I really need to cook quinoa more often, I love this stuff! This batch has white, black, and red quinoa and I cooked it in the rice cooker with a bit of Vegeta for seasoning. It’s topped it off with some bulgogi marinated beef with onions, carrots, and asparagus stems.

After cutting the carrots into sakura shapes and cutting the asparagus to fit in the box, I chopped up the stems and cut-out leftovers and added them to the beef. It worked out perfectly so that I didn’t waste any food. The rest of the bento is just cherries, tomatoes, cucumber, and a hard boiled egg.

Other than making a bento, the majority of my Sunday afternoon was spent making chocolate toffee whoopie pies. The cookies are chocolate and the filling is toffee buttercream.

Oh my! This might be the best dessert I’ve ever made! The cookie turned out moist and chewy like the cookies on an ice cream sandwich. And, I discovered that if you mix fresh homemade buttercream with soft gooey toffee, it turns into something magical. Heart stopping, knee weakening, unbelievably magical.

I used this whoopie pie recipe for the cookie part (minus the mint, these were just plain chocolate). I chose it because it didn’t call for shortening, which I didn’t have. The filling was made with a simple vanilla buttercream (butter, confectioners sugar, vanilla, and a dash of milk) mixed with toffee. I cheated on the toffee and made use of the handy sweetened condensed milk trick. Did you know that if you boil an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk for 3 hours it turns into toffee? Yeah, it’s a total cheat but it tastes great!

I’m off to eat some whoopies!

Happy Bento-ing!

Tags: bento, quinoa