Around the world with Mr. Bento!

I seem to be back into cooking lately. Sometimes I can't be bothered to even make a burrito. This weekend, I pulled out the cookbooks and cooked a lot.

Since I'm still working on the Mr. Bento contest (and having even more fun coming up with vote-worthy entries), I decided to go with a theme for today's lunch: wold cuisine. I knew what three of them would be. It was the fourth one that was hard. But then I found it: veggies in peanut sauce from Africa.

The sauce is actually peanut-tomato, and that frightened me a bit. But it's really, really good! And it made twice as much sauce as we needed, so I just froze the rest, and it'll make a good meal next week, maybe. Quick, too. Making the sauce is the time-consuming part; the veggies cook in under ten minutes.

The cake is another one from that Small Batch Baking I mentioned last week, and this cake is fabulous! I'll definitely be making more of these. Actually, tonight I plan to mix up batches of the dry ingredients and put them in ziplocs in the freezer, ready for mixing with the wet ingredients for quick cakes.

The baby focaccia is from a batch I made with toppings of all sorts. This was the most photogenic. :) And the spicy potato cakes are my answer to Thai fish cakes. They're not perfected yet, but I'm close!