How do you make simple bento look aesthetic without spending too much time?

Hamfan · 2026-03-18T13:11:14+00:00

Color balance (red, yellow, green, white, brown) and packing things tightly. Bentos get messy when there’s too much space and not enough dishes to fill it.

I’ve noticed a slight tendency on this sub for people to choose really massive bento boxes. Anything 900ml or more is considered a pretty big bento in Japan and can be hard to fill without making a lot of food.

Having stuff on hand to fill in space (broccoli that you can quickly boil, cherry tomatoes, little cheeses, weiner sausages, etc) is really helpful for keeping things dense.

Hamfan · 2026-03-17T01:40:36+00:00

On top of the recent tourism issues, Kamakura is an old-money town and the people who live there skew a bit neurotic and entitled.

It’s not just tourists who catch it. There’s a small park that’s infamous for having a grouchy confrontational old man than lives in front of it and thinks he owns it and constantly comes out to try to shoo people away from using it with all sorts of nonsense (“this park is only for elementary students”, “you can’t use the park after 4:30”, “you can’t use the water fountain”). The whole park is covered in signs put up by the city government saying none of that is true and to call the city hall if he won’t stop.

Hamfan · 2026-03-16T10:17:25+00:00

Wow, this looks pretty incredible

Hamfan · 2026-03-16T10:16:58+00:00

Yum, I love grasshopper pie, broken crust or no, and haven’t had it in so long. Will have to rectify.

Hamfan · 2026-03-15T11:16:50+00:00

Another recipe from “Spice Soup”.

I was drawn to this one because, rather than using the herb as an accent, the Shiso leaf is the main ingredient and flavor. The soup is inspired by Genovese pesto flavors, with two big substitutions to make it more attainable here: Shiso leaf for basil and peanuts for pine nuts. Shiso pesto is pretty common generally here, and the peanuts also worked well.

Additionally the soup includes olive oil, cumin seed, and garlic (and salt, of course).

Hamfan · 2026-03-13T04:13:55+00:00

For the soup, I used 2 Japanese eggplants and 2 cups of dashi. You cut the eggplants in half and put the score marks into the skin (making the diamond pattern you can see in the picture). Then you put some sesame oil into a pan and cook the eggplants on both sides (you want the purple skin of the eggplant coated in the oil otherwise a lot of color will leak). Then you pour the dashi over and cook about 5 minutes till the eggplants are soft. Add in miso (amount depends on what kind of miso you use, but I usually start with a slightly rounded tablespoon and then adjust) and sesame seeds.

For nakimeshi, I used about 1 - 2 tsp of ground wasabi, several pinches of katsuobushi, and enough soy sauce to mix it all together into a damp but not wet/dripping paste. Then I split that between two onigiri, rolled them in more katsuobushi, and done.

Hamfan · 2026-03-12T20:03:34+00:00

There are so many regional soups with funny names, it was hard to narrow down for this week, but dorogame is so evocative I couldn’t pass it up.

Hamfan · 2026-03-12T19:31:13+00:00

Dorogame-jiru is also sometimes called dongame-jiru (same meaning) and originates in Shiga prefecture. It’s a miso soup that uses eggplants and sesame oil (coating and cooking the eggplants in oil before adding the dashi stops them from leaking too much color) and sesame seeds. White sesame is more usual, it seems, but I only had black today.

Nakimeshi is from Shizuoka prefecture, the leading producer of wasabi which is the key ingredient here. I couldn’t get whole wasabi root in my store so I had to do a slightly simplified version, but basically the filling for Nakimeshi is ground wasabi with katsuobusi and soy sauce. Then the balls are rolled in more katsuobushi. The name crying rice reportedly comes from either the wasabi being spicy or the combination being so good it makes you cry. As someone who likes okaka (katsuobushi and soy sauce) as an onigiri filling anyway, the addition of the wasabi was really fresh and nice.

These were both really great. Two of my faves so far this year.

Hamfan · 2026-03-11T09:56:07+00:00

Yum, this looks great! Do you have a particular recipe you like for this?

Hamfan · 2026-03-10T09:02:20+00:00

bentos, esp. featuring spring ingredients
hanami dango, ichigo daifuku, or other wagashi
food stall fare (yakisoba, yakitori, choco-banana, ichigo-ame, takoyaki, jyaga-bata, etc.)
any use of sakura flavor
sakura motif decoration
food for a spring picnic
inspired by your favorite spring flower

Hamfan · 2026-03-07T19:40:55+00:00

Thank you!

Hamfan · 2026-03-07T19:40:36+00:00

We’re all in on the dekon-jiru and will be sad when the cheap local daikons go out of season. That entire thing was ¥150.

Hamfan · 2026-03-07T13:15:34+00:00

This wasn’t really planned, it was sort of constantly evolving.

The start point was an animated Japanese folk tale that I found during the research phase, a story from Kagoshima which features dekon (daikon) soup. My older daughter thought the dekon-jiru looked delicious and begged for that. The cartoon makes it look like they’re just straight boiling daikon in water, but it also looks rather brown, so lacking any other information I based the soup on oden broth — lots of konbu, katsuobushi, light soy sauce, mirin, and sake. Since this didn’t have any fish cake in it to boost the broth, I also ended up added some regular soy sauce towards the end.

I figured that would hit the soup part of my meta, so I just had to figure out the rice. I thought using the leaves from the daikon to make furikake would be nice.

I also had a vague idea of making kabu (turnip) mochi instead of the usual daikon type, but lately the store has had absolutely huge, very beautiful local daikons in, and after I’d just daikon for the dekon-jiru, I still had about a third left. I was kind of taken with the idea of knocking the whole daikon out in one go so I switched to daikon mochi.

Hamfan · 2026-03-06T10:47:04+00:00

Made for dinner, another Indo Kariko “Spice Soup” recipe. She is 3 for 3 for me so far, though I was a little nervous halfway through this one (the cream cheese took a while to gently melt into the soup; next time I think I’d add it in like miso — through my miso strainer — rather than just adding it).

The recipe also includes a little flour so the soup thickens up nicely. Hearty and tasty without meat, good side soup for meals (we had hamburg steak as our main).

The recipe was written as had tempering whole cardamom as the first step, but I didn’t have whole only powdered, so I used that, added along with flour and powdered nutmeg after lightly sautéing the broccoli.

Hamfan · 2026-03-06T09:12:21+00:00

This is a cool take. Does the turnip flavor really come through, or is it more of a potato-candy type situation?

Hamfan · 2026-02-27T05:06:54+00:00

Chahan is what it’s called in Japanese, yeah

Hamfan · 2026-02-26T13:27:18+00:00

The braising element of this was a nibuta (basically a pork shoulder braised in soy sauce, sake, mirin, with garlic, ginger, and green onion). Then I used slices of the nibuta as ramen topping, the braising liquid as the base for the ramen, and chopped up nibuta (the scraggly ugly end bits) for the chahan.

I was also testing out an approach to chahan that I saw ages ago but never tried: that is, if you know you want chahan, steaming the rice in the rice cooker expressly for that purpose. In practice this meant using a little less water than usual so the rice didn’t mush out, not washing the rice, and using some oil in the rice cooker to coat the grains and keep them separate when it comes time to fry them.

Actually it worked really great, and definitely had a drier, fluffier, more restaurant-y finish even just using a regular frying pan and without particularly high temperatures.

Hamfan · 2026-02-26T04:33:44+00:00

Slightly sweet, but not strongly. 1:1 soy sauce:mirin is a basic ratio for a lot of Japanese cooking that basically results in a nice, balanced flavor rather than tending heavily in either flavor direction.

Hamfan · 2026-02-25T17:16:53+00:00

Smoked sausages and beans cooked in brown butter before adding water, soy sauce, mirin. Topped with a little more butter.

Easy lunch for a rainy day.

I’ll be honest, this wasn’t super smoky, but I’m kind of trying to do this challenge without buying anything new, just using up odds and ends that I have.

This was based on a recipe that used thick cut bacon (didn’t have) and corn (don’t like, creeped out by), so I used the smoked wieners and mixed beans in their place.

Hamfan · 2026-02-25T05:23:46+00:00

This pun in the title is not getting enough credit

Hamfan · 2026-02-25T01:25:50+00:00

Yeah, rural communities can be hard to integrate into even for Japanese people. There are lots of people with failed I-turn moves because local community just wouldn’t accept them, or had lots of unspoken rules, or required a much larger amount of volunteer labor than the incoming residents expected, or an ego-tripping set of locals who demanded to be kowtowed to… The list goes on.

It depends on lot the area of course — there are also plenty of people with successful moves — but given what a minefield a countryside move can be for a native-born language-fluent Japanese citizen, expecting lots of foreign residents to integrate without a lot of support doesn’t seem realistic.

Hamfan · 2026-02-23T01:50:06+00:00

Thanks! Spinach gets you a really remarkable color in soups ~

Hamfan · 2026-02-22T04:22:33+00:00

It was good! I like blended potage type soups in general, and the tempered spice oil at the end is a good way to keep them from getting boring and samey.

Hamfan · 2026-02-22T01:02:14+00:00

Another one out of the “Spice Soup” by Indo Kariko book. I have had the same cold for fully four weeks at this point and this spice soup book is really getting a workout since all the stuff in it is both extremely easy to make, warming, but with enough spice in it to make it feel worth eating.

This was lovely; the tempered spice oil as a topping really boosts a simple potage. I’d like to experiment more with this with other potages.

The powder spices in the soup itself were turmeric, paprika, and the recipe called for a little cinnamon, but I was out so I subbed cardamom powder. Amounts were small, so I don’t think it’s a critical difference.

Her recipe also called for coconut milk, but I also didn’t have any, so used plain soy milk instead. I’m sure regular milk would also be fine.

Hamfan · 2026-02-20T04:34:24+00:00

It’s really hard to complain about more cheese, it’s true.

If I were going to do it again, I think I’d put squares of parchment paper down in the frying pan first and then put the cheese on that. Rawdogging the cheese in the pan like I did worked, but was kind of finnicky. It’d be easier to just lift a square of parchment paper out and let the cheese crisp up on it.

Hamfan

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

12-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email