In my mind, beef and mushrooms in oyster sauce sounded like a good idea. I mean, I love beef, I love mushrooms. Plus, I’ve always loved eating beef and broccoli in oyster sauce. Time to experiment. But I guess, I can’t always score wins each time.

Well, in fairness, it wasn’t that bad. I just found it a bit too salty and sweet, and I also wished it were more liquidy. To cook, I started off with a thin sirloin steak (roughly 100 grams) which I cut into bite-sized pieces. I sautéed half an onion, added the beef, straw mushrooms, then drizzled on some oyster sauce and sprinkled some sugar. BIG MISTAKE Next time, I’ll skip the onions—it overpowered the dish—and add a small amount of water before adding the oyster sauce. It appears that straw mushrooms don’t release much water, hence the need to add more. And I’ll skip the sugar.

On the top half of the bento is a bunch of plum tomato wedges, dusted with some sea salt, and some bokchoy and beef rolls. I found some leftover cooked ground beef in the fridge and decided to make little bokchoy rolls. I steamed them in a little microwave steamer then popped them in a bento.

Lastly, I packed rice! Can’t see it, but trust me, it’s there, under the beef and mushrooms. All in all, not a bad bento. Could’ve been tastier but far from unedible. Just a few tweaks and I may eventually add the recipe to the recipe index.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 11:26 pm and is filed under bento. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.