Oishii Bento

Today's adventure was a bento cooking class. Bento are lunch boxes filled with lots of different foods, that people often take to school or work to eat for lunch. They are mostly served cold, so the things inside them have to last for a while without spoiling, but also be easy to carry around. It is possible to buy bento that is served hot. As our cooking instructor told us, Japanese people often eat with their eyes, so bento are usually also very colourful. Train stations often sell bento lunches, which commuters buy on their way to work.

The cooking class was very intimate, as we went to our instructor's home in Tokyo for the class. She started by telling us that bento are often divided into 3 parts: half of the bento should be a carb of some sort (usually rice), a quarter should be a protein (meat or tofu) and the last quarter should be the side dishes (vegetables and other nutritious things). Whereas a Western dish might mix all those things together, like in a pasta dish with a meat sauce, you generally keep everything separate in a bento box. In a commercial bento, you might see containers with dividers between each section, to keep everything separate, but for a home-made bento box, which often uses one container which might be divided into a couple of sub-sections, you can use these cupcake liner-type things to make sure things stay apart. You can buy cupcake liners with different colours to help brighten up your bento.

The host grew up in the United States, so her English was flawless, which made it really easy to ask her questions. She was really funny, and sweet, and the class went by so quickly.

We started by making banno sauce, which she said translates to 10,000 abilities. She said it is used very frequently in Japanese cooking. It's pretty simple: 2 parts soy sauce, 2 parts mirin, 1 part sugar. Gently boil until the smell of alcohol is gone. Allow to cool. Tada - done!

From there we made a few salad dishes, some chicken mini-hamburgers, onigiri (rice balls) and tamagoyaki (Japanese egg omelette).

It's surprising how easy it was to make, and we got to eat our delicious bento at the end, which was so filling despite how little it looked!



After that, I made the trek to kappabashi, which had little kappa statues all over it. It's a street in Toyko between Ueno and Asakusa that's famous for having lots of cooking supply stores. They weren't kidding - there are stores for all the different aspects of running a restaurant: furniture, cutlery, appliances, knives, signs, menu holders, even those vending machines that dispense little tickets that people can use to order food. I found a store that had a wooden spoon that was almost as tall as I am!

There was a store that sold little knives (and regular-sized knives, too), which I was tempted to buy them for redbeanpork so he can tiny sushi, but the price was the better part of my salary, and I have a mortgage now! (You can see my hand in the photo to show how small the knives are.)

Very food-centric day today.