we went to the zoo; we learned a thing or two-oooh


Today we took a trip to the Woodland Park Zoo to see the flamingo exhibit, to stare at the giraffes (I LOVE GIRAFFES), and to eat delicious obento.





The first photo is of a three-tier jubako. Each person got one tier, and all three tiers have almost exactly the same stuff in them. Teriyaki Kobe beef, mini tomatoes in three colors, salted cucumber with sesame seeds, radish slices, herbed baby corn, tsukemono, sweet simmered kabocha (pumpkin), spicy sauteed renkon (lotus root), braised arame seaweed with carrot and aburaage. Scott doesn't like tomatoes so his tier has red and orange mini bell peppers instead. Everyone also got to eat some onigiri, which you can see in the second photo. The purple onigiri is white rice with yukari furikake [akajiso (red perilla leaf) and umeboshi (pickled plum)], the green one is white rice cooked with gyokuro kakurei green tea from Uji, and the white one has tamago filling. The second photo is of a two-tier mini jubako. The whole box was for one person. In practice everyone ended up sharing because I miscounted the number of people who were coming by one and so we were short a box. It was ok, though, because there was more than enough food to go around.

I am sorry, I have no idea how many calories and stuff are in this. Nothing is cooked in an unhealthy way so it's probably pretty healthy except for the carb overload from the white rice.

This lunch took me over four hours to prepare and I easily could have spent another hour on it but I ran out of time. I have been drooling over ekiben photos on flickr recently so I decided to do this obento in the same style. Ekiben are always full of tiny servings of tons of different kinds of foods. Overall I am happy with how it turned out. Plus I thought it was delicious and everyone else seemed to enjoy it too.