Something Like Bento

I've been trying to cook more, well, defined meals recently. The easiest way to do this is via a recipe, which usually don't make their way to this soapbox. The desire stems from my limited cooking vernacular; E ribs me about cooking "Mikey food" so often yet, without a recipe, that is the extent of my ability. Cook veggies so they are tasty? Sure, saute and season, maybe bake. Cook tofu? Sure, saute and season, maybe bake. So, to fix that. More recipes, more adventurous cooking. And, so, I bring you... Mikey food. Whoops.

While, yes, it is just cooked veggies, each bit was prepared individually, allowing me to play around with a whole four different preps in a single dish. The squash has rice vinegar and cayenne, the apple a mustard seed/sesame oil/rice vinegar dressing, the mushrooms soy sauce, and the rice furikake. I admit, none of that is very inventive, but it was a nice platform for experimenting.

The squash prep was probably the most involved; thinly sliced squash tossed in a bit of olive oil, cooked over medium without flipping or stirring until they became a little translucent. Sprinkle some cayenne over the pan, flip everything, add a dash of rice vinegar, and stir a bit. The mushrooms were equally simple - after the squash was out of the pan, the mushrooms went in until they started to sweat, at which point they were splashed with soy sauce, stirred a few times, and taken off heat.

The apple dressing is approximately 1 tsp coarse mustard, 1 tsp rice vinegar, and 1/2 tsp sesame oil. The proportions were easy but far from perfect; the main flavor was mustard seed. The egg was an attempt at soft boiling; the egg was too fresh, so I mostly destroyed it in removing the shell.