Oy, O-Bento!

Tonight, I dabbled further into Japanese cuisine:

I made tempura.

And not from a mix, oh no. Tempura from scratch. There was zucchini, carrots, and tempura shrimp. We ate the veggies with a dipping sauce, but the shrimp got rolled up with some cucumber and avocado into some sushi, yum yum. My carrot-hating husband even ate some of the tempura carrots. He tried the zucchini, but that was still too much for him. Baby steps.

We also had some edamame with our dinner, and I made some ebi nigiri. Sounds fancy, but all it involves is some boiled shrimp on a little oval of sushi rice, with a piece of nori (seaweed wrap stuff) to hold it together. I had to skewer the shrimp so that it wouldn't curl up as I cooked it.

I'm still doing all cooked stuff. I was going to try Spam musubi, because I keep reading how good it is. I'm kinda scared of Spam, I'll admit, but I figured, hey, live a little... that is, until I read the nutrition info on the can. Holy crap, 16 g of fat in a 2 oz serving??? I can live without it!

Of course, since we were trying new things this gave me an excuse to go back to the Asian Market. I swear, this place gets better each time I go. I actually found bottles of Ting! Ting is this Jamaican grapefruit soda that we used to get at a place called Jamaica Miah's a long time ago. They've been closed for years, and I had never been able to find it again... until tonight. I had a bottle with my dinner.

I also found something called Ramune, which supposedly is how a Japanese person would say Lemonade phonetically. I guess it's supposed to be kinda hard to find around here. I not only found several different flavors of it, I found Hello Kitty brand Ramune! The bottle is cool, a marble holds it closed and I guess there is a trick to getting it opened and drinking it. I'll have to report back how that goes.

We also bought fun Japanese junk food... cute little Panda and Koala cookies with chocolate fillings and these individually wrapped cocoa cakes. Those will make good little snacks. I guess that I like that everything is small, so it's not that big of a deal to have one of something as it is with American snacks, where everything is super sized.

I took some of the leftovers from dinner, added some blueberries, some Panda cookies and a hard-boiled egg, and made my first official bento for my husband's lunch tomorrow/today. It's silly, but fun, kinda like scrapbooking with food. I say "first official" because I've used it for snacky type stuff before, but not anything coherent and deliberately cute. Yes, it's another camera-phone picture. I'm dying here!

The little box is the Lock & Lock box I picked up at Target a few weeks ago. This thing rocks. There are the tempura shrimp rolls, the ebi nigiri, some edamame garnished with carrot stars, my cute little egg chick, some carrot slices that I cut the stars from, blueberries, jicama stars, and some panda cookies in a mini cupcake liner. I put some carrot stars on top of the sushi rolls (held in place by half a toothpick), and the chick's eyes are scraps of nori and his beak is a bit of carrot. You can't really tell in this pic, but I cut the egg white so it looks like a cracked half shell. Fun times.