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PARTNER SPOTLIGHT: BENTO PICNIC
05/05/17 — Heydon Hatcher
Before we get to our Partner Spotlight, we want to remind you about our Bulk Tomato Pre-Sale which ends on Tuesday! Pre-order 25 lbs. of our mouth-watering beef steak slicing tomatoes for a discounted $50, and we'll deliver them to a farmers' market of your choice during the peak of our tomato season. Projected delivery dates are between June 1-June 30. We will contact you to schedule your pickup day. Order here.
This week, we had the immense privilege of meeting with one of our lively, local partners, Leanne Valenti, owner of Bento Picnic. She passionately incorporates our farm-fresh seasonal produce into their Japanese homestyle cooking inspired bento boxes creatively and beautifully week after week. "Every meal is designed with five colors, five tastes, and five elements to deliver a full-sensory experience with every bite." Like so many of our partners in town, we are inspired by Bento Picnic and can get behind their ultimate mission, keeping Austin nourished and healthy. Meet Leanne!
![Leanne. Photo by Scott David Gordon.]()
Leanne. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
You've had a long history with JBG - tell us about that!
I moved to Austin in 2005, and was working at an after school program. I was always looking for ways for me and my kids to get involved with the community. I was looking through Craigslist for U-Pick type stuff specifically… picking peaches or something in the area. Brenton was just getting started with the 20 acres off Hergotz, and posted an ad about looking for volunteers on the weekend. He was still working full-time at the Department of Agriculture at the time. Interestingly, the entire reason I got into Japanese home-style cooking and bento is an interwoven story with volunteering at JBG because I went out there and volunteered with my good friend, Naoko, who is from rural Japan. We would both get veggie CSA boxes (mind you, I grew up in the suburbs of Houston in the '80s and '90s where macaroni and cheese counts as a vegetable), but I didn’t know what to do with them! Thankfully, really good cooking with veggies at the center of the plate was her upbringing and just part of her lifestyle. That is how I gained a huge appreciation and love of delicious, healthy Japanese homestyle cooking. I really wanted to make it accessible to people here. That’s how the concept of Bento Picnic got started... because of that relationship and my personal journey in figuring out what to do with the veggies.
What’s cool about bento cooking is whenever we would cook up a feast and eat it for dinner, instead of separating all the different dishes and packaging them in different containers, Naoko would package them as bentos instead. You would make a little lunch with a combination of all the different things as you were putting away your leftovers. It’s that meal prep that makes your week even easier.
When you were volunteering regularly for the farm, what are some good memories that you have?
My funniest story about Brenton is one time the volunteers were loading up the CSA boxes, and he had wandered into the packing shed. He had this bizarre look on his face, and was just standing there for a while maintaining this odd look. I asked him if he was okay, and he said, “I think that I have ants in my pants” and walked off. (Leanne starts laughing)
It’s been amazing to see the progress of the farm over ten years. Even seeing the changes over the course of a week (when I was volunteering regularly) and then now visiting for movie screenings, etc. when months have passed. It’s been incredible to see the pace at which the farm has grown and how Brenton's vision for the farm's future has been actualized.
Can you talk a bit about the principles governing bento boxes?
The key principle that we follow is using 5 colors, 5 tastes, and 5 elements in every meal. With that amount of variety, you get a lot of nutrition, flavor, and texture. The 5 colors are red, yellow, green, black, and white. Kubocha squash or spaghetti squash could be your yellow. Green is your bright spinaches, kale, arugula, and cucumbers. Reds can be tomatoes. White can be parsnips and egg whites. Black can be anything with a darker hue: eggplant or black fermented garlic, for example.
![Making a bento composition. Photo by Scott David Gordon.]()
Making a bento composition. Photo by Scott David Gordon
The 5 tastes are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and pungent/spicy. Sweet, sour, and salty are pretty self explanatory, but the bitter and pungent takes a little bit more exploration. Bitter is something that dries your tongue and balances sweetness - all your herbs. Some root veggies are going to have bitter edge to them, too, think radishes. They can be pungent AND bitter. All these things can be interpreted lightly and with a lot of liberty and grace. It’s just supposed to be a framework for the creative process of constructing a box and general recipe development. I’ve been able to create amazing meals based off of that structure, and expand my cooking creativity greatly, instead of just mindlessly following recipes. I think about adding colors, rounding out the composition, and expanding the tastes.
Finally, the 5 elements are water, fire, earth, metal, and tree which all relate to cooking methods. Water is steaming, poaching, or boiling; fire is something on the grill or to saute; metal is the oven; earth is fermented or pickled; and tree is raw.
![BP 5 Elements Letter Size Color copy]()
People exert their creativity in different ways, whether it be painting, drawing, or music. For me, cooking is my creative outlet. Instead of just arriving at a blank page, when you have a framework to work within, things can move further faster. It’s been super empowering for me to come up with new variations. It has been very affirming to receive all the positive feedback… the people who eat the bento compositions and love vegetables all of a sudden. I attribute that newfound love to just paying attention to the flavor profiles during the different seasons of all the ingredients and rounding the meal out.
How can folks incorporate this into their home-cooking?
For example, if they are putting a salad together... how can you get all five colors into that salad? Even if you can’t get all five, how can you get at least three? From there, you are going to start to see how you can get more use out of all the things in your CSA box.
![Composing the greens. Photo by Scott David Gordon.]()
Composing the greens. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
Another way to incorporate bento into home-cooking/meal planning is to not just packing away all the things that you have prepared in their own individual containers. Try packing them away together as composed, complete meals. Most people have really busy weeks, and if their meals are already set up, they are ready to go for the week ahead.
What attracted you to this type of cuisine?
It hits all the points… it’s healthy, delicious, and convenient. When I was volunteering at JBG, I was working full-time for Americorps (which felt like more than a regular full-time job), and completing my Masters. I was so busy, but I care about myself and my body and the people I cook for, so I needed something nourishing and energizing. Ideally, I spent one day cooking and then had all my meals lined up for the week. That’s the level of convenience that attracted me to the bento lifestyle. Using the 5 colors, tastes, and elements always ensures that it is satisfying and delicious, too.
![Photo by Scott David Gordon.]()
Photo by Scott David Gordon.
How does fresh produce fit into bento box principles?
You can’t check off a color if it’s food coloring. You have to use foods that naturally fit in the color framework. In order to fit the 5 colors, you have to bring in produce to do it. In order to do the 5 elements, you can’t just make all fried food. You have to incorporate things that are pickled, raw, sauteed, poached… you start to balance out healthier methods and healthier ingredients with the less healthy ones that just please your palate. I think that that’s the key, this method elicits so much balance.
![Making onigiri. Photo by Scott David Gordon.]()
Making onigiri. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
Do you have any tips for CSA Members who are stumped with certain vegetables?
Find a friend who is Japanese, and get them to search for the vegetable IN Japanese. There are so many recipes out there, that even if you look for them in English, you won’t find them. There are a lot of Asian veggies that come off of the farm, too. Don’t search for recipes in English, get someone to search for them in any Asian language, and you are going to find so many different recipes that are not in your current culinary arsenal.
I ask Naoko, still, to help me search for certain ingredients. Especially when I’m tired of using it in a certain way and want something new. She is always using cookpad, a really centralized site where almost every home-cook in Japan will post very thorough recipes, pictures, and feedback of anything that they’ve cooked. There’s an English version of it, but it is nowhere near as dense and robust as the Japanese version. I wish I could learn Japanese, but it’s not in the cards.
What's the veggie that stumps you the most?
Black Spanish radish… it’s too pungent for me. I need to find a good way to tame that back.
Do you have any tips for readers who are looking to incorporate more local and seasonal vegetables into their cooking?
The best way is going to the farmers markets, just making a habit of seeing what’s out there, picking something up, and using that as your springboard. Grab some tomatoes and make a point to use them in your dinner. I always do a couple of Google searches around what vegetables I have and will build a meal around that. It’s the same thing that Tom Colicchio says in his book Think Like A Chef, the proteins are not the star. You can get meats pretty much all year round, it’s the vegetables that you can only get at certain times.
![Making onigiri. Photo by Scott David Gordon.]()
Making onigiri. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
How can folks look to bento boxes/Bento Picnic for inspiration?
Bentos are artwork for sure. You can get to all levels of effort with them. You can keep them simple, which is beautiful and uncluttered, or you can do the character style bentos, where people will make Pokemon type characters out of vegetables. It’s a thing that Japanese moms do to get their kids to enjoy veggies. It is smart, and gets kids excited to eat a variety of different things by making it look cool and pretty. Lots of people have cookie cutters in their kitchens, you can use those on vegetables, too, instead of just doing regular square or round cuts… and that just adds so much to the presentation right off the bat.
Do you have a favorite seasonal recipe that you wouldn't mind sharing with our readers?
Pepita Parsley Pesto
Yields about 1 pint
What’s your favorite thing about working with local farmers?
How fresh we can get something. It’s going to have so much more of a shelf life if we are packing up with local veggies. The same just can’t be said for things that come from a purveyor who is trucking things in from across the country or the world because they’ve already been on the shelf for a couple of weeks. Same thing goes for the flavor, the veggies are just that much more delicious… I’ve had folks get excited about carrots when they have always hated them, and I think it’s because they have probably never had fresh vegetables before!
I’ve been running the business for a couple years now, and in the first couple of months, I was catering a school field trip to Boggy Creek Farm. There were 7th grade boys that were raising their hands and standing up so that I would call on them… “How did you make these carrots!? These are so good!” Seeing kids react to the food is something that drives me and is super rewarding because kids don’t lie. If a kid is excited, you know you passed the test.
![Leanne. Photo by Scott David Gordon.]()
Leanne. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
Do you have a favorite JBG vegetable?
Watermelon radish… I had never tasted them before Brenton started growing them. They're so mild and the color just pops.
Where can people learn more/taste one of these boxes?
We’re at 2600 Cesar Chavez, we have a little shaded picnic area where you can sit down and enjoy them, or grab a box to-go! We have a website where you can place orders in advance, and will be ready when you arrive… here. We also have a kiosk format, more of a grab-and-go, at Austin Bouldering Project. We stock it daily and have quite the variety of rice bowls, bentos, snacks, and sweets. A lot of folks will work and climb at ABP and work up an appetite, so it serves them very well; however, you don’t have to climb there to grab a bento box. You can just walk in and grab your bento to go! We have a menu at Irie Bean on S. Lamar if you are looking for something south. We also cater, and you can find us at the Lakeline Farmers Market on Saturdays or the Mueller Farmers Market on Sundays!
![On Cesar Chavez. Photo by Scott David Gordon.]()
On Cesar Chavez. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
If you were a vegetable what would you be and why?
Kubocha squash because it’s going to give you energy to make it all the way through the day. My days are 14-16 hour days… I have a steady flow of energy that I use on whatever I’m doing. Whenever I get into it, I have a really strong ability to focus. They are also sweet and tasty, but definitely carry you through the long-haul.
![Bento goodness. Photo by Scott David Gordon.]()
Bento goodness. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
A huge thanks to Leanne Valenti with Bento Picnic for making time for us! Grab one of her boxes at the farmers market or around town, you won't regret it! 'Til next time!
Want to meet your farmers? We have an upcoming Meet Your Farmer Happy Hour at ABGB on 5/18 from 6-8 PM! Come have a beer and a bite, we can't wait to meet you.
This week, we had the immense privilege of meeting with one of our lively, local partners, Leanne Valenti, owner of Bento Picnic. She passionately incorporates our farm-fresh seasonal produce into their Japanese homestyle cooking inspired bento boxes creatively and beautifully week after week. "Every meal is designed with five colors, five tastes, and five elements to deliver a full-sensory experience with every bite." Like so many of our partners in town, we are inspired by Bento Picnic and can get behind their ultimate mission, keeping Austin nourished and healthy. Meet Leanne!
Leanne. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
You've had a long history with JBG - tell us about that!
I moved to Austin in 2005, and was working at an after school program. I was always looking for ways for me and my kids to get involved with the community. I was looking through Craigslist for U-Pick type stuff specifically… picking peaches or something in the area. Brenton was just getting started with the 20 acres off Hergotz, and posted an ad about looking for volunteers on the weekend. He was still working full-time at the Department of Agriculture at the time. Interestingly, the entire reason I got into Japanese home-style cooking and bento is an interwoven story with volunteering at JBG because I went out there and volunteered with my good friend, Naoko, who is from rural Japan. We would both get veggie CSA boxes (mind you, I grew up in the suburbs of Houston in the '80s and '90s where macaroni and cheese counts as a vegetable), but I didn’t know what to do with them! Thankfully, really good cooking with veggies at the center of the plate was her upbringing and just part of her lifestyle. That is how I gained a huge appreciation and love of delicious, healthy Japanese homestyle cooking. I really wanted to make it accessible to people here. That’s how the concept of Bento Picnic got started... because of that relationship and my personal journey in figuring out what to do with the veggies.
What’s cool about bento cooking is whenever we would cook up a feast and eat it for dinner, instead of separating all the different dishes and packaging them in different containers, Naoko would package them as bentos instead. You would make a little lunch with a combination of all the different things as you were putting away your leftovers. It’s that meal prep that makes your week even easier.
When you were volunteering regularly for the farm, what are some good memories that you have?
My funniest story about Brenton is one time the volunteers were loading up the CSA boxes, and he had wandered into the packing shed. He had this bizarre look on his face, and was just standing there for a while maintaining this odd look. I asked him if he was okay, and he said, “I think that I have ants in my pants” and walked off. (Leanne starts laughing)
It’s been amazing to see the progress of the farm over ten years. Even seeing the changes over the course of a week (when I was volunteering regularly) and then now visiting for movie screenings, etc. when months have passed. It’s been incredible to see the pace at which the farm has grown and how Brenton's vision for the farm's future has been actualized.
Can you talk a bit about the principles governing bento boxes?
The key principle that we follow is using 5 colors, 5 tastes, and 5 elements in every meal. With that amount of variety, you get a lot of nutrition, flavor, and texture. The 5 colors are red, yellow, green, black, and white. Kubocha squash or spaghetti squash could be your yellow. Green is your bright spinaches, kale, arugula, and cucumbers. Reds can be tomatoes. White can be parsnips and egg whites. Black can be anything with a darker hue: eggplant or black fermented garlic, for example.
Making a bento composition. Photo by Scott David Gordon
The 5 tastes are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and pungent/spicy. Sweet, sour, and salty are pretty self explanatory, but the bitter and pungent takes a little bit more exploration. Bitter is something that dries your tongue and balances sweetness - all your herbs. Some root veggies are going to have bitter edge to them, too, think radishes. They can be pungent AND bitter. All these things can be interpreted lightly and with a lot of liberty and grace. It’s just supposed to be a framework for the creative process of constructing a box and general recipe development. I’ve been able to create amazing meals based off of that structure, and expand my cooking creativity greatly, instead of just mindlessly following recipes. I think about adding colors, rounding out the composition, and expanding the tastes.
Finally, the 5 elements are water, fire, earth, metal, and tree which all relate to cooking methods. Water is steaming, poaching, or boiling; fire is something on the grill or to saute; metal is the oven; earth is fermented or pickled; and tree is raw.
People exert their creativity in different ways, whether it be painting, drawing, or music. For me, cooking is my creative outlet. Instead of just arriving at a blank page, when you have a framework to work within, things can move further faster. It’s been super empowering for me to come up with new variations. It has been very affirming to receive all the positive feedback… the people who eat the bento compositions and love vegetables all of a sudden. I attribute that newfound love to just paying attention to the flavor profiles during the different seasons of all the ingredients and rounding the meal out.
How can folks incorporate this into their home-cooking?
For example, if they are putting a salad together... how can you get all five colors into that salad? Even if you can’t get all five, how can you get at least three? From there, you are going to start to see how you can get more use out of all the things in your CSA box.
Composing the greens. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
Another way to incorporate bento into home-cooking/meal planning is to not just packing away all the things that you have prepared in their own individual containers. Try packing them away together as composed, complete meals. Most people have really busy weeks, and if their meals are already set up, they are ready to go for the week ahead.
What attracted you to this type of cuisine?
It hits all the points… it’s healthy, delicious, and convenient. When I was volunteering at JBG, I was working full-time for Americorps (which felt like more than a regular full-time job), and completing my Masters. I was so busy, but I care about myself and my body and the people I cook for, so I needed something nourishing and energizing. Ideally, I spent one day cooking and then had all my meals lined up for the week. That’s the level of convenience that attracted me to the bento lifestyle. Using the 5 colors, tastes, and elements always ensures that it is satisfying and delicious, too.
Photo by Scott David Gordon.
How does fresh produce fit into bento box principles?
You can’t check off a color if it’s food coloring. You have to use foods that naturally fit in the color framework. In order to fit the 5 colors, you have to bring in produce to do it. In order to do the 5 elements, you can’t just make all fried food. You have to incorporate things that are pickled, raw, sauteed, poached… you start to balance out healthier methods and healthier ingredients with the less healthy ones that just please your palate. I think that that’s the key, this method elicits so much balance.
Making onigiri. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
Do you have any tips for CSA Members who are stumped with certain vegetables?
Find a friend who is Japanese, and get them to search for the vegetable IN Japanese. There are so many recipes out there, that even if you look for them in English, you won’t find them. There are a lot of Asian veggies that come off of the farm, too. Don’t search for recipes in English, get someone to search for them in any Asian language, and you are going to find so many different recipes that are not in your current culinary arsenal.
I ask Naoko, still, to help me search for certain ingredients. Especially when I’m tired of using it in a certain way and want something new. She is always using cookpad, a really centralized site where almost every home-cook in Japan will post very thorough recipes, pictures, and feedback of anything that they’ve cooked. There’s an English version of it, but it is nowhere near as dense and robust as the Japanese version. I wish I could learn Japanese, but it’s not in the cards.
What's the veggie that stumps you the most?
Black Spanish radish… it’s too pungent for me. I need to find a good way to tame that back.
Do you have any tips for readers who are looking to incorporate more local and seasonal vegetables into their cooking?
The best way is going to the farmers markets, just making a habit of seeing what’s out there, picking something up, and using that as your springboard. Grab some tomatoes and make a point to use them in your dinner. I always do a couple of Google searches around what vegetables I have and will build a meal around that. It’s the same thing that Tom Colicchio says in his book Think Like A Chef, the proteins are not the star. You can get meats pretty much all year round, it’s the vegetables that you can only get at certain times.
Making onigiri. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
How can folks look to bento boxes/Bento Picnic for inspiration?
Bentos are artwork for sure. You can get to all levels of effort with them. You can keep them simple, which is beautiful and uncluttered, or you can do the character style bentos, where people will make Pokemon type characters out of vegetables. It’s a thing that Japanese moms do to get their kids to enjoy veggies. It is smart, and gets kids excited to eat a variety of different things by making it look cool and pretty. Lots of people have cookie cutters in their kitchens, you can use those on vegetables, too, instead of just doing regular square or round cuts… and that just adds so much to the presentation right off the bat.
Do you have a favorite seasonal recipe that you wouldn't mind sharing with our readers?
Pepita Parsley Pesto
Yields about 1 pint
- 2/3 cup sunflower seeds
- 1 bunch parsley (~100 g)
- 3/4 cup pepita seeds, toasted
- 1 clove garlic, chopped
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- 2 1/2 Tbsp safflower oil
- 1/2 cup water
What’s your favorite thing about working with local farmers?
How fresh we can get something. It’s going to have so much more of a shelf life if we are packing up with local veggies. The same just can’t be said for things that come from a purveyor who is trucking things in from across the country or the world because they’ve already been on the shelf for a couple of weeks. Same thing goes for the flavor, the veggies are just that much more delicious… I’ve had folks get excited about carrots when they have always hated them, and I think it’s because they have probably never had fresh vegetables before!
I’ve been running the business for a couple years now, and in the first couple of months, I was catering a school field trip to Boggy Creek Farm. There were 7th grade boys that were raising their hands and standing up so that I would call on them… “How did you make these carrots!? These are so good!” Seeing kids react to the food is something that drives me and is super rewarding because kids don’t lie. If a kid is excited, you know you passed the test.
Leanne. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
Do you have a favorite JBG vegetable?
Watermelon radish… I had never tasted them before Brenton started growing them. They're so mild and the color just pops.
Where can people learn more/taste one of these boxes?
We’re at 2600 Cesar Chavez, we have a little shaded picnic area where you can sit down and enjoy them, or grab a box to-go! We have a website where you can place orders in advance, and will be ready when you arrive… here. We also have a kiosk format, more of a grab-and-go, at Austin Bouldering Project. We stock it daily and have quite the variety of rice bowls, bentos, snacks, and sweets. A lot of folks will work and climb at ABP and work up an appetite, so it serves them very well; however, you don’t have to climb there to grab a bento box. You can just walk in and grab your bento to go! We have a menu at Irie Bean on S. Lamar if you are looking for something south. We also cater, and you can find us at the Lakeline Farmers Market on Saturdays or the Mueller Farmers Market on Sundays!
On Cesar Chavez. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
If you were a vegetable what would you be and why?
Kubocha squash because it’s going to give you energy to make it all the way through the day. My days are 14-16 hour days… I have a steady flow of energy that I use on whatever I’m doing. Whenever I get into it, I have a really strong ability to focus. They are also sweet and tasty, but definitely carry you through the long-haul.
Bento goodness. Photo by Scott David Gordon.
A huge thanks to Leanne Valenti with Bento Picnic for making time for us! Grab one of her boxes at the farmers market or around town, you won't regret it! 'Til next time!
Want to meet your farmers? We have an upcoming Meet Your Farmer Happy Hour at ABGB on 5/18 from 6-8 PM! Come have a beer and a bite, we can't wait to meet you.
