Kids Dish

You’d think I’d have learned by now that it actually takes an awful lot of time to assemble a bento dinner…

Today was hot & tiring, so I thought I’d go easy on myself - and the cooking & assembling was remarkably easy, but somehow it took nearly an hour and a half from start to eat.

We had basmati rice with steamed turkey wontons (Yum!) in bok choy layers, steamed baby carrots and asparagus, avocado & cucumber salad (cucumbers cut into stars and an avocado crescent moon!), smoked salmon with marinated eggplant, watermelon, and nashi pear. Actually, that does sound something of a feast, doesn’t it?

Raeli had a mini version of the above and happily ate the “stars”. She also had a bonus strawberry and a corn cob to gnaw on. Best moment was towards the end of the meal when I convinced her to try a wonton (OK, I told her it was sausage! Her world only contains two meats, ‘chicken’ and ’sausage’). I peeled the sticky layer of bok choy leaf off the wonton to give her an unsullied one, but she demanded “Green!” with great certainty, and promptly ate the steamed green before demolishing the wonton!

I feel all glutted with vitamins and protein now. And my daughter ate five vegetables and two fruits with her dinner. A great way to start the week!

(the preparations were amazingly simple. Rice in the rice cooker, carrots & asparagus chucked in the steamer above it, salad prepared with cookie cutters, fruit sliced, smoked salmon and eggplant from deli just had to be arranged prettily. The only thing that required thought and attention was the wontons, and they’re pretty simple too - a bit of ginger, garlic and soy stirred into fresh turkey mince, a little spoonful of mince into each fresh wonton wrapper, folded envelope-style and placed seam down on to layers of dark bok choy leaf within a bamboo steaming basket. Steamed to within an inch of its life, while I did all the salady things)

Simple, even if it took a while to get it all done. And the results were so worth it! I’m glad we’re taking a bento approach to Christmas - that is, getting in lots of lovely fresh ingredients, preparing them simply when hungry, and not bothering with the fuss of an enormous, time-everything-to-the-second kind of dinner.

We’ll be cooking our turkey (roll) on Christmas Eve so we have cold meat the next day, and I’m seriously thinking of just chucking a risotto together to go with it (so easy in the magic pot!).

I’ll save the serious cooking mojo for my gingerbread. And trifle. And pudding…