Stars Under My Lid!!

I was ridiculously happy to pack these little carrot stars into the lid of my bento on Friday. I sprinkled a little salt over them and they were a wonderful treat alongside the other things: two onigiri, some furikake (this one has just black sesame seeds and some kind of puffy salt particles, and is very yum), veggies, two dates, walnuts, a babybel cheese, a soy hard boiled egg which had apparently been through mortal combat and just barely survived, and a brownie bite.

We get eggs from our Food Farm and they are so fresh - they've usually been laid the day before or even that very day, and by happy hens who have a hen playground and dine on organic vegetables, kind of living in Hen Heaven.

The down side of fresh eggs is they really aren't the best to hard boil. Even when I wait until the end of the week to boil up some eggs for bento, they can still be the dickens to peel. They taste great though.

Jan's bento had chili from the night before, basmati rice (so fragrant! I love basmati), skewers of celery and little cubes of cajun smoked gouda cheese, sugar snap peas, a few M&M's and a brownie bite. I am always trying to keep his carbs low for the diabetes so this chili had very few kidney beans, and a lot of meat - not my style of cooking ordinarily.

You can see both these bentos are short on veggies. It's interesting that's the thing I leave to last and Oh! can't fit it in. I need to readjust my priorities! I'm thinking these are too protein heavy. I dunno - I am still working on the classical bento formula: "Traditionally, bento includes a wide variety of both textures and flavors, split in a 4:3:2:1 ratio (rice, side dish, vegetables, dessert)".

My own substitute would be: 4 parts dessert, 3 parts fruit, 2 parts rice, one part protein. Probably not a good idea!!