4/15/11 - Carbs

Pretty simple lunch; pasta salad and roasted potatoes with broccoli. Can you say, carb overload?

I am really liking these one-tier boxes. They're a lot easier to organize and look more put together. I packed this meal yesterday just as I finished dinner, because I think that the warm weather is messing up with my sleeping schedule and I end up hitting the snooze button too many times before rolling out of bed.

I think that what I am needing is a bit of guidance... so I might go bento-book shopping soon. Before I started playing with bentos, lunches would be straight from leftovers (like this one). So the thought of cooking two different meals for, well, two different parts of the day is sinking in, but very slowly.

Anyone got any recommendations? I know slovakiasteph has been checking out Yum Yum Bento Box, and that's definitely on my list.

Rice stars and coleslaw

Kind of funky looking photo, but I also took one with a real camera and will probably upload it tomorrow or tonight. This lunch contains a boiled egg, cheese fence sticks covering the eggs, two rice stars topped with cheese flowers, coleslaw, and broccoli to secure everything in place.

I have been really craving coleslaw, so I went ahead and made some with the last of my cabbage. I ended up with too much shredded carrot (not that it is a bad thing), but it doesnt look like the typical coleslaw. It also doesnt have the same sauce, as most recipes I found had either too many ingredients, or different ingredients throughout the different recipes. So I stuck with the most prevalent ingredients, didnt measure (as usual) and it came out interesting. It was a little tangy from the vinegar and chopped onion, but overall, pretty good.

Egg noodles and veggies

What's in it: Boiled egg, carrots, egg noodle pasta with broccoli, mushrooms and onions with cheese flowers.

Well, the new supplies kind of intimidated me. So yesterday I went and attempted to buy general food supplies, since I'm between grocery shopping trips. I didn't get most of what I wanted (ew, expensive pre-Spring 'sales'), so I will try that again today. I had all the right intentions of waking up extra early and making some rice. But I got caught up in one of those dreams that are just too good to miss. (In case you were wondering, it included dinosaurs and epic battling... sigh, I'm just a big kid.)

So since I got ready relatively late, I decided to pack leftovers, but I just HAD to use the cutters. And oh my goodness, I love them! So fun, so easy to use. The cheese was slightly hard to punch out without breaking them, but overall, I think they might very well be my favorite purchased item.

I wanted to make a rainy day bento, since today it will be raining cats, dogs, cattle, dragons and meteorites, with green beans and rice and cheese clouds, but couldnt find affordable edible-looking beans.

I also take back what I said about the size of the boxes. They might be small, but they are kind of deep, so they hold a decent amount of food. This lunch was thrown together in less than 15min. I was being coy about not wanting to use all of the pretty supplies in front of my roommates. Yet, anyway. :)

New Bento Supplies!

First of all, this is like Christmas. I was too excited to wait until Saturday night/Sunday morning to get my packages, so I drove home... and there they were!

Courtesy of AllThingsForSale.com

Courtesy of FitJPStore.com. 

I combined my allowed budget with April's misc. money to buy these items. Together, they were $80 (yikes!), but I suppose I wont be buying any more any time soon, and I will get a lot of use out of them, so they sort of even out... I am especially excited with the food cutters. Though if I must say something...

They are TINY! Wow. Everything's a lot smaller than I imagined. I guess I should've known, but the picks are super small and cute, and the bento boxes do not look that much bigger... so we'll see how packing those go. The yellow and other pink boxes are 480ml. The natural pink is 560ml. The huge one in the back (came with a lid broken :( Hoping it can be replaced) is 900ml. It seems too big, but the other two seem rather small to me. Well, considering my red and green 2-tier bentos are about 580 combined... (I'll post comparative photos later.)

Anyway! Yeah. The picks, the boxes, the utensils, everything seems so much smaller to me. But I'm excited to get to use them. (Especially the cutters, ha!)

Cleaning the fridge

Very last minute lunch. It doesn't have anything really substantial on it, so I made sure to pack two snacks (some fruit cocktail and my usual yogurt with granola cereal). It seems that I am taking a bit too much time to put a bento together, even something as simple as this. From the moment I opened the fridge to get the first items out to the moment I packed it in my bag, it was a good 20-25min. Too much wasted time.

This bento contains mild cheddar cheese, strawberries, lots of broccoli, some carrots, some red pepper and feta cheese. The small container is oil/vinegar dressing.

Lost my appetite yesterday, and apparently, found quite a few items spoiled. So I'll be cleaning my fridge section and getting rid of the remaining stuff. If we are in the mood for confessions, I lost...: half a container of strawberries, 3/4 a bag of frozen strawberries, half a bag of frozen green beans, about 1/2 lb of cooked rice, 1/5th of a block of mozzarella cheese, four or so spears of asparagus and less than 1/3 of a red pepper. Well... yikes. So much for saving money, eh? I'm not sure where I went wrong. The frozen strawberries were a miss for sure. The regular strawberries, I just couldn’t find a way to add them to my lunches, and apples are so much better with yogurt. Green beans were another miss. I had this 'plan' for them but never got around to it. Asparagus, I didn't like it/found a way to properly cook it, and the pepper, I just bought too much at the beginning.

Time to change tactics, I guess. Rice cooks so fast, I will make much smaller portions and use them as I go. I like strawberries, but not as much as I like apples and oranges. Apples and oranges also last a lot longer, so I'll work on rebalancing my fruits and actually including them in the box. It all comes down to MEAL PLANNING, so hopefully next week I can start doing a lot better. Have a great weekend, all!

Avocado salad

On this lunch: Rice and tamagoyaki, avocado and broccoli with feta cheese and oil/vinegar dressing with a strawberry for the sweet touch. Very simple lunch.

You know when you buy something, and it gets pushed to the back of the fridge/bottom of the drawer? Then random thoughts for the following weeks go something like "didnt I buy a _____?" That was me and my avocado. I could've sworn I bought one, but it was out of sight, out of mind. Well, I found it this morning. It was still good, so I sliced it up and put some on this bento.

I havent posted this past week because the lunches look, well, exactly like Tuesday's. Pizza and salad. And I still have 2 slices of pizza left! They'll be gone today, and I am not complaining at all, but square (rectangular) pizzas > round ones in my books.

I cant wait until Saturday/Sunday, when I get my new bento supplies. Yay. It also means I have to do some more grocery shopping. Wish it was Friday today! :( Wish it was Friday of two weeks from today too (day off for Good Friday).

Pizza Lunch

 

Top tier: Pizza cut and sliced to fit in funny, unlogical ways; bottom: romaine, tomatoes and carrots with feta cheese; side: oil/vinegar dressing.

So, this was my dinner. Sort of. I started the pizza at about 6pm. By the time I was done, it was closer to 9pm, and by the time I could safely consume my food, it was 9:30. I've had one too many tongue burns recently, so I wasn't gonna risk it... (And yeah, sorry. I do go MIA during the weekends, as I'm between working too many hours on my other job and zombie'ing around recovering from said work.)

I had all the intentions of making a pretty lunch. I really did! But I woke up... early. Yes, early. Not late. But early meant I went and fixed my laundry from the day prior (who wants to do laundry at 10pm after dinner? Not me!), then started to work a bit on my computer, paid some bills, revised my budget... paid another bill, got confused with the budget because I paid for something twice... then by the time I looked up, it was slightly late. So I sprint into action and got ready for work. By that time, I was already very late, so this was a last-minute type meal.

On other news, I've been hounding my bento supplies. They should get home by Thursday this week, but I wont get them until Saturday. I'd love to go pick them up as they arrive, but gas prices are too high for that. So Monday I shall have a brand new posting! I borrowed a camera from my father as well, but havent figured out the kinks yet. So you might be seeing slightly better photos soon. :)

Also... I might be making staging mats. Just place mats to stage the food, so it looks better than on the counter.

And just because, here's what dinner looked like:

Yummy pizza from scratch (dough, sauce, toppings from scratch). It has cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes, sweet onions and green onions as toppings. It will take me a few days to get done with it, but you wont hear me complain... it ended up sizing to 16 'slices'/pieces. I ate two last night.. well, two and a half. Then packed 1 slice for lunch and snacked on the half from the night prior. So yeah, it'll take me a while.