Kimbap Summer Bento

Kimbap Summer Bento, originally uploaded by sherimiya ♥.

I am often influenced by food tweets on twitter, and yesterday everyone seemed to be having Korean food. I saw a pic of kimbap go by, and clicked to find a recipe for making shoyu tuna kimbap. Well, I didn't have tuna but I did have sardines. Could I substitute? Before you go "eww", I have to say, it came out really good! I adapted a recipe by Maangchi I found here.

Make seasoned tuna flakes
1.Open a can of tuna and remove the oil or water. Put it on a heated pan and drizzle some sesame oil over it. Toss it and cook it for 2 minutes.
2.Add 1 tbs of soy sauce, ½ tbs of sugar, 1 clove of minced garlic, and 1 ts of ground black pepper.

3.Keep stirring for another 3 minutes.
4.Turn off the heat and add 1 chopped green onion, 2 ts of sesame oil and 1 tbs of toasted sesame seeds.

I also realized I didn't have avocados or pickled radish, but I did have cucumber and crab stick. After cooking the shoyu sardines, it smelled so good I ate some straight out of the pan. Yum. Even better rolled up. I put almost the entire roll in his bento, two-deep. This stainless steel bento is deep enough to accomodate pretty tall food. I separated the kimbap from the fruit with a piece of green leaf lettuce and placed a bunch of Rainier cherries, a lychee and a half homegrown apricot on the side. There is shoyu in the yellow container. I used a dipping container instead of a squirt bottle so that he wouldn't have to squirt the shoyu all over the rest of the food. So good, quick and easy!

Kimbap Bento

Kimbap Bento, originally uploaded by sherimiya ♥.

We are spending the holidays in Hawaii with family this year. I was born in Hawaii and lived here until I went to California for college. Lots of my family are still here, so there's plenty of reason to visit as often as we can. Here is my first bento in Hawaii, using local eats that were already hanging around the house: kimbap, long rice, smoked tako, Kahuku cherry tomatoes, pickled daikon-carrots-bittermelon-cabbage-cauliflower-red onion.
Packed in my lovely Japanese field-worker's bento, happily the perfect size for a hot weather appetite.
It's so good to come back home to the familiar local flavors again! It might look like a mishmash of stuff, but to me it's just a mix plate bento :)