Beef Yakiniku and Sesame Noodles

I am a freelance writer working from home, so I don't take lunch with me very often. TheBoyfriend is now also home most of the day, as he is doing part time jobs at the moment. This means I'm not making very many bentos lately. However, I do cook dinner at least four nights a week, and most of those are awesome Asian or Asian-inspired dishes. So I'll continue to post those for a while, and if a bento comes up I'll make sure that gets a shout-out as well.

Tonight for dinner I made one of my fave recipes - beef yakiniku. This is a type of stir fried beef in an extremely tasty sauce. I first had it at Sushi.com a couple of years ago and fell madly and totally in love with it. It took a while to find a recipe to make at home that was just as good, but I think I've finally managed to get it right.

Green peppers and onions are cut into small pieces and then stir fried with oil in the electric wok. Flank steak, also sliced into thin pieces, is added in and cooked until brown. A sauce made up of soy sauce, mirin, garlic, and a few other ingredients is added in and allowed to thicken.*

While I was cooking up the beef I also made large pot of easy sesame noodles. I've mentioned them on here before. I like this particular recipe a lot because it is so easy to make, even if my brain is focused mainly on something else at the same time. And the end product is super tasty. I haven't had a single complaint yet, at any rate, and that works for me.


*I never include full recipes because I'm working off ones created by other people usually (except for with fried rice) and I don't want anyone getting the idea that I made them up myself. If you want to know the exact recipe for something that I've used, leave me a message and I'll forward you information on where to find them.

Sesame Noodles and Gyoza

I make gyoza a lot. I'm determined to be able to make it as easily as I make awesome fried rice. Which means I make it a lot in order to learn how to make it without needing a recipe. I haven't quite managed that yet BUT I'm getting there. I can almost remember all of the ingredients to mix in with the ground turkey/pork.

Basically the gyoza is just ground turkey or pork (whichever I can find without too much trouble) mixed with soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, ginger, and chopped green onions. The recipe actually calls for chopped cabbage as well but I never really use it. I think I did once and just ended up with a lot of leftover cabbage that I didn't know what to do with. Anyways, the meat mixture is put in small amounts into gyoza wrappers, fry them up for a minute or so until they turn brown on the bottoms, and then steam them until they are done. I have no idea how long this takes, as it seems to depend on what burner I'm using, the burner temperature, and how often I stop to check on them.

I found this really awesome and simple to make recipe for sesame noodles online. I'm sorry I can't remember the name of the blog they popped up on cause I totally recommend them. I used Chinese egg noodles the first time I made them and they were awesome. Today I didn't have those but I did have regular egg noodles so I went ahead and used them instead. The sauce is made of sesame oil, rice vinegar, sugar, garlic, soy sauce, and a bit of chili oil. I added a little more chili oil than initially recommended because TheBoyfriend loves spicy stuff. The noodles are tossed in the sauce and sprinkled with some white sesame seeds. Normally chopped green onions would be included as well, but I was being lazy so I just skipped them.

Once again not exactly a super impressive bento box, but the food is tasty and TheBoyfriend likes it, so it works out. By the way, the actual lunchbox today was a prize he won for being Employee of the Month at Petco. It was pretty cool. I like the box cause it has compartments so I could put in homemade sweet and sour sauce (made with rice vinegar, ketchup, sugar, and something I can't remember, I found it on the internet and it tasted good so whatever).

Chicken Sesame Noodles

Another simple bento today. It is late and I'm not feeling as motivated to do something big and special as I probably should be. This is a really basic sesame noodle recipe, with thin spaghetti noodles and a sauce of peanut butter, soy sauce, and sesame oil. I cooked some chicken on the stove, marinating a bit with some teriyaki sauce, and adding in some white onion as TheBoyfriend loves onion. Once the chicken was cooked I added the noodles, mixed it all together, and stir fried for a few minutes until the sauce thickened. This was the first time I had tried this recipe and I was a little worried about how it would taste, but it turned out really tasty. We ate a bunch of it at the stove before I even got it in the bento box.