Breakfast Bento 1

Usually, I will make bento posts during the week and save food posts for the weekend, but since I have a backlog, I'll start with the closest bento and work my way forward.

Assembly Time: about 10 minutes with pre-made pancakes and onigiri, cooking sausages during preparation.

This bento was my first breakfast bento. In it you see all the hallmarks of a delicious, balanced breakfast -- plus some snack onigiri stuffed with red bean paste and covered in sesame seeds.

I made the pancakes the night before using the recipe in my lovely Betty Crocker Cookbook and fried up some breakfast sausage while loading up the box in the morning. To cook the sausages, I put them in a small frying pan with about a 1/2 inch of water and I let the boiling water cook the sausages until they change color and are grey throughout (I cut them with kitchen scissors). After they're all cooked, I drain the water and let them brown in the same frying pan. This way, I make sure that my meat is cooked all the way through without burning the outside.

The little white-lidded container has a combination of raw honey and frozen berries with which to top the pancakes. Great idea, but the honey didn't go quite as far as cheap, synthetic maple syrup and my pancakes went a little dry, so I might go with regular syrup in the future.

The dark spots surrounding all the food is a combination of raisins and sweetened dried cranberries. They provide an excellent extra to the meal and I pack them around all the bento ingredients to keep them from shifting in transport.

This is one of my favorite bentos to make. With preparation the previous night, I had some delicious, share-able pancakes and an enviable lunch. The pancakes were a little dry (though I think that was my failed cooking) and would have been better if they were piping hot off the stove, but they were convenient to eat without a fork by picking them up and dipping in the honey/berry concoction.