Obentou - a mistery food for us, normal life for japanese people

The obentou (in japanese 弁当) is what we would translate as packed food, but in asian cultures, and specially Japan, it has become not just part of the culture, but also has reached quite an important status.

And that's because nowadays, how's your packed lunch reflects your family/social life, and you can tell a lot just by being able to see "how good is someone's bentou". In school it may have a lot of meaning around your family status, and when you work it usually reflects your marital life.

We wouldn't, in most cases, take all this myths surrounding bentou so seriously, but it still an important point in Japan.

A bentou normally consists of:
- White rice or substitute (if not rice it may be noodles, but it will be rice 80% of the time)
- Main dish, normally fish or meat
- 2-3 side dishes
- Decoration, a lot of decoration. Most of the time decoration is also made with food, so it may be included in some of the other groups.
- Depending on how complete you want your bentou to be, you can also plan desserts.

This topic can really go really really long, so for today we'll just show some pictures. Theses ones are taken from the japanese site http://www.yoppi.ne.jp , I hope I can detail you guys some of them afterwards! :)

This first bentou is soccer-themed. As you can see, there are flags and rice balls that mimic real soccer objects. This bentou would consist of rice, mini-cheese hamburguers, a little bit of vegetables and so, and a little bit of fruit .. This is what children get from their mums from time to time :P---

This would be more like a traditional-adult type of bentou. The one that you typically would bring to work. You can clearly see the different parts, rice, meat (tonkatsu in this case), and side dishes with a little bit of fruit. Quite a normal one! :)

Ok, the last one I'm showing today is from the blog http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/kasumin_yorosiku which has a quite huge amount of bentou recipes and photos, this girl sure is great! It is quite difficult to see this kind of staff in real life, but if you have the time you can try to make something similar. Ingredients are not very difficult to find, rice, vegetables, meat balls and some colouring natural ingredients for getting your cooked rice some colour! And some weed also for the faces! Gotta try this some time, mmm....

See ya' all in next post!

Japanese Chicken Curry

Here it is one of the most commonly used recipe in Japan, japanese curry. As it can be prepared in multiple ways, we are now going to use the chicken curry version. Be aware that you may need some japanese ingredients not available in a normal supermarket but just in specialized stores!

In normal curry you would use red meat and a lot of ingredients, that's what most people think. In this version, using chicken, you'll get a delicious, healthy and really cheap typical japanese dish!

*Note: Taken from the original recipe by funya on the japanese site cookpad.com

INGREDIENTS for 6 servings

* White Rice - 3 cups
* Chicken - 2 breasts
* Dried cayenne peppers - 2 units (use less if you don't like spicy)
* Onion - 2 units
* Pepper - to taste
* Salt - to taste
* Japanese curry package - 1 package / 6 servings worth
* Vegetal Oil

PREPARATION

Note: Prepare cooked rice and start preparing the curry sauce soon so that the ingredient's don't have time to become cold!

1. Theses are the ingredients. First of all we need get one onion cut finely chopped and the other cut in mouth-sized pieces. After that, we have to cut the chicken breasts in mouth-sized pieces.



2. Get the finely chopped onion fried until it gets golden-brown. We use a pot so we can use it to mix it up with the curry sauce afterwards. Put the fried onion aside once it's done.




3. Use a frying pan and get the chicken breasts cooked. You don't need to use much oil, as it usually has a little bit of fat on it. Use salt and pepper to taste.





4. Take the larger onion pieces and put them into the previously used pot. Get them cooked for around 4 minutes and then mix the chicken in it. To avoid the use of extra fat, put the chicken piece by piece and don't use the frying pan's oil. When the onion begins to take a darker colour, put the previously fried onion (point 1), the 2 dried cayenne peppers (don't cut them so you can remove them afterwards if you want) and mix it all up.

5. After preparing and boiling the curry mixture (sauce) for about 15 minutes, mix it with the other ingredients and it's done. Serve it on top of cooked rice!

Yummy!