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.