CRAYON FOOD
A guest post by the darling Tess Lynch!
My ROYGBIVness
Recently I was up until four or five in the morning mesmerized by Google-image-searched bento boxes. Not only are some of them exquisite, but they’re witty and meticulously executed:
The more I looked into them, the more complicated they seemed: there are ratios to consider, colorful patterns to be planned, and techniques to keep the food fresh in its box during transit. And then, of course, the fact that they’re so small; whenever I mentioned bento boxes to anybody, they looked a little sad.
“Tess, those things are small,” most of them said. And they are, they’re very small — you’re meant to pack them full of food, but the capacity of the boxes (when you’re minding the recommended ratios of rice:sides:protein) is a little shocking by my greedy American standards. I really liked the idea, however, of using as many brightly-colored foods as possible: they’re vitamin-rich (except when you cheat by using food coloring — which I did), they’re fun to construct and pretty to boot. Bento boxes are often packed with flower-shaped fruit, bunny-eared apple slices, and Hello Kitty sauce holders in order to make young picky eaters finish their lunches.
So, in the end, I decided to do a Bento-themed dinner (salad? I tried to make this count as salad — let’s just call it a salad), but on a plate. It had a zillion elements, because I couldn’t decide. I wanted to make sure I covered as many colors as possible:
Chicken breasts marinated in honey, garlic and turmeric (mostly for the sake of making them golden yellow, but I think it also made them taste extra awesome) and then baked.
Teal, white, and red jasmine rice.
Cabbage slaw with soy, sugar, and rice vinegar.
I got a little too enthusiastic making my plates. I was starving and concerned that nothing would go together, a combination which led to me giving up in desperation and deciding to pile everything onto a couple of plates for my co-diner and myself. Usually I’m a two- or three-dish lady, or even one dish if I’m feeling very lazy, which is quite a bit of the time. But look at this!!:
#1 (Left to right: garlic spinach, steamed broccoli, hard-boiled egg, turmeric/garlic/honey chicken, red rice, heirloom cherry tomatoes, cabbage slaw, shredded carrot, teal rice, japanese crackers)
#2, now with extra teal rice!
Everything was much better-tasting than you might assume. Time for dessert!
Sweets don’t have much of a place in bento boxes, because they’re supposed to be healthy (lest you forget). Because I laugh in the face of convention, I decided to do an entire dessert plate for my bento-inspired evening; but don’t get too excited: it’s mostly fruit.
Chopped fresh strawberries and watermelon, pineapple rings.
From top to bottom: watermelon and strawberry “sashimi” (I ASK YOU TO STRETCH YOUR IMAGINATION, READER), pineapple rings with seedless black grapes, slice of mini fudge bundt cake with vanilla ice cream and almond M&M’s.
My unintentionally romantic lighting makes everything look more Technicolor Dreamcoat in these photos than when I was staring down at it, eating my dinner with chopsticks to be pretentious; the effect was still pretty impressive, though, if I do say so myself. When I’m advanced enough, I’m going to do an exact replica of this Jackson Pollock painting:
Tess Lynch is a person. She Tumbls here, and at her recipe blog, Tessipes.
