I always have a bit of a conundrum as to where I should post a new recipe. I’ve more or less settled on this formula: if it’s particularly suited for bentos, the recipe goes here on Just Bento, and if not, it goes over on Just Hungry. The exception to this is if it’s a sort of foundation Japanese recipe, that applies to a wide variety of recipes - then it goes on Just Hungry. Got that? If you want to be sure not to miss anything, I hope you decide to just follow both sites. ^_^

The negimiso or onion-miso sauce recipe I posted over on Just Hungry last week belongs to the third category - it’s a foundation type recipe for Japanese cooking - but it’s really well suited to bento dishes. Here are three of my favorites - all quick to make if you have a batch of negimiso on hand.

For all of the recipes here, I’ve used variation no. 1 of the negimiso recipes, using a light brown miso and cooked to a loose-sauce state. I did use a sugar substitute for the sugar, but you can use regular sugar (which will be better). Any of the negimiso variations should work just as well.

Iri dofu or iri doufu (炒り豆腐) is a simple, homely dish, real Japanese style ‘mother’s cooking’. Probably every Japanese home cook has his or her own recipe, but the base is plain tofu that is crumbled and then stirred around or gently stir fried (the iri 炒り part means that) until it resembles dry scrambled egg. In fact, it’s rather like the tofu version of iri tamago, but with more flavor and texture.

For various reasons, I’ve been staying away from eating bread recently. This has led me back to an old favorite that I hadn’t made in a while, rice burgers. Rice burgers are made with rice that is formed into two flat patties, then made into sandwiches. Here are my original instructions for making a rice burger. Rice burgers are great for people who like onigiri (rice balls) but want a high filling vs. rice ratio.

This bento relies on two staples (plus premade frozen rice): meat soboro, and stewed hijiki seaweed with carrots and tofu.. 3-color soboro (sanshoku soboro 三色そぼろ) is a classic bento combination, and as you can see it’s quite colorful. To eat it yo mix the toppings into the rice. You may want to bring a spoon along to make eating the mixed rice easier.

I spent about an hour on Sunday making and cooking up a big batch of a basic burger mixture. The mix is very versatile, so I made four different things from it. Now I have enough mini-burgers, meatballs and more in my freezer for at least 20 or more bento portions. It was an hour well spent! I love just knowing that my freezer has a nice stock of ready-to-go bento items - it takes the pressure off considerably on busy mornings.

Over the past couple of years as I’ve pursued largely vegetarian eating, I’ve gradually accumulated a small arsenal of small, round bean patties or balls, which are great as snacks, for bento boxes, and just for dinner, in my regular rotation. This one was inspired by one of the first beany-round thing I made, the samosa-like lentil snacks from The Hungry Tiger, and a Japanese vegan cooking book called Saisai Gohan (Vegetable Meals) by Yumiko Kano. (Yumiko Kano is currently my favorite cookbook author in any language, and I’ll talk more about her down the line.) I’ve adjusted a few things to make them gluten-free.

Tamagoyaki, the slightly sweet rolled Japanese omelette, is a standby protein item for bentos. It tastes great at room temperature, is fairly easy to make (once you’ve done it a few times), and is cheap too. Plus the cheery yellow color brightens up any bento box.

Shuffling through the hundreds of photos I’ve taken of past bentos and such, I dug up this sushi roll bento that I did last summer.

It’s a very simple bento really, which is probably why I never got around to posting it here. (I only post a fraction of the bentos I actually make and eat…I should probably post more!) It has a plain tamagoyaki made with 2 eggs, some leftover stewed beans, and fruit. The star of the bento is half of a fat sushi roll made with brown rice that is filled with some decidedly non-traditional things: lettuce, cucumber, raw carrot, ham and cheese, and the end bits of the tamagoyaki.

There are many recipes for stewed or simmered beans in Japanese cooking, but this is one of the simplest, and I’m fairly sure, one of the oldest recipes in existence. It traditionally only uses three ingredients — soy beans, sugar and soy sauce — but I’ve added a little salt too since I like the saltiness to be a bit more assertive to balance the sweetness. The beans have a unique, chewy texture that is unlike any other bean dish I’ve ever had. The soy beans become almost caramelized, yet are not cloyingly sweet.

Warning: This furikake is very dangerous. It is so more-ish that you might find yourself putting spoonfuls of it directly in your mouth. To prevent this, I recommend making it a tad spicier than you might be comfortable with eating it on its own, so it will not disappear before you can use it on your rice. The spicy-salty-sweet taste, coupled with the interesting textures of the peanuts and the seeds, is quite hard to resist.

Tamagoyaki is such a integral part of Japanese food that I am rather kicking myself for not having posted a recipe for it before here. The name tamagoyaki means “fried egg”, and the alternate name, atsuyaki tamago, means “thick fried egg”. (Some books or restaurants erroneously called it just tamago, which just means “egg”.) A slightly sweet, moist square-shaped egg concoction, tamagoyaki is a bento box staple, as well as being a popular sushi neta (topping). It’s also great as a side dish for any meal.

A soboro is rather like furikake, except that it’s moister. It’s used like furikake in many situations - sprinkled onto rice, folded into other things like eggs, and more. Soboro can be made of ground meat, flaked fish (though fish soboro is often called oboro instead), or egg (egg soboro is often called iri tamago, just to keep you confused!) Meat soboro (niku soboro) keeps for about a week in the refrigerator, and freezes beautifully, making it a great bento johbisai or staple for the omnivore.

Tamagoyaki, the slightly sweet rolled Japanese omelette, is a standby protein item for bentos. It tastes great at room temperature, is fairly easy to make (once you’ve done it a few times), and is cheap too. Plus the cheery yellow color brightens up any bento box.

Usually chicken teriyaki (or chikiteri as it’s abbreviated sometimes) is made from whole chicken thigh pieces, but I prefer to cut the meat up in advance for bento use - the smaller pieces cook faster, and I don’t have to deal with slicing hot cooked meat early in the morning.

Bento contents:

3 medium sized Buttermilk Corn Muffins, 450 cal
1 serving Make Your Own Vegetable Soup Concentrate, 50 cal
Mache or lamb’s lettuce as background/garnish
Total calories (approx): 510 (how calories are calculated)

Time needed: 25-30 minutes to decorate the muffins (muffins are pre-made and frozen)

Type: Not Japanese, theme bento, vegetarian

Torihamu (鶏ハム）or chicken ham is a recipe that was born and made popular on the internet. It was first popularized around 2001 or 2002, on an extremely popular and often wild and woolly Japanese community/forum site called 2ch or 2-channel (２ちゃんねる), sometime in 2001 or 2002.

Although I use chicken quite a lot in my bentos, I realized that I have very few bento-appropriate chicken recipes up here on Just Bento, or even over on Just Hungry. I am going to rectify this situation over the next few days, so if you are a chicken fan, stay tuned!

The first chicken recipe is one I have made for years and years - tender, lemony white meat nuggets that are infused with lemon. They very quick to make, good hot or cold, and versatile. They are pan fried, not deep-fried, so they are not crispy on the outside, but are delicious nevertheless. You can use them in a rice based bento, with noodles, or as a sandwich filling. They can be eaten as-is with a cocktail stick or the fingers too.

One of the handiest freezer stock foods is frozen peeled shrimp. They aren’t as tasty as unpeeled, unfrozen shrimp, but they sure are handy to use. I almost always have a bag or two around.

Here are two recipes with a little kick to them that can be made in just a few minutes from frozen; both are perfect for bento.

Tsukune is a term that means “kneaded and shaped into a round shape”. It usually means a dish made with finely ground and flavored chicken or fish. Chicken tsukune are very well suited to bentos, since they are soft and stay nice and moist. They are also gluten-free (no breadcrumbs!), if you take care to use a gluten-free cornstarch or potato starch and soy sauce.

This bento brings together two recent recipes for a pretty low-calorie yet filling bento. The hot and sweet peppers do need to be made in advance, but they last there for a week or more, so are well worth the time they take. The Pan fried lemon chicken nuggets can either be made the night before or in the morning - they only take a few minutes. They are only about 30-40 calories per piece, so adding a couple more pieces won’t hurt much at all. I added some wide green beans that are in season right now, just boiled in salted water then ‘refreshed’ under cold running water. You could use spinach or other greens instead.

This is presented as an idea for a bento that doesn’t look like a bento, for people with hearty appetites who can’t get their heads around the smallness of a bento box and how it could possibly ‘be enough’. It’s supposed to ressemble a buffalo chicken wing meal, but has cut down on the fat and calories of a real buffalo chicken spread considerably, in this way:

The wings are baked with no added oil, not deep fried
Greek yogurt is used with a little bit of Roquefort cheese for the dip
The chips or fries are also oven baked, not deep fried.

There isn’t much new in this bento, except for the diagonally oriented packing of the box to accommodate the chicken skewers. I wanted to present it though because this is really a basic type of bento for me: 1 protein, 2 vegetables, rice or other grain (usually it’s brown or mixed-grain rice). It’s quick to assemble, balanced, filling and easy. It really doesn’t require any more thought than your typical sandwich.

I haven’t posted a complete bento in quite a while. I like to show something new when I write about a complete bento, and for the past few weeks I haven’t done much beyond making simple onigiri or assembling sandwiches. But since I turned some delicious locally-raised pork into miso marinated pork the other day, I made a spring-like bento to go with it. It was delicious, and looks nice too I think! I also decided to decorate it a bit, which gives me a chance to show a couple of ways of dealing with “charaben leftovers” if you will.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted a complete bento! The truth is, all of my new-bento creative energy has been going into the recipes for that book, and for my personal consumption I’ve been falling back on old reliables like grilled salted salmon and kinpira - things I’ve already shown you how to make. But now it’s time to rectify that situation. This is actually a bento I made for the book, but decided not to use. I was trying to come up with a cute bento (charaben) that a beginner could make and was not based on rice. This does fit the bill. It manages to be vegetable-filled and fairly low in calories too.

If you have access to a microwave and a refrigerator at work or school and you’re really pressed for time, you could bring a readymade frozen dinner to work. As long as you don’t have a very long commute the frozen items should stay intact en route, and at lunch time you can enjoy a piping hot lunch. But a frozen bento combo that you make yourself would be healthier and cheaper, and you’d know exactly what was in it too.

This is a quick-assembly bento (about 10 minutes in the morning) that consists mainly of seasonal vegetables. I did use a wiener sausage for the protein part because I was running low on other protein ingredients, but it’s just one so I don’t feel too bad about it, especially since the rest of the bento is so healthy! I cut the wiener into little fish, and arranged them so they look as they they are swimming upstream. I’ve described the wiener fish here - the tutorial (in Japanese, but with very clear photos) is on this page. You could of course just cut up the sausage into diagonal slices - but the fish are more fun! One sausage yields 4 fish. To keep the bento all-vegan, substitute some veggie franks, fried tofu or other vegetable protein.

Here is another example of an onigiri (rice ball) based bento, packed into an onigiri bento box. I made a batch of okowa, adding some chopped cooked leftover chicken to the the basic recipe, formed it into 1/2 cup-portion plastic wrap method onigiri, and froze it. Because of the extra-glutinous nature of sticky rice and the addition of a little oil to the rice, okowa freezes and defrosts beautifully. Since okowa does contain oil and is preseasoned, it’s not necessary to moisten the plastic or salt it to form the onigiri.

The time it takes to assemble a bento depends on how long it takes to cook and cool down the item that takes the longest. In this case it’s the cherry tomato and vegetable gratin, which takes a couple of minutes to assemble, 6 minutes to cook in a toaster oven, then at least 5 minutes to cool. So as you can see from the timeline below, I start with this first. Once the gratin is cooking, I pack the rice in the bento box (so it has time to cool down) and then cook the shrimp, which takes a shorter time to cook and cool. (Incidentally, the gratin’s calories can be reduced if you don’t use a big spoonful of pesto sauce as I did…though that certainly makes it taste great!)

This is a bento that uses one of the chicken recipes I’ve posted, little chicken dumplings stewed with carrots (tsukune-ni). The recipe takes about 20 minutes to cook, but since it is a bid fiddly it’s best made in advance. It keeps for 2-3 days in the refrigerator, and can also be frozen quite successfully. What I usually end up doing is making enough for dinner, with ‘planned leftovers’ for the next day’s bento. The soft dumplings go marvelously well with rice.

Every component of this bento is made in advance with the exception of the carrot rice. This I made using some leftover rice, mixed with a little grated carrot, a bit of oil, and salt (see carrot rice recipe). In the other compartment I put in two pre-made, frozen and defrosted Panfried chicken mini-burgers, and refrigerator-stock Cooked to death hot and sweet peppers. I used a couple of fresh shiso leaves from the garden as garnish and liner; if you don’t have shiso, just use some dark green leaves of any kind that are sturdy and can be eaten raw (for example cos or Romaine lettuce, Malabar spinach, Swiss chard, even cabbage!) I do like using shiso as garnish, since it’s loaded with nutrients - and every bit of nutriition counts in a small bento box!

This is a very simple, all-make-ahead bento. It consists of a vegetable-rich spicy vegetarian (vegan really) chili with kidney beans, plus healthy carbs in the form of homemade muffins. The basic pattern can be varied almost infinitely by changing the chili part and the muffin part. Here I have used non-vegan pumpkin yogurt muffins, but you could very easily make this a vegan combo by selecting a vegan muffin. And you could just as easily make this an omnivore’s feast by adding some lean ground meat to the chili.

The star of this bento is the Sesame Flavored Beef, but it’s still loaded with vegetables and fiber. You might think “2 ounces of meat? No way is that going to fill me up!” but it really does in a bento like this.

This is a bento that I made right after I came back from my trip. You know how it goes - whenever you’re going away, you think you’re going to clean out the fridge properly before leaving and all that, but you never get around to it in the final rush. So you come home and you are faced with some dodgy looking science experiments in your vegetable drawer. The only vegetables that were still cheerfully intact in my fridge after 3 weeks away were a small cabbage, a bunch of celery stalks (slightly limp), and a half-filled bag of carrots. The onions were ok in the pantry too, but the potatoes had all sprouted their way to oblivion.

So, on to the bento! Here are the recipes for Red Peppers With Maple Syrup and Chili and Sweet-Sour Red Wine Vinegar Chicken. I made a double amount of the chicken since I also packed The Guy’s bento, and there’s enough left over of the red pepper for another round of bentos.

The components of this bento are the cooked broccoli, shredded carrot, and the leafy vegetables. Leafy vegetables can get limp if they are carried with heavier food on top of them. In addition there’s the chicken and the yogurt dressing.

A donburi is a bowl of rice with various savory toppings. This bento is donburi-style, since all the savory things are piled on top of a bed of rice. All the juices in the chicken and vegetables run down into the rice, so by lunchtime it’s all very tasty. You may want to bring along a spoon as well as chopsticks or a fork to eat this.

A regular bento maker relies heavily on leftovers. But there is no reason why they have to look boring or sad, or scream ‘ich bin ein Leftover!’ at you from your bento box. This bento is made almost entirely of leftover bits; the rice is left over from dinner so I didn’t have to draw from my frozen rice stash), the ham and lentils were from a soup a couple of days ago (the lentils were Puy lentils so they stayed nice and firm in the soup) , and the broccoli stems are, naturally, left over after the florets were used up. Once they are peeled, they are perfectly edible, and add a nice crunch to any dish.

Gyuudon or beef bowl has become more and more popular outside of Japan. In its basic form, it’s beef and onions or leeks simmered in a savory-sweet sauce, served on a bed of rice. It can be awful if made with bad, gristly beef, but very good if made with good, tender slices.

An oyaki (お焼き）is a flat dumpling or bun that is grilled or pan-fried on both sides. It can be filled with a savory or sweet filling, or left plain. The dough part can be made of anything that can formed into a sort of dough - rice or rice flour, wheat or buckwheat. Quite often it’s made with leftovers. It’s a homey little snack that is made quite commonly in Japanese homes. It also appears in some regions as a roadside snack.

Chirashizushi is just a bed of sushi rice with toppings of your choice. Here I have used peeled frozen shrimp that is steam-cooked with a little salt and sake in a dry pan, half of a chikuwa (a fish paste produce that looks like a bamboo branch), plus cucumber, edamame and carrots. If you cut the carrots in decorative shapes, allow a little more time. It will be pretty anyway with the colorful toppings. Since the protein components of this bento are quite low fat and low calorie, the whole bento is under 400 calories. This bento was inspired by one in Yaseru Obento Recipes.

This is the ‘skinny bento’ featured in Skinny Bento vs. Not So Skinny Bento.

I made everything in advance the night before except for the tamagoyaki, but I could have made that in advance too. This can also be made in the morning in about half an hour, except for the task of marinating the chicken teriyaki - if you have to do that too, add another 10 minutes or so. (I’d cut up and marinate the chicken, go and shower and stuff, then return to finish the bento.) All in all though, I think this bento is more efficiently assembled by doing almost everything the night before, as I show here.

I’ve already given the recipes for bite size chicken teriyaki and tamagoyaki, so here I’ll note down the recipe that is barely a recipe for the bean sprouts with umeboshi (moyashi no ume ae). This is a refreshingly crunchy and very low-calorie sort of side salad, which I like to serve with a meat dishes.

Here is another bento for the bento-shy. No rice, no ‘strange’ Japanese food, just meatloaf and pasta. The centerpiece is the pre-made Bento sizes mini-meatloaf. I used half of one here. The trick is to defrost the meatloaf briefly, about 3-4 minutes on the ‘defrost’ setting of the microwave, so that it’s still frozen on the inside but just soft enough to slice. You can then store the rest of the mini-meatloaf for next day’s bento. If you don’t have a microwave, just put the frozen meatloaf in the refrigerator the night before.

Who doesn’t love a meatloaf? (If you eat meat, that is.) Sliced leftover meatloaf is great in sandwiches, and it’s also very nice in a bento box. Meatloaves also freeze very well, since they have a moistness to them.

While I do like to make a big meatloaf now and then, I also like to make these mini-sized meatloaves specifically for the bento freezer stash. I often reserve a couple for dinner, and wrap and freeze the rest.

You could use your own favorite meatloaf recipe for this, but here is one in case you need it. The key point here is the size, perfect for bento boxes and sandwiches.