"Monday's Child is Fair of Face..."

Remember that old poem? Monday's bento is kind of simple:


Jalapeno egg salad, honey tangerine sections (yum), Uncle Paul's bread (double yum) and sugar snap peas. Added: Pocky sticks and a tiny lichi cookie from the Asian grocery in Madison.

Uncle Paul's Bread comes from a local bakery called Positively 3rd Street. I love everything they make: they are true old-fashioned hippies with the munchies, and the last item in all their ingredient lists is "love".

This weekend I made my own yogurt!!


One of the reasons I got interested in bento was to reduce the amount of plastic I send to landfills. Our university's food service went over to the dark side adopting a fast food station-model a few years ago, and the result is tray after tray of waste plastic, styrofoam, and paper dumped into the trash all day long. Even bringing lunch from home seems to produce little wads of plastic wrap -- unless it is bento: Yay for bento!!

But now I am looking at all aspects of my life for more plastic to eliminate: have gone to bar shampoo, so no more shampoo & conditioner bottles. Have gone to glass bottle milk so drag the bottles back every week and feel good-old-fashioned. And now! Yogurt, a staple food in my life, but how bout those plastic tubs it comes in? So I tried making my own and it worked!!

I used these directions. It required buying a candy thermometer and an electric heating pad, both of which can be used for other things like...candy and heat I guess. It was really easy except for one thing: the auto shut-off safety feature which heating pads all have now, to keep us from heating ourselves to death.

This meant I had to manually switch the &%$# thing back on every hour for 7 hours. So much for my little scheme of making yogurt while I sleep at night. Oh well. I'll be looking in thrift stores for one of the old death-trap heating pads now.