Vietnamese Empress Rice Bento

I made Empress Rice or Com Hoang Hau in Vietnamese (please excuse the missing accents!) today. I had always wanted to make it ever since I saw it in my Vietnamese cookbook Quick and Easy Vietnamese Home Cooking for Everyone by Andre Nguyen and Yukiko Moriyama. It looks gorgeous, festive and delicious too! Unfortunately the bento pictures here don't really show how pretty the rice actually looks, because it's covered by fruit, vegetables and so on...! My husband especially found the rice really yummy and aromatic, I guess a real change from the usual fried rice. It's not very complicated to make either.

The rice uses coconut juice and vanilla leaves, which I think really accentuate the beautiful aroma of the rice.

Ingredients - serves 2
Adapted from Quick and Easy Vietnamese Home Cooking for Everyone

• 1 cup jasmine rice, rinsed and drained
• 10 cm Asian vanilla leaves
• 2 cups coconut juice (not coconut milk...!)
• 1/2 cup Chinese sausage, diced
• 1/2 cup Vietnamese ham, diced
• 1/2 cup chicken fillet, diced
• 60 g long beans, sliced
• 1/2 cup chopped green onions
• 2 salted eggs (use only chopped yolks)
• 2 thin omelets
• 1 teaspoon chopped garlic
• 1 teaspoon sliced chili, seeded
• 5 - 6 quail eggs, hard boiled
• 1/2 teaspoon each, sugar, salt, pepper, soy sauce
• 2 tablespoon oil for stir-frying

Instructions

• Cook rice with vanilla leaves and coconut juice in a rice cooker.
• In a non-stick skillet, make 2 thin omelets and shred finely. Cut up all the remaining ingredients, except for quail eggs.
• Heat oil in a wok and stir fry all ingredients except quail eggs. Season with sugar, salt, pepper and soy sauce.
• Place hard boiled quail eggs in a rice bowl.
• Press down the meat mixture to line the bowl. Add cooked rice and press hard. Turn over to unmold.

Note: I didn't add the quail eggs to the rice, as it's actually meant to be, because I wanted to make some cute characters with them.

Filling: Vietnamese Empress Rice, slices of mango, grapes, blueberries, red currant, strawberries, tamagoyaki (Japanese rolled omelet), flower sausages, cherry tomato, broccoli, hard-boiled bear, chick and piggy quail eggs.