Bento for week 12 and Japanese Sweet Potato Muffins

Soooo yeah... remember last week's bento post where I said I was ill but would try to post...? Well... I have been ill most of the week, still went to school... you get my point. So today I will share a recipe with the bento post that I wanted to share last week, but couldn't. I will try to post something Easter related tomorrow. No promises though ;) But I did a;ready write and schedule the Food Blog Swap for March, so there is something to look forward too. The recipe for the sweet potato muffins comes from Mama Loli.

I will only post one bento this week. This is the one I took to school with me. Nick's were the same for two days and the last day he just took muffins and bread with him. In the bento there are some leftover beans in tomato sauce, Greek style, that we had for dinner. Some Kisir, Japanese Sweet Potato Muffins, cheese cubes and hot chocolate Pocky sticks.

Japanese Sweet Potato Muffins: (makes about 12-16)
- 200 gr sweet potato (about 1 medium)
- 115 gr unsalted butter
- 135 gr sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 250 gr cake flour
- 0.25 cup milk
- 2 tsp honey
- 1 tsp baking powder

Pre heat the oven to 180 degrees. Grease your muffin tin, but I use silicone ones so it isn't needed. Peel and cube the sweet potatoes (they should be sugar cube size) and boil them for about 5 minutes. Mix butter and sugar in a large bowl. Add the eggs one by one in the mixture. Do not add more egg until the previous egg is mixed in the batter. Stir in the honey.
Mix the flour with the baking powder. Add half of the flour mixture and half of the milk with the rest of the batter. Mix well. Then add the rest of the flour and milk. Mix once more.
Scoop the batter into the muffin tin and top each muffins with sweet potato cubes.
Bake for 25-30 minutes. The muffins are done when a toothpick comes out clean.

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Bento for week 11

In the past week I only posted one recipe because I had the mother of all migraines which kept me away from my computer for several days. Luckily the slow cooker did most of the work for me food wise in the past week and the recipes that I had planned, I just have to move forward. No biggie.

Nick was really craving potato salad so we made a big batch of Japanse potato salad for our lunches. There are also some Spinach ricotta muffins from the freezer stash with some cucumber slices and green tea Toppo in the lid.

Here there are some Dutch poffertjes with powdered sugar and vegetarian roti from the slow cooker. This was the recipe that I wanted to share so I could link back to it now, but I will try to share it this week. It is my school week though and while I mostly try to plan posts ahead for that week. This didn't happen either.

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Bento for week 10

The past week was a pretty normal week. I had more energy because we finally had some good weather, which makes such a huge difference in managing my illness. I am in less pain and I am less tired. bento wise we didn't do anything special this week. There were pancakes on sale so we got those and stuffed them with a mixture of 250 ml Boursin cuisine cheese, 400 gr mushrooms and some spring onions. Just bake the mushrooms and onion shortly before you add in the cheese to melt. Really easy and hardly noteworthy. But it was tasty!

Here are the pancakes in the left tier and some pasta with spinach and cream cheese in the right one. It was just leftover from dinner. I made an extra large portion so we could both eat some for lunch as well. In the lid there is Green Tea Toppo.

More Toppo green tea flavoured sticks here. Together with a sweet potato vegetarian minced meat casserole from the evening before. In the right tier there are more pancakes, and Nick already ate his spinach ricotta muffin it seems ;) That spot wasn't empty ;)

So yeah, the bento aren't that special this week. But sometimes you just have to keep it simple :)

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Bento for week 9

This was a bit of a weird week. While we had it all planned bento wise, I got sick on Wednesday night and therefore Nick and I both slept badly. So in the morning he forget to make his soup bento. The thing with a thermos bento is, that you have to make it in the morning, but Nick totally forgot and ended up at work with no lunch at all, but with a cake that he baked that night before ;)
Tuesday's and Wednesday's bento were the same, so only one bento this week. But I will share a recipe to go with it.

Sorry for the bad quality picture. I wasn't able to make one and Nick's camera isn't so good as you can see. Anyway: In the bento are some leftover noodles from dinner. Cucumber and tomato fritters, which I will share below. In the lid there are 2 small Milka candy bars.

Tomato Fritters: (makes 8 fritters)
- 2 eggs
- 3 - 4 tomatoes (about 1.5 cup chopped)
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
- 0.25 cup feta, crumbled
- 4.5 tbsp flour
- dash of salt and pepper
- some other herbs that taste good with tomatoes, like basil or oregano
- olive oil

Whisk the eggs. Remove the seeds from the tomatoes and squeeze out the extra juices. Otherwise the batter will become too fluid. Chop them and add them to the eggs together with the tomato paste. Stir. Add the feta and stir again. Then add the flour and stir once more. You may need a bit more flour depending on how fluid your batter is at this point. It should be a little bit thicker than a cake batter. Lastly add in salt, pepper and herbs. Stir once more.

Heat some olive oil in a pan. Drop the batter with a spoon in the pan and fry until lightly golden brown (about 30-60 seconds), then flip and bake the other side. Let them cool a bit on paper towels to get rid of the extra oil. They taste great warm and cold.

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Bento for week 8

This was another school week for me, so this means I got a bento too. Nick got through his tgrial period and will be getting a half year contract at his new job. Both bento that are shown, are our Wednesday bento. Nick got 2 similar bento this week and on Thursday I just gave him a pre made salad to work, because I mostly am too tired to make him anything after I finish my school day.

In Nick's bento there is some leftover 3 cheese lasagne. I did mention before that Nick can microwave his food at work, so this makes my job really easy. In the tier there is also a spinach ricotta muffin from the freezer stash. In the other tier there is Greek tomato rice. We made this before but the recipe isn't blogged yet. I will do that next week. In the lid there is cookies and cream peppero.

In my bento there is Greek tomato rice too together with some cucumber slices. I also have low carb tuna burgers and the peppero sticks, but mine aren't on the picture. I always buy a cup of soup at school too. They are freshly made and the mushroom soup is one of my favorites.

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Bento for week 7

The last week was a bit of a hard week to find inspiration for the menu. Sometimes I have these weeks where I don't really know what to make. Especially if you want to keep the menu cheap and there is not much one sale veggie wise. There was broccoli on sale, so I made something with that and I bought a new bag of lentils because that will keep us going for a while. Anyway, I hope I will find more inspiration for next week. I am still not very inspired ;)

I made a sateh dish with the broccoli and we still had half a cauliflower left. We also added some corn. I tried a more spicy sateh sauce this time while I normally make a more sweet one. But Nick liked it, so the recipe will probably appear on the blog some time. In the other tier there is a Kenyan bean dish, that we both found really tasty with pita bread. I still need to plan the blog schedule for next week, but I will try to blog one of the recipes that I made this week.

In the left tier there is a red lentil dahl with Greek yoghurt and in the right tier a very simple potato salad with more Greek yoghurt and some lime juice. And some cucumber on top.

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Bento for week 6

This week has been pretty okay. Now that Nick is healthy again and I am getting used to the schedule things go more smoothly. Monday is still mostly our day to cook for the rest of the week, and last week we baked muffins. Some for this week but I also put some in the freezer to use in future weeks. I didn't have much of a bento stash anymore so I am working on that.

In the first and 2nd bento of the week there are some spinach and ricotta muffins and spaghetti with vegan sauce, that I shared earlier this week. In the lid are the last of the green tea panda cookies I had.

The Thursday bento often is the odd one out. There is curry madras with rice and some sandwiches with curried chicken salad. Nick doesn't often have meat in his bent. But I had tuna salad for myself and he doesn't like that.

I will share the recipe for the ricotta spinach muffins with this post. The next time I will not use the cupcake liners because the muffins stick to them greatly which is a real shame.

Ricotta Spinach Muffins: (makes 16)
- 400 gr cottage cheese (huttenkase)
- 300 gr spinach (fresh or frozen)
- 250 ml milk
- 3 eggs
- 450 gr flour
- 4 tsp baking powder
- some dates, chopped (sun dried tomatoes would also taste good)

Pre heat the oven to 180 degrees. Cut the spinach finely. But when using frozen just squeeze out as many fluids as you can. Mix spinach, cottage cheese, eggs, milk and dates. Mix everything together. Then sift and add the flour and baking powder and scoop this through. Place the batter into the muffin pan. Bake them for about 20-25 minutes in the oven.

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Bento for week 4 and 5

Two weeks ago Nick had the flu. He lost his voice and when working at a help desk, you kinda need that ;) But the day before he would go to work, I did make a bento. I didn't share it last week, because a post with only one bento in it is a bit of a waste, so I shared a recipe instead and combined it with this week.

This bento is a bit different from usual, as it has a dish that needs to be heated. But Nick has access to a microwave at work, so if it comes to that, it isn't a problem. It was some leftover cheesy potato oven dish. In the other tier there is kisir, a Turkish bulgur salad. In the lid there is custard Toppo.

This is the bento of this week. There is a Turkish style omelet, which I will share the recipe of below. The panda cookies were in the lid, but Nick choose to photograph it this way. In the other tier there is curry madras with rice. I won't share a recipe of that one, because I just used a store bought package, which had the veggies for it.

For the 3rd day I didn't do a bento this week. But we made some hummus with sundried tomatoes and we had that on bread.

In the Turkish style omelet I use a Turkish white cheese that I bought in a speciality store. But you can substitute feta, if you want. It does make a difference in taste because the Turkish cheese is creamier. The recipe I use comes from My Mixed Kitchen.

Omelet with Turkish Cheese (serves 4)
- 6 eggs
- 100 gr Turkish white cheese
- a handful fresh parsley, dill and / or fresh chives

Mash the cheese a bit with a fork and cut the herbs. Mix them together. Add the eggs with a tiny bit of water and beat them into a creamy mixture.

Melt a bit of butter in a tiny skillet. Pour half of the egg mixture in. On medium heat let the egg cook slowly. The top of the omelet shouldn't be fluid any more but may be a bit wobbly in the middle. Make sure the bottom doesn't get too dark. Turn the omelet and let the other side bake shortly.
Bake another omelet with the rest of the mixture. The serving size is half an omelet.

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Bento for week 03

For the bento from this week, I made 1 go to recipe and some new ones. I love that most dinner leftovers are very suitable for bento. This makes prepping really easy. I don't have much to tell for this week. I am still not doing much better on the energy part. Mainly on Thursday night, Nick's final workday I am really exhausted and emotionally drained. Combining whole days of being alone and doing more in the house is difficult to combine with my tasks for my volunteer job and my study. Next week will be the 4th week, so it should be easier from now on, in theory. I am trying to give a bit of a personal update with each week of bento or else the posts do get really short ;)

Nick too the pictures himself this week at work. When there is still daylight left after dinner, when I make the bento, I will be doing them myself again. But until then we have to deal with these iPhone4 pictures ;)

This bento is really plain. There is couscous salad on the left, and broccoli "beef" with rice on the right. In the lid are some cookies from the anime One Piece which I got at an anime convention. The recipe for the broccoli "beef" will be up two days from now.

Here is more couscous salad, which Nick spiced up with some tomato ketchup himself. In the other tier there are Indian aloo tikki pancakes with aloi sauce and tikka masala curry. And a mini cookies and cream kit-kat in the lid.

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Bento for week 02

The 2nd work week of Nick was even harder than the first, because we had to combine this with me going to school. We managed it in the end, but it was a bit hard to plan for. I guess that eventually we will be used to it, but it will take some time. Anyway: we still made some good recipes for the bento, which was nice. Good food always lightens the mood :D

This was Nick's bento for Tuesday. In the bento was some Eggplant Potato Curry with rice, a dinosaur cookie in the lid, carrot-feta fritters and caprese bread with herbal cheese. From the latter two I will post the recipes later in the week.

Nick made me this bento for my school day on Wednesday. I also have caprese bread with cream cheese, some crispy biscuit balls and hummus tuna wraps.

The recipe for the wraps is really easy, so I will share it real quick :)

Hummus Tuna Wraps: (serves 1)
- 1 wrap
- about 1/3 can of tuna
- some hummus
- fresh basil
- sundried tomato

Mix the tuna with some hummus and sprad this on the wrap. Cut a sundried tomato and some basil into stripes and top the wrap with it. Roll the wrap tightly and cut into 8 pieces.

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Bento for week 01

I am only going to show the bento I made about once a week. I manage to keep blogging every other day now, and I don't want to increase that. This way there is a weekly bento post and the rest is filled with recipes. I made 3 bento this week, and that will be the average. I only show two here because two of the three bento were kind of the same. I have to say that I have a pretty hard time adjusting to the new work schedule but hopefully that will go better in a couple of weeks.

Nick took this picture himself at work. In the bento are Turkish potato salad, cucumber, Indian dahl, spring onion and cheese muffins, some leftover cheese cubes and panda pocky in the lid. The 2nd day he had dinosaur cookies in the lid, but the rest was pretty much the same.

In this bento are slow cooker beans in sateh sauce with rice and vegetarian balls. More muffins and a slice of speculaas carrot cake that I had to stuff in there to make it fit.

I cook up new recipes faster than I blog them so that is why I never manage to work away my recipe backlog. But the muffins we actually made before, I just haven't gotten around to blog them.

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A New Year with Bento

Happy new year everyone! I will start the year with two bento that I made in December. That is right! After a long time, the bento will be back on the blog! Nick finally has a job again where he works enough hours that I can make bento for him. With him being a mail man for so long and only working a few hours a day and after that being unemployed for 9 months there wasn't much opportunity to make bento. I took one to school with me about once a month, but I often forgot to take a picture during lunchtime. But on the last school day of the year I didn't forget and Nick had two test days at his new job, so I have two bento to show you. Now Nick starts his job in a few days, he will work for three full days a week, so plenty of chances for me to make bento again.

The bento that Nick made me for school is very simple. These are tuna burgers and leftover spinach pasta from the day before. I always order soup at school as well, so the bento I take with me, isn't that big. The tuna burgers were a new recipe that I will share soon, because they are very easy to make and healthy too.

Nick's main dish in the bento was Pesto Couscous. In the other tier there is leftover eggplant potato curry with rice and some cucumbers. The recipe for the curry is another one I need to share. It was such a tasty dish. As a snack Nick had green tea Pocky in the lid. On his 2nd work day I made practically the same bento but with a mini pumpkin kitkat in the lid instead.

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Bento: Pesto Couscous

This blog is called She Likes Bento and there are hardly any bento shown anymore. I know, I know! This is mainly because I only need one a month and I often only take one dish with me that I eat with the soup I buy at school. I considered changing the name of this blog even, but that means changing all my links with it, which is too much hassle. But today I have another simple bento for you. The blog the answer is food has a nice category that shares recipes for food on the go. There I saw this very tasty salad that I just had to take with me. I ate it with a mushroom soup. Yum!!

Pesto Couscous (serves 1)
- 100 gr green beans
- 0.25 courgette
- 60 gr couscous
- 1 tbsp green pesto
- 1 tbsp yoghurt

Quarter the courgette and cut the beans into 3 cm pieces. Boil them for about 8 minutes. Put the couscous in a bowl and pour 100 ml boiling water over it. Stir it for about 1 minute. Then cover it and leave it rest for a few minutes. Then fluff it up with a fork once more and add the pesto and yoghurt. Lastly add the veggies and you are done.

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#132 - Muffin and beans bento

This bento was made by Zeronic for me when I visited the hobby club. I didn't have time to make a bento myself the evening before so I asked Zeronic to make me one :)

Don't mind the picture. I took a quick snap of it before I ate it. In the bento is a pistachio-date muffin, Dutch spiced cake (peperkoek), a left over bean dish and edamame to snack on.

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#131 - Build your own cracker bento

I actually had other plans for this bento, but we had so much leftover from dinner, that I decided to just save it for the next day and pack another bento. I had plenty of muffins in my freezer stash and I also had these new brand of crackers that I wanted to try.

Sorry for the dark picture. It is that time of year again where everything is dark and my phone doesn't deal too well with pictures in evening light. Anyway in this bento there are 2 muffins. One date pistachio muffin and one courgette-feta muffin. I had to cut them into pieces because this bento is low and these muffins are huge ;)
In the other tier there are 2 large crackers broken into halves. (For the Dutchies, it are Vitalu crackers, very tasty!) As a topping I brought a vegan cashew-paprika spread and mozzerella. I know this doesn't really make sense, but because I switched around my bento planning, I needed to fill it with whatever I had in my fridge, and there wasn't that much. I also brought some pistachios to nibble on during my school day.

I did wrap up the crackers in plastic after I took the picture, or else they will get soggy. This isn't my most creative bento but I loved the combination of the crackers with the spread. Also the muffins are a handy treat to take with me to eat during the smaller breaks.

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#130 - Vegan Paella Bento

I made this vegan paella for a Spanish cookalong and my boyfriend Zeronic liked it so much that he wanted it in his bento for work that day.

In this bento there is vegan paella as a main dish with lots of different veggies like bell pepper, green beans, peas and spring onions. As a side there are two cranberry muffins from the freezer stash (non vegan!) and cucumber slices. This bento looks a lot like last weeks, but that is because I made them in about the same time period and then the same main or side dishes may occur. This was the last in the backlog I still had from the summer period. So from now on there will be more seasonal bento again, if I make them.

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#129 - Tarly bento take 2

Between the bento that I posted last week and this one was actually just one day. That is why my boyfriend Zeronic had the same main dish as the day before but with different sides. I was in doubt if I should post this one, but I wanted to keep my bento count complete, so here it is.

There is the tarly dish again. For the ones who missed it last week: this is a grain that can be used as a base for dishes. This time we combined it with zucchini, bell pepper, eggplant, corn and vegetarian bacon. As sides there are 2 cranberry muffins from the freezer stash and cucumber slices.

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#128 - Tarly bento

One of the things that my boyfriend Zeronic really likes to cook with is tarly. It a a kind of grain that can be used as a base for a lot of dishes. That is why I used some leftover tarly in his bento the next day.

His main dish is tarly with different veggies likes bell pepper, zucchini, eggplant and corn. There are also some vegetarian bacon pieces in there. My boyfriend isn't a vegetarian like myself so I gave him some rolled up ham filled with cream cheese in his bento together with so cucumber slices.

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#127 - Sandwich rolls bento

This is another bento that my boyfriend Zeronic took to work with him during the summer when he has to make longer days. I kept this one fairly simple because it was a hot summer day.

I made sandwich rolls stuffed with a cashewnut and bell-pepper spread. And in the other tier is a cous cous salad with bell pepper, peas and feta that we ate often last summer. It is really basic but it does the trick on those really hot days when every minute spend in the kitchen is one too many.

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#126 - Inarizushi bento

Over the summer my boyfriend Zeronic worked longer hours for a few weeks and did request if I could make him some bento on the longer days. My bento making had been on hold for a while, so I didn't mind making some again.

In this bento is some inarizushi - filled tofu sachets. We had them left over from our sushi meal from the day before. Other than that I fried some leftover bell pepper, added some cucumber and mixed beans from my freezer stash. Too bad that I didn't have any more inarizushi for myself that afternoon because I put it all in here ;)

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