Bento Lunch Week 1

Heeeelllloooooooo, weekend!  So glad you're here :o)

This week I challenged myself by going bento for lunch every day.  Well, almost every day.  We had an in person training from our HR rep, who's actually based in LA, so the company ordered in lunch for us on Tuesday this week.  Yum!  I have to say, the focaccia sammich with spinach, bacon, turkey, and some sort of white cheese (provolone, perhaps?) with a chipotle mayo from Jason's Deli was pretty darn tasty.  And yes, I braved it and ate the mayo.  Shocker, I know! 

Anyhoo, here is my bento showcase for the week.  It was actually a lot of fun to plan out what I was going to eat and to arrange it in my tiffin box, which I finally used!  Michael bought it for me for Christmas from World Market and I just adore it.  It does have it limitations – you can't put it in the microwave and the circular shape prohibits some foods from fitting properly – but on the whole, it's a great little lunchbox.  It's really helped me manage my portions and be conscious about what I'm eating.

If you're interested in getting one, they retail for about $10 at World Market and are dishwasher safe.  The top bin is pretty dang tight, so you could even transport soup or other liquidy foods without issue.

MONDAY

Bottom layer: Spring mix salad with shredded rotisserie chicken, dried pears, candied almonds, orange cherry tomatoes, and a pear Gorgonzola vinaigrette (in the blue lidded container to the left).
Top layer: Chocolate chip cookies, cucumber slices, orange cherry tomatoes, string cheese, honey wheat pretzel rods. 

TUESDAY

The office bought lunch.  YES!  But my homemade dinner of bacon shrimp with cheesy grits and baby spring peas was way better ;o)  Recipe came from Kevin and Amanda.  A little salty, but oh my heavens, it was sooooo good.  Especially when paired with the Kendall-Jackson Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay...now there's a good Chard to keep around!

WEDNESDAY

Bottom layer:  Quinoa and black beans with shredded rotisserie chicken, and baby carrots.
Top layer: Honey wheat pretzels, cheese stick, green grapes, strawberries, and raspberry fig bar.

THURSDAY

Bottom layer: Homemade mac and cheese using "bat pasta" (really just bowtie pasta, but Billa calls it bat pasta, lol!), shredded rotisserie chicken, spring peas.
Top layer: Dried apricots, raspberry fig bar, blue corn tortilla chips, shredded mozzarella and colby jack cheese.  I made nachos out of the cheese and chips for a mid-afternoon snack.  OMG, it was awesome.  I nuked it in the microwave at work for about a minute on half power...best. afternoon. snack. EVER! I'm totally doing nachos again next week.  Maybe I'll add some black beans this time and make it my main meal!

FRIDAY

I discovered the limitations on spacial intelligence of my tiffin box for today's lunch.  I ended up using an old tupperware container container instead which worked beautifully!  In it I stuffed: (counter clockwise from top left) Muenster cheese, pita pocket bread, cucumber slices, roasted red pepper hummus, shredded rotisserie chicken, raspberry fig bars, and dried pears.  The honey wheat pretzels sat on top of everything once it was packed.

So there you have it.  I'm going to try and pack bento again next week.  I'll keep you posted on my ideas, but so far, I think I have an Italian/Mediterranean theme going on lately.  I'm going to try and actually make some sushi or simple Japanese stir fry to throw in next week.  Whatever I do, I am so excited about bento!

Cheers,
Kelly

Bento, Manga, and Japanese!

Amongst my close friends, it's no secret that I love the Japanese culture.  It came about as an accident really, when I was in college.  My best friend Kellie and I went everywhere together in those days, earning us the nickname of Kelly/ie Squared or K2 as some of our professors called us.  People began to wonder when only one of us showed up anywhere!  Part of our degree requirement was to have two semesters of a foreign language and we chose Spanish.  None of the classes worked out with our schedule, but Japanese did.  What the hell! we said, and we signed up.  The next two semesters were some of the most fun we had, as our sensei was quite the character.  She was new to America by only a couple of years and I daresay we taught her as much about American culture as she did Japanese culture with us.  Those two semesters sparked something within Kellie and I.

This is hiragana, just one of several forms of characters used in writing Japanese.  Hiragana is used to write out words that are native Japanese; katakana is used for foreign words that have been introduced to Japanese, and kanji is the complex language to spell actual words (as opposed to katakana and hiragana, which spell out syllables)

Kellie's daughter Madeleine is obsessed with anime, and in turn, Kellie and I got into it too.  One thing led to another and now we're obsessed with manga, anime, bento box lunches, Japanese cuisine, and relearning all of our college Japanese.  Kellie had told me about an anime called Fruits Basket on instant watch on Netflix which was a great show, but it ended on a weird note and I felt cheated.  It's a nice thing that my husband works for a bookstore, because I've been tearing through the 27 volumes of the manga that the anime was based on.  A side note: it's called Fruits Basket, because there is no 't' sound in Japanese.  Everything is spelled out with syllables, so the word 'fruit' in Japanese is actually 'furutsu', thereby translated in English to 'fruits'!  Pretty cool, huh?

 Some of the gang from Fruits Basket: Hatsuharu, Kyo (my favorite!), Tohru, Momiji, and Yuki.

With the new year rapidly approaching, I've been meaning to live a healthier lifestyle and one of my new resolutions this year is to start doing bento boxes for my lunches.  Bento is a way of packing your lunch in a little box that hits all of the food groups and keeps the portion sizes appropriate.  There are all sorts of fun gadgets and do-hickeys that help to make the bento look cuter and more appetizing.  It can get pretty serious, but I'm only concerned with trying to keep it healthy for now!  I think I will also plan on eating more meals with chopsticks since it forces me to really concentrate on my meal and how much I eat.

See how fun bento can be?  I'd love eating this for lunch every day!

I'm excited about relearning all of my Japanese and then some.  I'd love to go to Japan someday and tour the country, trying the food, meeting new people, and checking out the scenery and historical sites.  I'll be sure to share my adventures in bento box making as well as reviews on mangas I read or animes I watch.  This is going to be an exciting year!

Cheers,
Kelly