Adventures In Foodening

If I were to summarise this weekend in one word, that word would have to be "owcosmuf" - a sentiment which, roughly translated from Tiger to English, means "Oh My God! Why did I cook so much food?!". The reason for this outburst of gibberish follows fairly logically...Well...Somewhat logically...Okay, okay - I may have spent 2 hours Friday (tea-stained eggs), 2 hours Saturday (Milo Cheesecake) and 6 hours Friday (the subject of this post) cooking. Geeze, give a guy a break will you?

Now, this may strike you as unusual, but my weekends are not typically spent in Harris Farm/Woolworths/The Kitchen. No. Nonononono. Whilst I do enjoy cooking, my aversion to doing things for any great period of time usually prevents me from getting too bogged down in any one recipe (especially ones that call for something to marinate, as I have been known to never get back to them...)

This weekend, however, I decided that I was going to be a good boy, and not buy a take-out lunch each day. Instead, I was going to prepare myself some meals to take to work and consume. Being the little otaku that I am, I've decided to go the bento route, and prepare a veritable tiny smorgasbord for each day's main meal. For those who don't know, bento boxes are a series of small portions of many different types of food, and they are the staple lunch meal in Japan.

In order to give myself the proper Japanese cuisine experience, I quickly jumped on the net and found six recipes to attempt, printed off a shopping list, and hit up the grocery store. All in all, I attempted to prepare the following: Eggplant Salad with Lemon Flavoured Plum Dressing; Yakitori; Sesame Flavoured Beef; Miso Marinated Pork; Sweet Pepper And Carrot Confetti; and Tamagoyaki (Egg-Roll). I swear, making that many dishes, I have never felt so close to Iron Chef in my life.

The only meal I would consider myself a failure at preparing was the eggplant salad, and that was because I left the eggplant pan-boiling for too long and it went all mushy - I managed to salvage it, however, by mixing in the plum dressing that I'd created, and stewing some seafood extender in there. The tamagoyaki also turned out a little worse than I'd have hoped, but I think next time I just need to make more mixture and have each layer be slightly thicker. Otherwise, all signs point to awesome as far as taste went (Spud, Lydia, and Andy were all suitably impressed!)

Of course, without actually owning a bento box, I kind of failed when it came to presentation, but that step can wait until I've become slightly more confident/speedy with my cooking, and further until I have managed to travel to Sydney to actually buy a decent bento box. For now, everything has been spooned into a disposable take-out container, and separated using kitchen paper (everybody knows that disaster occurs when two different flavoured foods meet each other...)

For today's meal selection I decided to take some of the Seafood Stewed in Plug-Eggplant, some of the Sesame Flavoured Beef, a handful of the Sweet Pepper and Carrot Confetti, and three Yakitori. I've eaten the yakitori for morning tea, and I'm not dead (yet - and they even contained mushrooms which is a pretty big thing for me). We shall see at lunch if I've created deadly poison overnight, so if I don't post tomorrow...Well...That's that I suppose...

The moral of today's story is the some people, when preparing bento boxes, have way too much time on their hands. Of course, I say "way too much time", what I mean is "an abundance of skill, why can't I do this? These are so cool I want to be the one to make such awesome foodstuffs..." Ultimately, of course, my jealousy will take one of two routes: it will either simmer out until there's nothing left but me eating my delicious, plainly presented food, or I'll obsess over it to the point where my kitchen is filled with tiny rice-ball animals. Would anybody like to place a bet?