Back in Spring

In this bento are curried pork patties on rice, potato omelet with ketchup, and some raw veggies with mayo. As some of you are aware, I painted my table top white! I was so tired of the darkness of the table haha!



These ones contain slices of shoyu chicken thigh, sweet potato dressed with sesame seeds and a bit of salt and butter, shoyu egg halves and carrot bacon stir-fry.



For these ones, I made carrot salad, herb-mayo broiled salmon, snow pea salad and egg aburaage pouches. Egg aburaage pouches! You are curious about that, I guess. I have you covered of course! Eh I want to say so, but I'll save it for a future post, sorry hehee.



You know what, Yuppi complained later, *Mama, that sour carrot wasn't my type. I like carrot to be stir-fried, not sour*. I was a bit miffed because I was happy with the carrot salad and it is one of my hits (at least I think). Not to mention I insisted. *It's really good and not even that sour. Just refreshing! You can leave it if you don't like!* I was a bit opinionated and mean LOL.

I first lightly cooked carrot julienne and then seasoned with a bit of salt, rice vinegar and shirasu (cooked and salted tiny little fishes). It may be hard to imagine, but is something like carrot tuna salad with no oil. Sounds good and healthy, doesn't it?



Although It's totally long overdue, I decided to post some photos I'd taken when going on a trip to my favorite park to see sakura this past spring. This year I got my hands on a telephoto zoom lens for the first time, which is very affordable but enough fun to use. I've taken quite a few photos using it. I'm going to post a lot more in future posts as well. I hope you'll like them!

Cosmos

Hi there! I did give up on the summer and am already excited about winter haha! Before that, yes, fall has come. One of the happiest things about living in Japan is that I can feel the differences in each season. Each season, you could enjoy each air, smell, color or food. One of the typical signs of fall is cosmos, right? Hey it's strange I've hardly seen dragonflies this year. Cosmos flowers and dragonflies are kind of a pair to me. This summer was very short and we've had a lot more rain than usual so far. It's weird.

These pictures are obviously duds, but I like them, so here they go.
























In the meantime, isn't this jar so darn cute? I also have the Gaspard and Lisa version. I've been making mayonnaise myself for some time now, but couldn't resist buying them teehee. I used up the content and made my own again. Mayo is so easy to make I do suggest making your own!




For these bentos, what I did the night before is sprinkle some salmon pieces with herb salt, save part of mini chicken pork burgers, carrot burdock salad and boiled broccoli from the dinner. In the morning I broiled the salmon, tossed the broccoli with minced umeboshi and shoyu, re-sauteed the burgers and then dressed in thickened shoyu sauce.




For these ones, I made pork sukiyaki (pork, aburaage, shirataki, maitake mushroom and green onion). Then put them on beds of rice neatly and added shoyu egg halves. I used aburaage (fried thin tofu) instead of tofu, which turned out a very nice idea. Aburaage in the sukiyaki sauce is delish and it goes great with rice. Ah I wish I'd added something red to top it off. Don't you think so??