#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.