Saturday, October 1, 2011

Weekend Cooking: #104 - First Soup Bento

I really wanted to have a thermal bento for a few years already and now I finally got one! This is great because I am now able to take soup with me to school.


The bento has two compartments, one for soup that has a watertight lid and one that you can place on top of that to take some side dishes. As you can see the 2nd compartment isn't too big, since I could hardly fit in two broccoli muffins. This bento comes as a set and also part of it is a fitting bag and chopsticks. But I was in a hurry that morning before school, so I forgot to take a proper picture of the whole set. The bento did hold up very nicely and the soup was still warm when it was lunchtime, so I am very pleased about my new bento set. If you are interested to get one of your own, I bought mine on e-bay. You can click here to go to the seller and to see many great pictures of this set.

I also have a recipe for you of the soup I made. I really wanted to make pumpkin soup because the pumkins are in season again but I added sweet potatoes as well :)


Sweet Potato Pumpkin Soup (serves 4)
- 500 gr pumpkin
- 500 gr sweet potatoes
- 500 ml vegetable stock
- 300ml coconut milk
- juice of 1 lime

Peel the sweet potatoes. Remove the seeds from the pumpkin and cut both pumpkin and sweet potato in pieces. Toss the veggies in a large pan and add the vegetable stock. Let it boil for about 40 minutes until the veggies are soft. Mash the vegetables with a hand held blender until you have a smooth texture. Add the coconut milk to make it more creamy. Let the soup simmer for a bit and lastly add the lime juice for a sweet and sour taste.

The post is part of weekend cooking. Please go check out what others have made this weekend as well.

17 comments:

  1. First, I love your bento set!! And good news that the soup was still warm at lunchtime. Second, I love the look of your muffins -- cut in half with that perfect broccoli spear inside. Wow. I hope you share that recipe someday.

    I adore pumpkin soup and addition of sweet potatoes sounds yummy.

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  2. @ Beth: I already shared that recipe. Just click on the word broccoli muffins in my post and it will take you there :)

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  3. Cool bento set! The soup looks delicious and what a great lunch with the broccoli muffins, I love it.

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  4. I've never seen a bento set like this one before -- what a great idea. I love soup, have it alot for dinner with home made bread.

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  5. Such a cute bento!! I bet daughter would love taking soup to school in this. I will definitely hit ebay and browse, see what I can find. And then I'll have to make some of this soup w/ the muffins. Tasty :D

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  6. Very cute bento set and great way to have a good soup away from home. I like the simplicity of the soup recipe. I haven't tried pumpkin and sweet potatoes together, but it sounds like it would taste good. I'll have to try it.

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  7. I have a confession: I didn't know what a bento set was until now. I hadn't heard of it before. Your set is so cute! Now I want some pumpkin soup. :-)

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  8. Delightful! Is Bento widely used there? Why haven't I heard of it before your wonderful postings??

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  9. @ Vasilly: That is exactly the purpose of my blog :) I know that a lot of people haven't heard about bento before, so I am always happy when people discover it.

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  10. I think I have all the ingredient to make this soup and it is a perfect day for it. I love your bento set.

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  11. @ Nan: No bento isn't widely used here in the Netherlands. It is fairly uncommon here too. It originates from Japan. But it is getting more popular in other countries too.

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  12. I like the coconut idea for creaminess..

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  13. Those broccoli muffins are beautiful...I will be trying that recipe!

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  14. I like the look of your broccoli muffins! The bento set is very cute.

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  15. The box is cute! It looks a tad small though, though thick wintery soups/chili's would probably fill enough, I assume?

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  16. The box for side dishes is small. But I didn't even fill the bento with soup completely and I was full after eating this lunch. So yeah, I think the size is good :)

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  17. This is wonderful and so easy. I must try it. Thanks.

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