Raw Bento

Alas, a bento post! And to also announce I joined Vegan Mofo…I registered really late so I’m not sure I’m included at the feed over at Vegan Mofo but I’ll like to just join in anyway as a personal pet project and to make blogging here even more fun.

We’re supposed to blog at least 5 times a week, if not daily, but I’ll see how it goes because I’ve never blogged daily and it does seem challenging.

So I’m going to open with a bento post for Vegan Mofo…naturally!!

The night before the Ogano half-marathon race two weekends ago, I packed dinner into bentos so we could have a nutritious meal at the onsen hotel. We were going to arrive late, around 930pm, so we would have missed out on dinner which ended at 8pm (countryside schedules are super early).

I’m still not sure if eating a lot of carbs before a long distance race helps because I read that our bodies can only store up to an hour’s worth of carbohydrates. In fact, I find eating a huge meal at night keeps me from feeling fully rested. So I went for the middle road.

I made my own bean sprout kimchi which is actually a raw take on Korean marinated bean sprouts, Kong Jang. The bean sprouts are meant to be blanched in boiling water for a minute but I figured that raw bean sprouts wilt very quickly with a touch of acidity, I could rawify Kong Jang. In fact, some recipes call for vinegar so I was confident I could wilt raw bean sprouts in a jiffy. This batch was made two days before so no preparation was needed for this bento.

Recipe (marinate for an hour):
3 cups raw beans sprouts
Juice of 1/4 lemon
2 tbs shoyu
2 tbs Korean red pepper flakes
Dash of sesame oil
2 tbs raw sesame seeds

I wanted to fill up the other section of this Totoro bento so I chopped some cucumber and poured leftover sauce from the bean sprout marinade.

I had to somehow transport the contents of this salad bowl…And did so with two ordinary plastic containers. Big salads don’t stuff well into teeny tiny cute bentos – lol! But we needed our salad, dammit!

I whipped this one up on the spot…creamy parsley dressing:

In a high-speed blender:
1 cup soaked cashews
Handful of flat-leaf parsley
1 clove garlic
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Sprinkle of nutritional yeast
Dash of sea salt
Pinch of black pepper
1/2 water

I couldn’t decide if we needed snacks or dessert so I just tossed in whatever was available. Chocolate truffles and pistachios were devoured on the drive up.

For my main, I packed an Asian brown rice pasta stir-fry.

I paired it with this homemade fiery chilli sauce that is raw.

In a food processor:
1 cup small red chillis
1 clove garlic
2 dates
1 tsp olive oil
1/4 cup water

I managed to spot red chillies at my local supermarket a month ago — this is extremely rare as they only usually stock non-spicy green chillies. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them but I nabbed them all the same. I can’t tell you how much I miss these overly spicy make-you-cry tiny red chillis, or chilli padi as we call them in Singapore. I decided to make a garlicky chilli sauce to pair with noodles or rice dishes. Whoo….!

A heart-shaped pot of diabolic elixir that is the path to any Singaporean’s heart.

The non-raw fiance had a bento of stir-fried chicken and brown rice but it’s not pictured here. I think I was too hungry by the time we arrived at our onsen hotel in Ogano so I hoovered all my food and was feeling pretty stuffed — so much for the middle road! But an improvement from pre-workout dinners/breakfasts many moons ago when I inhaled heavy cooked food like sweet and sour tofu, lots of meat, rice, bananas, and broccoli at 4am in the morning! Craziness! Now I just make one of these smoothies two hours before a race.

I couldn’t sleep well unfortunately. In fact, I felt fine two hours after we ate; I was sleepless because I was apprehensive. I need to learn how to take a chill pill…I think I suffer from too much excitement haha… I had a fabulous time, though. I hope to do more of these trips again.