I am officially certifiable...

[LiL dEviL MiNeE]

Awwwww Oishiiiiiii! hehe.. wow, i wanted to make it too but after making 4 layers of cake in different flavor, i stopped. i applause for your hard work because i know it's crazy.. hehe.. envious of your coworker. well, i hope it turns out awesome and enjoy enjoy!!! Speaking of which... :: wandering off to find food ::

[Risu-chan]

I'm making bento for my coworkers on Friday.

I just sat down and counted and I'm putting together 15 dishes and side-dishes (not including the hot tea, rice, and miso soup). Only two sets of them are duplicates because I have to come up with a vegetarian and non-vegetarian version.

Been cooking for five and a half hours and nine of them are done... gotta finish the others tomorrow... I don't think I actually ate dinner per se; I ate things like carrot scraps from flower cutting and leftover daikon ends and so on...

Somehow, these things always sound like a fun idea when I think them up... I need to learn to stop thinking... or something... yeah...

[Verykawaiineko]

You're making me hungry *goes off to find pocky*

[Tsubaki-chan]

Ooo! Bento! Rats...I just ate dinner and I'm already hungry again!

[Risu-chan]

...Fourteen hours of cooking over three days and I'm finally done (well, except for washing the huge pile of dishes). It seemed to be a smash hit; even the people who didn't like sushi liked it, or else they were polite, but since I didn't serve any actual raw fish, I think chances are good they liked it...

I took a picture of the bento before they got descended upon like a carcass before vultures (now there's an image)... my digital camera's in my car, I forgot to bring it in, but maybe I can put up a picture later...

I'm pretty darn impressed with myself right now... ^^;;

[ikkitousen]

ooh! Do post that pic quick!! [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Am very impressed you put in soo much effort
15 dishes!!! wowow

Guess your dishwasher gets a workout now heheh

[Risu-chan]

^__^ here's the pic:

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/dlstrong/www/Bento.jpg

[Verykawaiineko]

yumm that pickle and rice looks really yummy...now i am REALLY hungry...but wow what a good job you did

[Risu-chan]

I wrote up the recipes too... unfortunately they're on another computer and I'm too tired to go boot it right now... maybe tomorrow...

[Risu-chan]

Here's the recipes for everything but the sekihan; the guy I wrote it down for doesn't like adzuki beans. Other than that, they're all here...
--------------------------
Recipes for the bento stuff

Umeboshi, ginger, and takuan - buy ^_^

Ingredients for everything else (skipping the sekihan):

Daikon radish
Carrots
Frozen spinach
Edamame
Dried shiitake
Kaeri anchovies
Soy sauce
Rice vinegar
Sugar
Salt
Konbu
Hon-dashi (or konbu and bonito to make dashi from scratch)
Miso
Soy-roasted sesame seeds (or regular sesame seeds and extra time to roast them with soy sauce)

----

Going around the clock from 12:00:

1) Namasu (daikon and carrot quick pickle)

Julienne carrots and daikon and mix together (more daikon than carrot). Sprinkle them with salt and let them stand in a strainer for about half an hour, then knead them in a little rice vinegar and drain out the salty vinegar. Add fresh rice vinegar to the bowl and a few small pieces of konbu and put plastic wrap over it and let marinate in the fridge overnight (keeps up to a week in the fridge).

2) Simmered shiitake

Soak dried shiitake in warm water until they're soft, maybe half an hour or an hour, then drain off the shiitake soaking water through a piece of cheesecloth in a strainer in order to keep the shiitake-infused water but get rid of any grit. Rinse the shiitake for the same reason, then chop them up into pieces that look on the small-bite-size range (they keep expanding when you simmer them). Put the mushrooms in a sauce pan and add back the strained shiitake soaking water just to cover. For a one-can-of-soup-size sauce pot, add two tablespoons of soy sauce and two tablespoons of sugar. Simmer gently until most of the liquid is reduced, stirring occasionally. Pour into a lidded container and refrigerate (yes, they'll keep absorbing the sauce in the fridge). Also lasts up to a week in the fridge.

3) Ta-tsukuri
About 2 cups of dried kaeri anchovies (small and medium sized) or chirimen-jako (really tiny ones)
Equal parts soy sauce and sugar (two and a half or three tablespoons of each)

First, dry roast the anchovies in a skillet to make sure they're really dry and haven't absorbed any moisture while in storage. Then wipe out the skillet and put the soy sauce and sugar in the bottom of the same skillet and cook until it starts frothy-bubbling and thickening a little. Toss the fish back into the pan and stir it around quickly; make sure to distribute the sauce as well as possible before the fish slurp it up. Dump on a tinfoil-lined cookie sheet or other relatively nonstick surface to cool and spread out into a reasonable distribution; depending on the state of the caramelization it will set up about like peanut brittle. Break bits up once it's cool so it's easier to extract parts of it.

4) Sesame spinach

The hard way to do it is to start with cleaning fresh spinach and chopping the ends off and boiling and separating out each leaf to line them up side by side and cut them into one-inch pieces. (That's how Tomoko taught me to do it.) The easy way is to defrost a package or two of frozen spinach in the microwave, then rinse it in cold water to keep the color bright.

Then get together:
3 tablespoons soy-roasted sesame (or roast regular sesame seeds in a dry pan and stir some soy sauce into the last few seconds of cooking)
2 tablespoons miso paste (it's easier to use the kind that has dashi broth already mixed in; otherwise, substitute dashi for the water later)
A pinch of salt
A little water (or dashi if your miso doesn't come with the dashi flavoring in it)

Grind the sesame seeds in a mortar and pestle with the pinch of salt to make it easier to grind them. Then stir in the miso and just enough water (or dashi) to make a fairly thick sauce-paste.

Make sure that the spinach is squeezed as dry as reasonably possible, then put it in a bowl with enough room to let you mix with your hands. About half the sesame sauce is enough for about a 9 ounce package of frozen spinach. (The full amount went fine for two packages.) Add the sauce slowly to the spinach, mix around, and taste; stop when it tastes good. ^_^ Keeps a couple days in the refrigerator with a piece of plastic wrap pushed right down against it to keep the air out.

5) Soy carrots
Cut thinnish flower shapes (or rounds if you don't want to be fancy). Make a soaking sauce of:
soy sauce
a couple small pieces of konbu
(if you like it spicy) a sprinkling of ichimi-togarashi or a chopped-up dragon's tooth pepper

Put the carrots in the soaking sauce and stir around, then push plastic wrap down against the top to make sure the floaters don't get left out (a drop lid or a light weight on a small plate can also help). Put in the fridge overnight.

6) Edamame

This one's really easy. Either just cook the edamame or simmer them with some sugar to bring out the buttery taste in them.

(7 and 8 are rice sprinkled with tamago-furikake and sekihan sprinkled with roasted black sesame seeds and salt, divided with pieces of nori)

(9, 10, and 11 are red pickled ginger, umeboshi, and takuan)

12) Radish roses

Slice petal shapes into a red radish, then soak them in cold water to get them to open out a little (half an hour or so). Drain them, sprinkle with salt, and rub gently to open the leaves a little more. Rinse and soak overnight in rice vinegar (if you want them edible) or apple cider vinegar (if you don't mind them too sharp to eat but like the way the pink of the radish skins redistributed itself through the radish in the picture.)

13) not pictured: kuri-kinton

About 2 lbs sweet potatoes
3/4 cup sugar
1 can chestnuts in syrup

Peel the sweet potatoes (including the pale inner layer of the skin; keep peeling until it's properly orange inside). Cut them into rounds and soak in cold water for from an hour up to all day, changing the water relatively frequently. Then rinse them and boil them until they're soft enough to mash. (You can do this a day ahead of the final prep.)

Mash the sugar and about three or four tablespoons of the chestnut syrup into the mashed potatoes. Then either:

a) mix the chestnuts into the sweet potato mixture and serve like that
or
b) put individual glops into a piece of plastic wrap, top with a chestnut, and twist until it shapes a ball, then unmold onto a plate. (I kind of semicheated with mini muffin tins.)

14 was the miso soup; 15 didn't get finished (tamagoyaki).