The scene
Yoshino and Chika are on the train to Yamagata to attend their father's funeral.
What a wonderful little train! I want to ride one the next time I'm in Japan.
The two sisters talk about their late father. Chika says she remembers dad being nice, but she was small when he left so she doesn’t have many memories of him. Yoshino says that towards the end he and their mother were always fighting, with the eldest daughter Sachi having to console their mother. Yoshino also remembers how Chika always wanted a little sister, but Chika thinks it's a bit too late now.
Yoshino and Chika on the train.
The food
We can see the sisters have grabbed some lunch for their long train journey. They're both holding what's called a bento box, a packed lunch you can buy at food stalls or just about any convenience store, or prepare yourself at home.
Japanese bento boxes have a long and surprisingly complicated history. If you're interested, you can read up on how they evolved from just cooked and dried rice in a bag to the varied, full meals of today or how they became controversial status symbols for a while.
Judging purely by the sleek-looking black box itself, Yoshino might have prepared her bento at home or splurged on a high-quality one. Chika's box looks a bit plainer in comparison. Both seem to be using disposable chopsticks, however - you'll get those with your bento box wherever you buy it.
Unfortunately, those are the best shots of the contents of these particular bento boxes we get, so you can't really tell what's in them. The thing we see Chika handling might be rice in some form, but it's also too hard to make out. However, we do know that alongside the almost obligatory steamed rice or cooked or fried noodles, bento boxes often include a selection of meat, fish and vegetables as well as fruits for dessert. As far as I've understood, the idea is to make the lunch filling, nutritious, varied as well as pleasing to the eye.
Recreating the food
Well, who'd have seen this tiny little crisis coming?My original idea for this entry was essentially to write a review of the new MUJI Helsinki store's bento lunch. They had those for sale at the start of the year but sold out soon and promised they'd be back before spring. I waited... and then COVID-19 hit, MUJI was closed for the time being and I took my sweet time adjusting to studying online. So that plan had to be scrapped, and since it's unclear when it'll be possible to buy a bento lunch in Helsinki again, I finally decided I'd just cook my own.
I’d actually prepared my own bento lunches several times before for those extra long days at the university where you barely have time to go to the next lecture room, so I had some experience of assembling a decent one. Since this blog project is in part about trying new things, I wanted to find something I hadn’t cooked before to base this bento around. After seeing some panko bread crumbs at Tokyokan, I ended up choosing tonkatsu.
I'm not a huge fan of deep-fried or oil-fried foods, so I haven't actually cooked much of the sort, but after my experience with making tempura (which will be the next post - I prepared that a while ago), I figured tonkatsu wouldn't be much of a hurdle. I used the recipe found in the homecooking book by the Finnish Japanese Society, which called for pork fillets, panko bread crumbs, eggs, wheat flour, salt and pepper. Making tonkatsu is just like anything else you might fry in fat - coat the fillets in flour, then egg and finally panko, then fry them in the oil until the bottom starts looking nice, flip and repeat. Done!
Egg, panko and two fillets frying.
End result!
Some of the Asian stores in Helsinki also carried authentic Japanese tonkatsu sauce, which I ended up not buying because 1) the bottles were huge and I figured I probably wouldn't use them that much and 2) I wanted to see if I could make my own. The homecooking book had the answer once again: a simple tonkatsu sauce could be made from scratch using ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, mirin and mustard powder, all of which I happened to have in my kitchen.
Of course, the bento box can't consist of just tonkatsu, so I had to add some other stuff. Of course you need some rice, so I steamed some with my rice cooker, salted it slightly and added black sesame seeds as well as an umeboshi on top as a fun extra.
Other quick and easy items to add color and variety to your bento lunch are fresh or cooked vegetables. In this video on making an affordable bento box at home by the wonderful YouTube channel TabiEats Satoshi makes several little side dishes from vegetables for his lunch, so let's crib some ideas from them. First up is a very simple salted carrot salad as seen right in the beginning of the video. You cut carrots into chopstick-friendly sticks, salt them, let them be for a while and then squeeze the excess water out of them. Done! Another easy side dish shown in the video is broccoli, some of which I steamed in the rice cooker's steaming tray alongside the rice.
Satoshi also makes an omelette for this bento box, but his is a very basic one with just some salt added. I wanted to make a Japanese-style omelette: the slightly sweet tamagoyaki. Now, if you aren't sure what that is, you might've at least had it with sushi, where you can often see it as a nigiri. Tamagoyaki was one of the first things I learned to cook when I was starting to get into Japanese cooking, and while I can't say I'm a master or anything, I do think I can make a pretty good one. Now, there are tons of tamagoyaki recipes out there, for example this nice one by Tasty's Rie. I like to use three eggs, a pinch of salt, mirin and sugar and also half of a nori sheet. Making tamagoyaki might seem intimidating and while you might fail your first attempt, it's really not that difficult or complicated and I highly suggest giving it a try!
Here's my bento box, assembled and ready to go:
The carrot salad in a muffin liner didn't look quite as cute as I wanted it to. Oh well.
Trying it out
So - I originally had the idea of grabbing a friend, getting a couple of MUJI bento boxes and then riding a tram around Helsinki and eating them to sort of simulate the scene in My Little Sister. However, the world suddenly flipped on its head, MUJI was closed and I didn't really have much interest in sitting in a tram for fun either, so I ended up eating my bento lunch at work - ie. at my computer desk at home.
I was very pleased with how easy the tonkatsu was to make and how nicely it turned out. As mentioned before, I don't love oil-fried foods overly much, but here the coating was light and crispy, and the easy homemade tonkatsu sauce was actually really quite good. I might have to cook tonkatsu again!
The side dishes complemented each other and the tonkatsu well. I really love the ease of steaming vegetables with your rice in the rice cooker, and the salted carrot salad is honestly kind of ingenious. I hadn't encountered the salting and squeezing method before I saw the video by TabiEats, but have since noticed it being used in several Japanese recipes, like in Japanese-style potato salad (which I'll be talking about later). As for the rice - I've really fallen in love with rice after starting to cook Japanese food. It has so many uses and the various ways of making it more exciting are all fun in their own way. I honestly really like the simple joys of just the light salting and sesame seeds I've used here, but I also love using furikake or yukari shiso. Also, while the taste might initially be a bit of a surprise, umeboshi is excellent and nowhere near as sour as Rhett and Link make it out to seem in their Sourest Food Challenge video (fun video though, and where I learned of umeboshi in the first place)! It works wonderfully as a sort of a mini-side dish with your rice.
Assembling your own bento lunch is a lot of fun and I highly recommend giving it a try sometime. Brighten up your work day with a colourful lunch, break up a long train ride or wow your friends at a picnic - there are lots of reasons to make a bento box instead of just grabbing a sandwich!
Recipes used
Salted carrot salad: TabiEats (video)
Tamagoyaki: Tasty (video)
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