Welcome to The Avocado’s weekly discussion of Japanese pop culture! I’ve been in a bit of a rut the last few months with my bento recipes. I guess after three years of making the same rotation of bento dishes over and over again I got a little…bored. So I was still making my big batches of the old favorites, but I wasn’t excited about eating them every day for lunch. All of this is a long way of saying that I’m determined to explore and experiment with lots of new bento recipes this year! That means that you’ll be seeing some new adventures in bento-making in these threads. YAY!(?)
This week I have two new dishes I want to highlight: tsukune (chicken meatballs) and lotus root salad (both pictured above). The tsukune recipe I used came from Maori Murota’s Tokyo Cult Recipes, which was actually recommended by one of you years ago (I believe it was romanes eunt domus). I finally bought it a couple weeks ago, and it’s wonderful! There are a lot of new-to-me dishes that I’m excited to try. For example, tsukune! This is, for me, the perfect bento dish because it’s easy to make, freezes well, and is delicious. If you are going to freeze this dish, don’t add the sauce. When you heat it up in the morning you can add the sauce then (instead of making the sauce you can also just add Bulldog sauce if you’re in a hurry). I also want to make more fresh vegetable dishes each week, and the first one I tried is a delicious lotus root salad with a mustard dressing. I couldn’t make lotus root dishes in the past because it was impossible to find where I live, but now I have access to frozen lotus root so I can finally make this dish found in Makiko Itoh’s Just Bento Cookbook 2. It is very easy to make, and it adds a nice vinegar flavor to the bento (which is good because a lot of the dishes I tend to make are more soy sauce-based, so this dish adds a much-needed balance to the bento). The dressing is mustard, white wine vinegar, salt, pepper, olive oil, and parsley. Simple and delicious!
I hope you enjoy learning about some new recipes with me this year!
And, as always…
What have you been watching/reading/playing/eating/listening to lately?
Happy Wednesday! 🙂