Teriyaki is a traditional Japanese recipe and is widely enjoyed at home as well as at restaurants. However if you image the type of teriyaki you know from neighborhood teriyaki joints, you might find the Japanese teriyaki less…sweet.

The recipe calls for sugar, yes, but not to make the sauce syrupy. It should be a good balance of soy sauce and sweetness coming from sugar or mirin. Additionally, teriyaki originally was the sauce mainly for fish in Japan. Fatty fish such as buri (yellowtail) is most popular for this type of cooking, but salmon is also a favorite for Japanese teriyaki.

Living in the Northwest, salmon is the most accessible fish these days, so I picked the fish for my teriyaki bento. I am hoping many of you will enjoy the dish along with many good vegetable dishes.

And I really want to highlight those wonderful vegetables that I selected for the bento.

I was excited to start seeing asparagus on the produce isle at supermarkets and couldn’t help grabbing a bunch for “shiraae”, a traditional salad with creamy tofu and sesame dressing. Feel the spring!

Also I made a dish with lots of good root vegetables such as gobo (rich in soluble dietary fiber), carrot, satoimo (a Japanese taro that enhances your immune system), dried shiitake mushrooms (wonderful source of Vitamin D). The detox vegetable stew!

Do not forget by players for the salmon. Lotus root is a wonderful source of fiber (and another immune system booster), shishito pepper (source of Vitamin C), and cabbage (source of vitamin C and fiber!).

And any bento should come with rice. I used Nishiki new crop and mixed with edamame and black sesame seeds. Yum.

Wow, you can get a perfectly balanced meal from this bento. Hope you can enjoy my salmon bento next week!

Order my bento at https://www.josephine.com/meals/authentic-salmon-teriyaki-bento.