Flag in-a-box: Mali © 2012 kit

Flag in-a-box: Mali

Still reeling from our beer festival debauchery both Yvan and I are feeling a little slower than usual. With beer *and* cider to order, an Android app, then setup nightmares and long serving hours the mess of a kitchen serves as an empty firkin storage before we head off to another beer festival in a week.

Luckily, anything around the house of the edible variety tend to be long-lived or growing on the plant. Doubly lucky that the spinach is thriving and the tomatoes don’t like wet feet – we managed only 2 ripe specimens on the slow producing plants, one of which is an heirloom variety (can you guess which?)

Flag in-a-box: Mali

Unfortunately, though eggs have a long shelf-life I do believe they lost some of their colour with age: making very pale tamagoyaki. Tempting that they verge on white instead of yellow the colours that turned out in the end were of the Mali flag rather than a more recognisable Italian. But if I were to use a country flag I did know about, I would probably have to feature items of that cuisine, which would require much more planning.

Top tier

Bottom tier

Top tier contents: Inari sushi (filled with shiitake, carrot and sesame seeds), buckler-leaf sorrel garnish and cherry tomatoes.

Bottom tier contents: Dry-fried chinese sausage (sliced into strips), spicy spinach namul, tamagoyaki, stir-fried red capsicum & onion (garnished with a bit of sausage).

On second thought, the red-yellow-green combination reminds me of a certain batch of beers at the beer festival..

I couldn’t resist having a little meat with my lunch, and seeing that chinese sausage has so much flavour it was good to have the plainer capsicum to balance (it was simply stir-fried with a little salt to taste). I had made the inari, namul and capsicum in advance yesterday so this lunch was just a matter of assembly. And the inari tasted better for it!

If only the yellows were more yellow, the colour combination also coincides with a brewery whose firkins are colour-coded in this manner – though again, I would have to ensure that my lunch was taste compatible with one of their beers. Perhaps another lunch challenge: beer matched bento?

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