Better than Leftovers - Kareiraisu

Part of the magic of bentos is the way they can make leftovers seem just as appetizing as the first time round. I've done my fair share of reheating leftovers in the company microwave, and I know how tedious it can be. Inspired by "Leftover Remake", over on Lunch in a Box, I've been casting a critical eye over my dinners to see how I can save money and time by re-working elements from dinner for the next day's lunch.

This week I was able to incorporate almost all of our dinners into the next day's lunch, something which really helped stretch our food budget before payday! This isn't always possible, because sometimes dinner doesn't really lend itself to being eaten at room temperature the next day (like pasta, for example), and sometimes we're so hungry that nothing survives the feeding onslaught.



The first success I had this week involved a bit of planning, but yielded a really delicious and filling lunch. I decided to make chicken kareiraisu from Elizabeth Andoh's "Washoku", a recipe which calls first for pan-frying marinaded chicken with curry powder before turning it into a thickly-sauced curry.

Curry rice is an extremely popular dish here, and one thing that I associate strongly with Japan is the smell of warm curry floating through the air at lunchtime. The most common way for curry to be made at home is from a roux, which can be bought in boxes in the supermarket. They usually come in a range of flavours and heat levels, but I find them a bit bland, too salty, and a bit heavy from the fat needed to make the roux thicken properly. When I saw the recipe for making it from scratch, I knew I had to try it. Although it took a bit more work and time than a boxed version, I was able to control the seasoning and oil myself, and it resulted in incredibly tender and flavourful chicken. I added a bit of fresh garam masala to the S & B curry powder, which made for a warm, ever so slightly sweet curry crust on the chicken. At this point, I set about a third of the chicken aside, to be put into the next day's bento.


The kareiraisu recipe calls for cooking cubed potatoes and carrots separately, before adding it to the pan-fried chicken together with some stock to make the final curry dish. I deliberately cooked more than was needed, and before adding them to the other ingredients, I set some of them aside to be mashed with mayonnaise (Kewpie, of course!) and a bit of minced onion for a potato salad. Creamy salad seems to find its way into a lot of bentos at the conbini and supermarket. While I doubt they're a traditional bento ingredient, I enjoy potato salad, and I knew the creaminess would provide a nice contrast to the spicy chicken.




By the time I was done, I not only had some pretty fabulous kareiraisu on the table, I also had two things ready to go for the next day's bento.

The next morning when I got up, I reheated some plain rice from the night before, sauteed some asparagus, and added the chicken and the potato salad, and lunch was made, with only the smallest resemblance to dinner the night before.

Boxed Lunch: An Introduction

I take a traditional Japanese boxed lunch to work every day - a bento. I do this for a couple of reasons:

First, lunch meat and decent bread aren't exactly thick on the ground here, and when you do find them, they're usually quite expensive. A Japanese-style lunch is usually the most economical. I could buy a pre-made bento from any of the national conbini chains for a reasonable price, but I worry about the amount of packaging that is used, and the general non-recyclability of those materials. Also, the food in them tastes bad. If I make my own, it tastes delicious, and I can re-use the box and chopsticks over and over.

Eventually, when I'm on more stable financial ground, I can do what everyone other than myself and junior high students do, which is eat at any one of the thousands of really good restaurants surrounding - well- pretty much anywhere. Until then, my budget runs more to around 300 yen/lunch (compared to the 1,000 yen that a non-fast food lunch would cost) and bentos easily fall into that range.

The most important reason that I make bentos, however, is that they're filled with miniature food, and that means they're killer cute.



Kawaiiiiiiiiiiiiiii desune?

Bento-making is pretty much the bane of most regular Japanese people I talk to, because unlike sandwiches, which can be made the night before, bentos have to be prepared fresh from hot food in the morning, and cooled down in time to be packed into everyone's tote bags before they have to run for their train. Rice cookers with timers make it fairly easy to have fresh hot rice in the morning, but the rest of the box should be made up of some combination of veg and meat dishes. This means the 5 am bento call is a real bummer for most busy mums and dads.

There's a lot of thought that goes into the make-up of a bento. Boxes are sold in particular sizes matching a person's age and calorie requirements. When filled in the correct ratios, the bento is perfectly nutritiously balanced. Ideally, the bento should be visually attractive as well, featuring different colours, textures, and cooking techniques.

Some parents go completely overboard, and create what's known as the kyaraben, a character-themed bento, meant to look like popular children's cartoon characters. Who knows how they taste when they're finally opened at school, but I guess everyone needs a creative outlet. I attempted a fairly amateurish kyaraben myself, to help mark myself and my husband's visit to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka last year.



In case you don't recognize the character, it's Totoro, from My Neighbour Totoro.

I usually make two bento each day, one for me, and one for my husband. They're almost always the same, but sometimes I prepare slightly different things, depending on our tastes. What I generally try to do, since I'm as pressed for time as anyone, is try to plan my meals such that the main dish from the evening's meal can be remade into the next day's bento. This is fabulous, because not only do I prevent myself from either scraping the extra food into the garbage/eating it out of the pan and gaining weight; I also save money and time on buying and preparing separate things for lunch. Most recipes are meant to yield enough for four people; so the extra goes right into the bento, along with leftover rice (reheated in the microwave in the morning) and one or two vegetable dishes that I make and keep in the fridge as the week goes on.



I've learned most of what I know about making bento on-line, from such exhaustive sites as Lunch in a Box and Just Bento, please check them out if you're interested in making your own bento, they have lots of recipes and practical advice. You don't need a special box or accessories to make your own bento, and they can be adapted to western-style ingredients, as my friend Canadian Bento is so good at doing.

Coming up, I'll explain how a dish goes from dinner to bento.

Hina Matsuri

Here in Japan, it's Hina Matsuri - a festival held on March 3, and involving girls and dolls. I'll leave it to Wikipedia to flesh out the details, but traditional foods for Hina Matsuri include coloured puffed rice, clams (the two shells joined are meant to evoke, ahem, devotion and fidelity), and one of my favourite dishes, chirashi-sushi.

Chirashi-sushi, often translated as scattered sushi, is a layer of su meshi (sushi rice) topped with a variety of things, usually some sort of roe, dry-egg omelette strips, fish, and nori. You can buy chirashi sushi in most supermarkets ready to take home and be eaten, but I decided to make my own, because who doesn't love getting up early and making sushi rice first thing in the morning?

Actually, I would have just bought some, but I knew I wouldn't have time to go to the supermarket before work, and I didn't want to risk missing out if my supermarket was sold out by the time of my afternoon break.

I chose smoked salmon for my fish, and tried to make the dry-egg omelette, but alas it was too thick to pass proper muster. It tasted okay anyway, but looked nowhere near as elegant as proper dry-egg strips. For a green accent, I used radish sprouts, which also added a nice peppery note to the fish.


I love this dish because, like most great dishes, all of the separate ingredients combine to form more than the sum of its parts. The faint tang of the sushi rice cuts the oiliness of the salmon, and the sharp green sprouts give a little heat to the otherwise cool dish. The egg provides colour contrast and softness. Every bite is a little different, as each element comes to the forefront and recedes, depending on the luck of the chopsticks. And as with most Japanese dishes, the look of the dish is just as important as the taste. The pinks, yellows, and greens remind me of Easter eggs - in colours, but as well the eggs and sprouts as ingredients evoke Spring and renewal.

Lunch

We decided to eat lunch at a restaurant yesterday, which was daring and ambitious - for two reasons.

First, we're still broke, and dinner in a sit-down, non-fast food restaurant in Japan means 1,500 yen a head, on average. It kills me, as I know I can produce a reasonable meal for much less myself. But we had no food in the house, and we wanted to do something other than get groceries with the nice weather on our day off.

Second, in the past, when we've decided to eat out, it has usually devolved into an argument on a street corner, people streaming by us, on what we would eat. This would usually end in crankiness on both ends and culminate with us staring at each other over Big Macs.

The problem? I'll eat anything, but I'm not blessed with a spouse who'll do the same. Although he's come a long way in the years we've been married, there are still lots of things that are a no-go for him, comestibles-wise.

Sushi, no. No fish at all. Noodles -boring. No onigiri, can't eat nori. Curry rice only acceptable with katsu on the side, and no more than once a month. Ramen and yakitori are okay, but yakitori is generally served in pubs that open at night. It was lunch. Ramen is a lunch food, so possibilities there, but it was a weekend, so most of the ramen-ya around the station were shut. I began to get cranky around the edges.

Fortunately, we were at Ofuna station, with a large department store. Before I came to Asia, if you said the words "dining at the Department store" to me, it would have conjured blurry memories of eating soggy french fries covered in packet gravy and ketchup at Sears. Now, of course, I know that the department store is the only place to go if you're looking for a decent meal at lunch.

A lot of helpful people will tell you that while in Japan, to save money, you go to department store basements to get food. I am not about to offer you this advice. This is crap advice. As a matter of fact, department store basements are fabulous places to buy food, including all sorts of amazing french pastries, sushi sets, yakitori sticks, korrokke, rich salads...you name it. They are, however, really shitty places to eat anything. If you buy something here, it'll be packed up most marvelously for you, chopsticks included, in a lovely plastic bag, which you are then expected to take home to eat. There is nowhere on the premises to eat this food. Don't try it for lunch, unless you like eating out of a plastic bag, furtively, standing in the corner of a stairwell by the exits. (It is a great option for something cheap at the end of the night, if you're going back to your hostel or hotel - a lot of it gets marked down as well. Just don't leave this trick for too late - everyone else is out there snapping up these deals as well, perhaps thinking of what they can stuff into the next day's bento. You'll be microwaving mayonnaise spaghetti at the 7/11 with the rest of us slowpokes.)

Department store roofs, on the other hand, are a great place to find reasonably priced sit-down lunch options. I say roof, but actually, I mean the top floor. Here we found six or seven potential places. It was lunch time, so they all had lines (Does anybody eat at home in Japan? I wonder.) There was shabu-shabu, sushi (*sigh), soba noodles, a western fusion place - lots of seafood pasta and sausages, don't ask me where they come up with these menus-, and a tonkatsu place. We agreed on the tonkatsu, and that's what we ate, and it was good. We even managed to negotiate the questions the server came up with, including the kind of rice we wanted with our set (mixed grain) and what ice we wanted for dessert (matcha ice cream for me; some obscure fruit sorbet for Mr. Fussy).

But all this fuss, and sighing, and rolling of eyes, and stomping about made me miss food courts. I'm not talking about the Manchu Wok and A&W kiosks of my youth, but of the fabulous range of fried rice, noodle, hotpot, hot plate, meat profusions of ...Korea. At the top of the department stores as well, but instead of sit-down restaurants, just small stalls, a large bank of plastic food displays, a giant sprawling mess of plastic chairs and a cold water machine in the middle. Go up to the cashier, tell her your number, and get a ticket. Wait for your number to some up, and go get your food.

The food was almost always crap, especially if you strayed beyond the Korean triumvirate of food-court mainstays - jjajangmyeon (black bean udon noodles); Kimchi Bokkumbap (kimchi fried rice) or Popeyes. Never, ever, order the tonkatsu at a Korean food court. Stay away from the Japanese food altogether, as a matter of fact. But I could almost always find a reasonable dolsot bibimbap, which is always good, even when it's bad. And Mr. Fussy could eat Popeyes, and we'd avoid the whole twenty minute meltdown. Occasionally, I'd get the sushi platter, and marvel at home much it would suck. I longed for better food.

If only I could marry the convenience and the choice of Korean food courts and the quality and deliciousness of Japanese department store lunch restos.

Then I'd have the hawker stalls of Singapore.

Izakaya Night

After a crap day on Thursday that culminated with me wandering the streets of Hiratsuka, randomly asking strangers if they knew the address for the school I was supposed to be teaching at - thank god for all those Japanese lessons! I did eventually find where I was supposed to be, (Snaps to the handsome young officers at the Hiratsuka Koban; no snaps to me for forgetting my map. And phone.) but the psychic toll meant the bottle of sake I was saving for izakaya night was finished ahead of time. Oops. Right, so I made salt yakitori, and sauce yakitori on my fish grill. I wished I had proper long skewers, but I'm trying to use up what I already have in the house, so toothpicks it was. A green salad with that great sesame dressing from kewpie - what is that stuff called, anyway? Until I get that great suribachi from Muji, it'll have to do for goma-e. Carrot kinpira, and rice to fill up....It would have been a lot better with the sake, frankly.