same time or I’ll end up saying what I’m typing, I’ve had to stop talking on my mobile to light my cigarette because if I don’t I’ll either set my hair on fire by accident or drop my phone, and I certainly can’t walk, light a cigarette and talk on the phone at the same time. Yet valid reasons aside I’m also lazy and don’t like the idea of having to wash up several things after I’m done cooking when if I stick to my usual routine I usually only have a handful of things to wash when I’m done.
Of course it could be argued that a bento container only really needs a something or other to go with plain rice and that I therefore only need to bother myself about that other something and let the rice cooker deal with the rest. These days there are even microwave rice cookers which deal with the entire process in far less time than a standard rice cooker. So I could just take rice and cook something to go with it, except the problem with that is that for me rice is something I enjoy eating at home as part of a proper meal and even then I don’t actually eat it all the time. I like to experiment with other styles of dishes so I don’t eat rice, and by rice I mean plain basmati rice, for every meal and coming back to my one pot principle I tend to cook single things for lunch which is where my problem with bento containers arises. They presume variety, even if that variety is divided into two portions, one for rice, the other for whatever else you have to go with it and in my case that means that I end up with one larger section full of pasta salad/paella/Bavarian breakfast and a separate, smaller section in want of something else. I could just shove crackers into that spare section without preamble since I do sometimes eat those Carr’s water biscuits without anything on them or I could go with little wholegrain melba toasts or even just use the compartment as a storage space for some teabags but I do actually want to experiment with some variation.
I’d quite like to find ways to add variety to my lunch by having something else suitable in that compartment that doesn’t contrast horribly with the main bulk of my lunch. Unfortunately, right now the only thoughts that strike me involve chipolata sausages, strawberries or broccoli. Extra vegetables might work or occasionally extra meat if I feel like adding pork to something. I’m trying to resist the idea of fruit though since I take an apple to work for an 11 o’clock snack anyway and I’d rather eat kiwis by hacking off their skin and treating them like any other easily held fruit which probably wouldn’t go over so well in public. I could always add extra fruit for desert and there are large punnets of strawberries in the supermarket at the moment since it’s the season for it so the more I think about it the more likely I am to add fruit, tangential salad or cooked vegetables, all of which should help provide me with enough nutrients to last through the day.
The thing with actual Japanese bento containers is that they are designed for a diet that consists of variety or at least of three main food groups. This sort of thing is fine in principle since a standard Burmese meal for me would consist of rice, a curry and vegetables of some variety with some alternation in vegetables in a meat curry or lentil combinations and so on. But while that is fair enough on a plate, that’s not the sort of thing I tend to pack for a work lunch, not least of all because that’s not the sort of thing I cook for myself. Pater will take the effort to cook several dishes to make up one meal, using up just about as many pans as he can lay hands on in the process: I on the other hand am a fan of one pot meals or at least reusing as few pans as possible until my mash has inadvertent bits of broccoli incorporated into it to match with the broccoli that I boiled to go on the side. I make things like goulash, paella, pasta salad and spanakopita. I’m loathed to use more than one pot, pan or oven tray. I can just about manage two on occasion but this usually consists of the grill as well as a pan or straining out soup into a jug. Possibly this all comes down to my inability to multitask: I can’t type and talk at the same time or I’ll end up saying what I’m typing, I’ve had to stop talking on my mobile to light my cigarette because if I don’t I’ll either set my hair on fire by accident or drop my phone, and I certainly can’t walk, light a cigarette and talk on the phone at the same time. Yet valid reasons aside I’m also lazy and don’t like the idea of having to wash up several things after I’m done cooking when if I stick to my usual routine I usually only have a handful of things to wash when I’m done.
Of course it could be argued that a bento container only really needs a something or other to go with plain rice and that I therefore only need to bother myself about that other something and let the rice cooker deal with the rest. These days there are even microwave rice cookers which deal with the entire process in far less time than a standard rice cooker. So I could just take rice and cook something to go with it, except the problem with that is that for me rice is something I enjoy eating at home as part of a proper meal and even then I don’t actually eat it all the time. I like to experiment with other styles of dishes so I don’t eat rice, and by rice I mean plain basmati rice, for every meal and coming back to my one pot principle I tend to cook single things for lunch which is where my problem with bento containers arises. They presume variety, even if that variety is divided into two portions, one for rice, the other for whatever else you have to go with it and in my case that means that I end up with one larger section full of pasta salad/paella/Bavarian breakfast and a separate, smaller section in want of something else. I could just shove crackers into that spare section without preamble since I do sometimes eat those Carr’s water biscuits without anything on them or I could go with little wholegrain melba toasts or even just use the compartment as a storage space for some teabags but I do actually want to experiment with some variation.
I’d quite like to find ways to add variety to my lunch by having something else suitable in that compartment that doesn’t contrast horribly with the main bulk of my lunch. Unfortunately, right now the only thoughts that strike me involve chipolata sausages, strawberries or broccoli. Extra vegetables might work or occasionally extra meat if I feel like adding pork to something. I’m trying to resist the idea of fruit though since I take an apple to work for an 11 o’clock snack anyway and I’d rather eat kiwis by hacking off their skin and treating them like any other easily held fruit which probably wouldn’t go over so well in public. I could always add extra fruit for desert and there are large punnets of strawberries in the supermarket at the moment since it’s the season for it so the more I think about it the more likely I am to add fruit, tangential salad or cooked vegetables, all of which should help provide me with enough nutrients to last through the day.
