I sprinkled egg furikake over the tuna and potatoes. This salad is the same as above, just mixed.

I have given up on making bento from scratch. Instead, I’ve decided to make bento for dinner. This works out since dinner should probably be on the lighter side at the end of the day and packed with vegetables.

That is, I made these French styled salads for the family dinner and pack them the next day in my bento with spring mix salad. In three consecutive days, I rotated salads from potato to broccoli:

Day 1 – The potato with tuna salad had a scallion mayo dressing as its centerpiece (also pictured above).

Day 2– Mashed potato with broccoli and shrimp (substituted frozen shrimp tempura)

Day 3 – Broccoli and egg salad

These salads mixed some boiled vegetables with raw: both the potatoes and broccoli required some softening. Recent Japanese recipe books I encounter have really small servings, even just for one person, so most of the time I had to double or quadruple the quantities. Some of these were by weight in grams. To prevent food waste, I used all of the over ripening potatoes I had, boiled and peeled off the skin. Since I used only half, the abundance of potato determined my second salad: the potato mash with broccoli and shrimp. Again, I had a lot more broccoli so that inspired the next recipe.

My family loved the scallion mayo dressing dish. What was unusual was boiling the scallion prior to mixing it with mayo. It brought out a certain flavor we normally didn’t taste before. So dressing was really key. For some dishes, we ended up mixing a French homemade vinaigrette with Japanese kewpie mayonnaise. I winged a pasta black bean salad the next day (not pictured here). That makes my 4-day substitute teaching bento week.