#twitterfoodparty #twitterpancakeparty

Last monday of the month, it's time for #twitterfoodparty. This month's theme is pancakes.
I love pancakes. I usually make them like my grandma used to. Just egg, milk, flour and sugar. Add sugar, nutella or cowberries/lingonberries, roll up and enjoy.
But for today, I wanted to make something different. I have a lot of squash left so I looked for a recipe for squash pancakes. I found an african one which was pretty easy to make. Although I wrote it down with the exact amounts, but in the morning I didn't bother and just added the ingredients intuitively. I cooked a big piece of squash, mushed it, added a bit of milk and an add and enough spelt flour to thicken the batter. The original recipe probably used normal flour, but I wanted to try it with spelt flour.
I made 2 pancakes for my bento, added a bit of sugar and made another 3 for breakfast. Both versions were really really good.
I filled the rest of the bento box with lettuce, brussel sprouts, parsley root, swede and carrot.
Lunch time was late today, because we our boss talked with a customer and our 'conference room' is the kitchen. Usually I become hungry around 11am, but today I didn't even feel hungry at 1:30pm. The magic of spelt, which has a lot of fibre :)


A picture of the first breakfast pancake. The light in my kitchen isn't good for photos, so it is a bit dark ^^;

There's a bug in my bento

I had the idea for this bento some days ago when I cut the beetroot. A round piece with a nice pattern that looked almost like wood grain. But I didn't have a place to put the ladybug on and I was in a hurry anyways, so I postponed it to another day.
Yesterday someone told me that my bentos look too cute to eat. There were just two cheese hearts, that's not too cute o.O So today I had to make a cute one XD
The ladybug is made of beetroot, nori and cheese. It is sitting on top of rice and millet in front of a cheese flower with sesame seeds. There's more cheese and half of a fish patty in this tier, too. The other tier contains cooked squash and beetroot, sautéd king trumpet mushrooms, swede and zucchini and the other half of the fish patty.

25.11.10

I cooked rice today and froze 4 batches. The last one went into my bento box. I mixed all types of rice I have at the moment (broken jasmine rice, normal jasmine rice, sushi rice and brown rice) and also added a bit of millet.
I decorated the rice with swede and beetroot. The other tier contains zucchini, swede, carrot and squash (Muskatkürbis/Muscade de Provence, I can't find an englisch translation).

The weather forecast said "snow" again. A look out of the window told me "not here". It started snowing as I went out of the house, but just a little bit. Just some snowflake floating around. Nothing that would last long. The snow became heavier as I drove out of the village. There really must be some magical weather barrier or something o.O

24.11.2010

I wasn't in the mood to blog the last days. I went to the dentist after more than ten years and, well, after three visits in two weeks the four bad teeth are gone. I'm still feeling kinda down and sick, but it can only become better from now on. At least I was able to eat normal food the whole time.

Today I made fried rice with corn, prawns, king trumpet mushrooms and broocoli stem and decorated it with babybel two cheese stars. The other box contains parsley root, broccoli, carrot, bamboo shoots, red kuri squash and the rest of the cheese.

In the weather forecast they said, today would be sunny and snowy. I looked out of the window and thought, snow? Not here. Not a single bit of white out there. But you can't trust the weather forecast here anyway. Especially the area around my village doesn't seem to care about the weather around. If it's raining in town (5km from here), there sometimes are just clouds. If you can hear thunder all around, it sometimes doesn't even rain here.
This morning was a little bit like that. I drove to work, not thinking about the weather anymore. After 5km I reached the top of the 'blue mountain', a 125m high hill (yes, you call that mountain, if you live in the flat north of Germany ;) ) and *woosh* it was winter. Just a little bit on the trees, but so beautiful. I so wished I had the time to stop and take pictures. The snow was gone after I reached the nexr big village, but for around 20km I drove through a nice winter wonderland. It can stay like this. Free streets without ice and a nice scenery. That would be a perfect winter. But I know it is useless to hope for it

Little Tiger Bento

I planned this bento last week, when we had to switch off the computers while the server got restarted.
My little tiger looks more like a tabby cat. It is made of a fish patty. The nori for the stripes were hard to apply, they just didn't want to stay where they should.
The tiger is sitting on a spelt patty. That was the last one I could make with the mixture I bought some weeks ago. It was a special offer, so I don't know, where I can get more of it :(
The rest of the box contains swede, corn, green beans, red kuri squash, cucumber, peas and cauliflower.

Oops, where's the rice?

I was in a hurry this morning. Maybe I should set my alarm clock to a different time. The just-5-more-minutes always turn into half an hour ^^;
I cooked some vegetables and made scrambled eggs with my last 3 mushrooms. I also put a frozen batch of rice into the microwave.
While the vegetables cooled down, I ate breakfast, changed my clothes and got ready for work. The last thing I do in the morning is usually packing my bento, taking a photo and then I'm off. This morning was the same. I noticed I don't have anything white in my bento, but there was no time to look for something and the box was full anyway.
As I opened the box at lunch, the first thing I thought was "oh no, the rice is still lying in the microwave". So this was a low carb bento. But it was tasty.

The top tier contains green beans, carrot and brussel sprouts. The bottom tier contains lettuce, swede/rutabaga, scrambled eggs and mushrooms.

Pink cat bento

Yesterday's bento wasn't anything special. The only 'decoration' was a piece of carrot in the middle of the rice. My colleague tried to interpret the japanese flag into it, but no, not really XD They seemed kind of disappointed. So today, I made a charaben.
I wanted to make a Jigglypuff, but the ears, arms and feet were too big and it didn't look good. So I just left the ears and made a cat face.
The rice is coloured with beetroot. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, but in the end it turned out ok. The face is made of parsley root and nori. The rest of the box contains lettuce, carrot, beetroot, squash, parsley root and spinach, hidden under tamagoyaki filled with nori.
Lunch was somehow disappointing. My colleagues didn't look T_T And I was too shy to ask them to.

Bento, birds and garden pictures

Nothing special today. Lettuce, parsnip, rice and nori in one tier, hokkaido squash, brussel sprouts, mushrooms, green beans, zucchini and prawns in the other.

I tidied up the balcony room this weekend, so I can store my plants in it when it gets too cold. It wasn't too early. On sunday evening the temperature sank under 0°C (32°F). Freezing. Not that much yet, the plants still are ok. The next nights will be over freezing temperature, so no need to take them in yet. But maybe I'll have to soon.

One of my evening primroses has buds which are almost blossoming. I hope the frost didn't damage them.


I also tried to take photos of 'my' birds. They aren't that shy. Sitting in the trees, maybe 5m away from me, watching me or looking for food. But they are to far away for my camera. The pictures aren't sharp enough.


And at last, a picture from my garden. Well, actually not much of the garden, but one of the borders. There's a stream called Hardau. Usually there isn't as much water as now, but it rained a lot in the last weeks.

Gyoza Bentos

I totally forgot the gyoza which I bought two weeks ago. The best before date was november 2nd, so I really had to eat them. I had 1 and a half packages left, which meant gyoza for three days.


#1 contained king trumpet mushrooms, zucchini, parsnip and carrots. I had some space left which I filled with peas and corn. There also is some of my last parsley. Only such small leaves.

#2 containedcarrots, brussel sprouts, a fish patty, cauliflower, green beans and bamboo shoots.

#3 contained green beans, carrots, brussel sprouts, parsnip, king trumpet mushrooms, prawns and zucchini.

Japanese National Sushi Day and #twitterfoodparty

#twitterfoodparty is an event on Twitter, where everyone who wants to participate cooks something fitting the theme. The first theme was tacos. Reading the posts was fun, but I don't really care about tacos, so I didn't participate.
The next theme was pasta. But it was on the day after my birthday, on which I wanted to make breakfast for my colleagues, so I didn't participate again.
Today was the next party. It's national sushi day in japan, so ... it's #TwitterSushiParty today.
I wanted to make sushi for some time now. But it takes some time and I usually get up too late, so I didn't make any. But switching back from summer time helped a lot with getting up early.
I forgot to buy salmon and cucumber, so my sushi is a little odd. It contains zucchini and carrot.
The rest of the big tier is filled with carrot. The other tier contains zucchini with black sesame, tamagoyaki (which looks a lot better than my last one), bean sprouts and bamboo shoots.

Bentos from thursday and friday

Usually I stay in bed until 6 am, but on thursday I managed to get up a little earlier. I didn't go to work earlier thoug, because I spent too much time on my bento. I sautéd squash, a little more squahs with soy sauce and parsley root and fried a potatoe dumpling. The zucchini and carrot were steamed as usual. The lettuce is homegrown. I seeded it early in august, so it didn't grow much. And this are the last leaves. It is already too cold and rainy.



On friday I wanted to eat mushrooms, but I found a little mould on some of them, so I had to throw them away :(
The bento contains gyoza. They contain glutamate, so I don't like them that much. But I wanted to try gyoza, so I bought them nonetheless. They taste better cold, so I'll use the rest in my nex bentos.
I also made tamagoyaki. The pan was too hot so the last layer didn't stick. I have to make them more often. The first ones I made looked a lot better ^^; These are filled with black and white sesame.
The rest of the box is filled with broccoli, carrots, squash and parsley root and decorated with a parsley root cloud and squash leaves.

Halloween Bento

Halloween bentos wherever you look. So I made one too.
Halloween isn't that popular around here. When I was a child, all I knew about Halloween was, that Charlie Brown is afraid of the great pumpkin. It gets more and more popular, but there are still few people who celebrate it.
The top tier contains a Jack o' Lantern made of hokkaido squash and nori, a nori cat with cream cheese eyes and a parsley root mouth on top of rice.
The bottom tier contains king trumpet mushroom, zucchini, parsley root and a piece of squash which didn't fit in the other tier.

Half of the bento contains things I've never eaten before.
I bought hokkaido squash because I've seen it in other bentos and wanted to try it. It smells a little bit like honeydew melon, which really surprised me. And I like it. Have to try out more.
I also didn't eat king trumpet mushroom before. It isn't sold in stores and you rarely see it at the farmers market also. I actually wanted champignons, but I was late and there weren't many left and they weren't lookking, well, like they would say 'buy me'. I wasn't in the mood to look if another seller hat better ones and the seller also told me that shiitake and king trumpet mushrooms have a special price this week so I took those.I really don't regret it. They taste good ^.^ I just fried them in sesame oil and didn't add any spice to have just the taste of the mushrooms.
Instead of the parsley root I wanted to get parsnip. But it was already sold out (did I mention I was late? ^^;). Parsley root looks the same, just a little bit smaller so I took it instead. I thought it tastes the same, but it doesn't. The inner part of a parsnip is a bit hard and doesn't taste that good (but maybe that's just true for the ones I got last time?). The inner part of parsley root is much bigger (maybe you can see it in the picture) and not ligneous at all. And it was somehow sweet. I like parsnip, but I like parsley root a lot more.

Edit: I almost forgot this month's B.O.M.B.

Birthday breakfast for my colleagues

Yesterday was my birthday. I didn't do anything special though. The day didn't feel anything special. It was really nice weather on saturday, but yesterday was rainy and stormy and cold.
At my company you get a present from your colleagues and you have to make breakfast for them. I thought of making something special, but I don't know if they would like an asian influenced breakfast, so I made something 'normal'. Bread rolls, cheese, cold cuts, Fleischsalat (my dictionary says "salad with strips of bologna-type sausage, gherkins and mayonnaise dressing", so there doesn't seem to be an english word for it), home madered currant jelly and a cucumber. I couldn't help but make it a little bit bentoish, so I used a cookie cutter to make some cucumber flowers. One of my colleagues saw this and said "I would have been disapointed if you didn't make anything like that" *lol*

I got 3 books as a present. I gave them my amazon wishlist, so I knew I would get books, but I was curious what they would choose, because it's a loooong list.
The first one was
  Yum-Yum Bento Box by luckysundae and Pikko
Most of my colleagues think that making (cute) bentos is weird. In a funny way, but I must be crazy to spend that much time just for a lunch. Yes, I am crazy (and not just because of bentos), and I like it *g*
One of the mothers asked for some tipps and if she could borrow that book. Spreading the bento virus, yay.
Other comments were "I don't know if I could eat something that looks at me" and "Is that a piggy hamburger?" "Can I call you mom?" (or whatever babe says in english).

The second book was
Keltische Kochbarkeiten: Mit 60 Rezepten vom "Fünf-Steine-Ko​ch" (would translate to something like "Celctic cookliness: with 60 recipes from a 5 stone cook")
It's a book with old recipes, using stinging nettle and other weeds.

The third one (whoa, so many, they are crazy) was
  Magic - Gärtnern mit der Kraft der vier Elemente (Magic - gardening with the power of the four elements)
I just skimmed over it. There are a lot of topics. Some seem a little strange, what has atrology to do with gardening? But I'll see.

Makkukurosuke Bento

I love Ghibli movies, especially Totoro. I found the "How to make Makkukurosuke"-Tutorial at Anna the red's page a while ago and alway wanted to make them. They look so cute ^^ I just wish there was better light in my kitchen. You can see the flash too much. But without flash the pictures aren't sharp :(
The Makkukurosu are onigiri (filled with cream cheese), covered with nori. The eyes are made of cream cheese and black sesame.
Left tier hast brussel sprouts, green beans and broccoli. Right tier has carrots, bean sprouts and tamagoyaki. The tamagoyaki are made with salt, turmeric and lemon grass.
Makkukurosuke are called Rußmännchen (little soot men) in German. As I went to work, I heard that today is chimney sweep day. So my bento somehow really fits today *g*

Pasta Bento

This is a bento for this week's bento challenge at Livejournal. I read the theme and thought, yes, something easy this time. I'll make ramson noodles. Or udon? And teddy pasta as decoration.Hm... or all 3. And whatever I find in our noodle drawer.
I found two other open packages that I could use some noodles from. There were some soup noodles, too, but they would have been to small, so I just took those 5 types.
Top tier: cauliflower, carrots, spaghetti, teddy pasta and sesame
Bottom tier: ramson noodles, spiral noodles (without a name on the package), wholemeal noodles called cornetti rigati, broccoli, green beans, udon noodles and black sesame.
I didn't have a sauce (any suggestions?), but the variety made up for this.

I wanted to post my last bentos on the weekend, but I'm a little obsessed with Glee and Juuni Kokki at the moment, so I spend most time watching. ^^; Have to get better. 

Last two bentos

I miscalculated both bentos. For monday's bento I took too few vegetables out, for today's bento I had too much. It wasn't a big problem, because I could fill yesterday's up with corn and peas and ate the left over carrot and parsnip as breakfast, but it still is annoying.

Monday:

Probably my last evening primrose blossom this year. The plants still have buds, but most didn't blossom in the last week and it started to freeze at night. I collected seeds and seeded some for the year after next year (they blossom in the second year). I hope, the birds didn't eat them.
The bento contains leftover potatoes from sunday lunch, peas and corn because there was a lot of space left, cauliflower, bean sprouts, green beans, kidney beans, prawns, brussel sprouts and tamagoyaki, coloured with paprika and filled with sesame.


Today:

Rice, more coloured than flavoured with curry, green beans, zucchini, carrot, parsnip, fish burger, and brussel sprouts. The zucchini and parsnip were the last I had. My favourite seller at the farmers market is on holidays until next saturday, so no zucchinis for the next 1,5 weeks :(

Tomorrow I wont make a bento. I will be on a workshop with customers and we will go out for lunch. In the evening I will go to a concert by Michael Bublé with them (I was so surprised when they asked me O.O). There wont be enough time to go home between work and the concert, so maybe I can go to an asia market. I need anko, I want to eat daifuku.

Octopus bento

Another bento with nothing from the freezer, except for the rice. Steamed mushrooms, zucchini, carrots and spinach. The zucchini are from a local organic farmer. Zucchinis bought in store taste like nothing compared to these ♥.♥
They also had parsnips this time. I had never eaten them before, so I took two with me. I sautéd half of one with a little bit of soy sauce. They look and taste a little bit like potatoes. And a little bit different. I'll definetily buy them again :)
The protein part of the bento is a wiener. And what are wieners usually made of in bentos? Yes, octopusses *g* I just wish their legs would stay curled when they cool.
My colleague saw them and asked "what's that, fingers?" "No octopusses. They even have faces" She couldn't help grinning back at them.

Smiling Bento

My bentos have been pretty boring the last weeks. Maybe I just spend too much time reading and then there's no time left for decorating. Maybe I should plan my bentos beforehand and not decide most of it in the morning.
This isn't a charaben, but at least, it has a face. And there's nothing from the freezer in it. The bottom tier has carrots, mushrooms, spinach and cauliflower, the top tier has ramson noodles, carrot eyes with black sesame pupils, sesame hair and a cheese mouth.
Ramson is quite popular here for some years now. Especially in noodles and bread rolls. I'd love to try it as a vegetable, but it doesn't grow in my garden (yet, I bought seeds) and I didn't dare to look for it in the woods, because it is easily mistaken for poisonous plants :(

Cauliflower mushroom bento

This is the bento with the longest preparing time I ever had.
I didn't have mushrooms for a while and I really wanted to put some into my bento. I first thought of buying champignons (Wikipedia gives a lot of names, but which do you really use in english?), but then I had a better idea. It's autumn, it has been rainy but not too cold for the last few weeks and after 4 days the rain had finally stopped. So there couldn't be a better time to go into the woods to look for those mushrooms you can't buy in stores. I should have taken my camera with me. There were so many beautiful mushrooms. But I only know 3 types of edible mushrooms, so I couldn't take many with me. I found a lot of cut mushrooms, so somebody has already been there before me. But I found some Bay Boletes.Ok, but I knew, there's a better one growing there. I went depper into the wood until I reached the way, where we usually stopped and returned and I did the same. I didn't think, I would find anything more and I was still a little bit sad, because I forgot my camera in the car. And then there was this tree and I just thought "you have to go around it and look from all sides". And there it was. A cauliflower mushroom (or fat hen, as we call it here). Not the biggest one I ever found, but not a small one even.I was happy and went back home.
At home, I cleaned the bay boletes and put them into the freezer. Then there was the cauliflower mushroom. Look at the pictures at wikipedia. And then imagine it full of fir needles, moos and little black dots which might be soil or maybe little bugs. It is really hard to clean and it took me 2 hours @.@ Here you can see 2/3 of it, mostly cleaned and the other 1/3 cleaned pieces.

In the morning, I fried it and added a little bit of soy sauce. I also added leftover potatoes from yesterdays dinner, a carrot, green beans, bean sprouts, peas and corn. Nothing special, but I just didn't want to spend more time ^^;

You can look for mushrooms the whole year, but we only do it in autumn, so this qualifies for this month's B.O.M.B.

Spelt patties bento

It was late yesterday and I didn't want to stay up longer to wash rice. I don't have any left in the freezer so I had to choose something different today. I still had some of the mixture for spelt patties. I really have to find a recipe for these, they taste very good.
I also made scrambled eggs with shrimps. Not the best idea for the shrimps, but ok. They are small which makes it hard to eat with chopsticks.
Carrots, brussel sprouts, green beans and cauliflower make the vegetable part.

Welcome to my bento garden

When I started making bentos in january 2010 I also started blogging about them. I stopped blogging because of my new job. Having to drive 50 minutes by car in the morgning and in the evening after almost not driving at all for 6 years is really stressful at first. But I didn't stop making bentos. I'm used to the new timing now and I really miss blogging. So I'll start again. And in english this time, because I really need to practice. If you find any odd grammar or words, feel free to correct me :)

My new job allowed me to move back to my dad's house. So my dream of an own garden where I can grow vegetables finally came true. Or so I thought. At the moment my garden contains mostly weeds. But hey, weeds can be used for bentos, too. Many are edible. I used goutweed instead of spinach and decorated my bentos with daisies and dandelion. And I want to use a lot more in the future.


This is the first bento I want  to show here. It isn't my last one, but it is one I made with this blog in mind.



The flower I used is an evening primrose (probably Oenothera glazioviana). It starts blossoming in june and grows new blossoms until late september. You actually could eat the whole plant, but I only tried the blossoms so far. They add colour (I don't have that many yellow ingredients) and there are usually no bugs in them (there's nothing for them to hide).
The other ingredients are some I use a lot in my bentos. Rice (sushi rice and broken jasmine rice), which I cook once a week and freeze. Steamed broccoli, brussel sprouts, carrots and salmon. And frozen corn and peas because there was a little space left.