Pomegranate Chicken & Psuedo Sushi (Bento #40)

Tonight's cooking brings more experimentation and fun! As you already know, dear reader, the word this week is pomegranate. The pomegranate I purchased and seeded this week was too much fruit for just me. Tonight, I decided to take the remaining seeds and try out the sauce from a recipe called Pomegranate & Balsamic Glazed Cornish Hen, found at http://www.recipezaar.com/.

I juiced the pomegranate seeds by hand through a cheesecloth (fun!). Since I didn't have any balsamic vinegar on hand, I used a light balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing. This worked out well in my opinion. The sauce had a nice sweet flavor from the pomegranate, but I wasn't overwhelmed by the balsamic taste (which is why I don't often use balsamic salad dressing). The only thing I was unable to accomplish was to get the sauce to thicken and become syrupy. I think the reason for this is I didn't use enough honey; I ran out. All in all though, it made a wonderful sauce to baste the chicken breasts with and made for a very tasty dinner.

For tomorrow's bento, I also decided to try my hand at making a psuedo-sushi roll. I cooked some sushi rice and spread it out on a tumeric colored Sushi Party! soy wrapper. The rice was then sprinkled lightly with sea salt and liberally with toasted sesame seeds. Thinnish slices of carrots, cucumber, and radishes were added to the middle and then it was rolled up. I don't own a sushi mat, so I used my silicone baking mat to help me get the roll into shape. However, I think a bamboo mat might be necessary to get the thing to stay together. I didn't cut the wrap into sushi rolls because I could tell it would fall apart.

Here's a quick picture of what the inside of the sushi roll looks like. I cut one end to get a good picture. Then, I had to eat the portion I cut off. It is quite tasty indeed!



Tomorrow's bento includes:
Psuedo-sushi roll containing cucumber, carrots, & radishes
Wavy cucumber slices with french dressing in container for dipping
Pomegranate & Balsamic baked chicken breasts with wavy chip steamed sweet potatos
Pocky and chocolate "burger candy"

BTW, can you tell I purchased a wavy vegetable cutter. So much fun!


I included a picture of my lunch all wrapped up and ready to go. I'm excited because I now have matching bento/belt sets. Wheeeee!