hiatus for a bit

computer has acquired Borg malware which is horrible and won't let me take webcam pictures and is generally messing up my day. So I am continuing to make bento, just not posting about it for a while.

Totally Awesome fruit salad

I have pots of fruit salad for use in bento this week, which look and smell amazing.

For 2 portions:
about 1/4 of a fresh canteloupe, diced.
1 kiwi, skinned and cut into chunks.

Drizzle with a little lemon juice and a touch of orange-mango squash concentrate. Instant summer in September! :D

Bento 2. Meh.

From last time:
Improvement Goal: under 30 minutes morning prep time, check.
Homework: Make Bento Stash for the week... no, but bought stuff.
Wishlist: Fillable sauce pots... sort of.

This was... kinda crap. Too much processed/prepackaged food, too much wheat, too much fruit. Did manage to stay away from the sweets at the union shop, but that's probably more to do with how junky my brought food was to start with. Nevertheless, photo, description and marks follow.

This is a new box. I was super-excited about the idea of the lunch-cube. It's 1400ml of double-bento perfection... except that I only found out *why* it was the last one on the shelf when I got it home to find it was cracked in several places. So it's only usable with dry or wrapped items, and pots. In the undivided section we have pistacios, 2 Taro mochi, a strawberry & apple 100% fruit puree and a mars bar. In the divided section is a crabstick salad sandwich (spring onion, cucumber and a little mayo), a small carrot, a dominos honey-mustard dip for the carrot, a kiwi (slightly under-ripe) and two mini cheeses. Along with the box was a pb&j roll (bread is bestofboth so it's not quite as unhealthy as white bread) which was breakfast, a small pot with 6 slices of egg tofu left over from dinner last night, and a pre-packed little pot of pineapple pieces in juice (not pictured).

Overall scores:
Looks: 2. New bento gear is bright and cheery, but the food itself wasn't exactly art.
Variety: 3. Probably just scraped my 5-a-day, but it was all so processed...
Durability: 5. Pots of joy.
Prep Time: 4. This was quick and lazy. 15 minutes in the morning while talking online.

Next Bento: Tuesday
Improvement Goal: Max. 2 fruit, at least 2 veg.
Homework: Make up onigiri for the week ahead and freeze.
Wishlist: umeboshi!

Bento Joy at Poundland!

Today I went to poundland, full of keen and light of wallet, and I was not disappointed. While I don't have *exactly* what I was hoping for (mini refillable sauce containers) they basically don't exist over here that I can tell (and the empty cosmetic containers you can get are explicitly not safe for food use) BUT! All was not lost. I've had the tiny pots of brightly-coloured joy before (squares, circles and even cutesy flower-shapes, 8 in all, in a little net for a pound) and the latest versions of these are even more brightly-coloured and hideous than I remembered. I love 'em!

Anyway, I also found something even more fabulous. It's a packable salad bowl with a nice tight lid and a removable sauce pot in the lid. Still only a quid. Thing is, I don't see salad in it, I see noodles and assorted yummy things in the bowl section, say about half-full, with wetter things in the sauce pot, like home-made pickle or stir-fried onions, whatever goes... chuck in a pouch of miso paste, or possibly a wrapped oxo cube or packet of dashi powder. At lunch time, decant soup base of choice over noodles, fill with hot water from the kettle and top with (or use as a side) the sauce pot contents. Better than pot noodle! :)

So then of course I had to go to Matthew's Foods on my way home. That's my very very local Oriental supermarket. One pack each of Taro mochi and Red Bean mochi go in the basket automatically (which is why I don't go there often!) Also got baby pak choi, a big bunch of spring onion for cheap, nori and more furikake, along with sembe crackers (the ones with the sugar confetti-effect all over them... mmm... and seperately wrapped in pairs, perfect for gamer snacks!)

Dinner tonight is to be an experiment, and if it works I suspect Tuesday's Bento will be all kinds of awesome. It's not one that'll work for Sunday, since I don't have access to a kettle on campus, only at work.

Scraping the fridge on day 1

I work afternoons during the week, and 2 days I go straight from work to games club. I'm a roleplayer, but this involves silly card games, nerdy board games and so on as well. I could just stop at McDonalds on the way to my bus up to campus, but frankly doing that twice a week isn't going to help my bank balance or my waistline. I'm also trying to lose weight for a number of reasons, some of them health related. Add a bonus few years in Japan as a kid and Bingo! The obvious answer: Bento. Specifically, doubled-up Bento that serves as lunch, dinner and gaming snacks all in one. There's a few habits which are going to be hard to break, like the requirement for gaming to involve highly sugarry drinks and grazing on sweets, but that'll come.

Day one then.

I had nothing pre-prepped, but having done a few random one-off bentos over the summer had a few ideas. I also had not a lot in the fridge or freezer, so I'm quite chuffed I came up with something so appetising I had to distract myself for a few hours at work before I let myself dig in.

The blue box is a systema sandwich box, 450ml and contains rice with furikake and home-made dashi/garlic pickled radish, fresh radishes, mixed veg in cream cheese (from frozen mixed veg) and soy spinach (frozen spinach heated through in frying pan, in soy sauce). The 2 little jelly mould pots hold between them a small tin of mandarins. The clear box is a lock&lock 470ml box (which really doesn't look like it could possibly be bigger than the blue box, but there you go) containing most of a 3-egg (low sugar, with a little dashi powder) tamagoyaki cut into chunky strips, 4 slices of salted cucumber (slice, set in brine in the fridge, good for a few days) and pistacios I found in the back of the cupboard, unopened with a due date this month.

Also featured but not pictured was a packet of instant miso soup, the kind I get has the dry bits seperate to a little pouch of paste, and in my opinion is much richer and tastier than powder mix, even when using a larger mug of hot water.

We did get given free fudge at work today (we're basically nextdoor to a big chain fudge shop) which nobody else seemed to want, so I put a few pieces in one of the jelly pots once I'd eaten the fruit and cleaned it out, and had that as sweet stuff for gamers, meaning I didn't eat the Emergency Mars Bar I'd sneakily packed for that purpose.

I'm gonna rate these as well, out of 5 for a number of features:
Looks: 4. I found myself going back to look at the photo several times today...
Variety: 5. Colourful, healthy, balanced, close enough to 5-a-day too.
Durability: 3. The nuts went everywhere because the lock&lock wasn't densely packed.
Prep Time: 2. This took almost an hour, everything was made from scratch.

Next Bento: Sunday (all day gaming club, still need a double bento)
Improvement Goal: Spend less than 30 minutes on prep.
Homework: Make bento stash for the week
Wishlist: fillable sauce holders of some kind.