baby steps to bento

so bento in simplest terms is a japanese box lunch made up of a variety of foods, usually involving a base of rice and some veggies, pickles and meat. they can be simple like an everyday lunch or they can be over the top in design and complexity.

well i have to start somewhere so i figured Onigiri and one-day pickles might be a good start.

Onigiri are the rice ball, made hot out of the rice cooker, shaped with salted hands and having (usually) a filling. Things i learned from this first onigiri: rice out of rice cooker extremely freaking hot, when doing filling for onigiri it is not necessary to prep an entire can of tuna. they do look the right shape though, i even got the seaweed hand holder on there.

The pickles were also an experiment, i took the recipe from here http://www.justhungry.com/sweet-and-sour-cucumber-and-wakame-pickles
i didn't have one of the types of seaweed and i used chili powder in place of a whole chili pepper.
i left them over night in the fridge and ... they're really good!! they only last a week, two tops but they won't be around that long.

so bento baby steps was a success.