Bentos a Little Bit Picnic

With fall drawing in and cooler weather, I still have a picnic going inside my head and the bentos of this week are in line with that.



Here is my bento on the left in blue, and Jan's on the right in red rabbit usagi:


Fried rice made with brown basmati, a two-colors-of-tomatoes salad heavy on the cilantro, and Jan has some steak strips on crab picks and a hard boiled egg for manly protein (and to reduce the amount of rice in his lunch, due to its being so carby).

Jan's bento for today has egg salad, coleslaw left over from last night, cheese and salami hearts, cold sesame noodle with cilantro and sweet red pepper rings, and 3 Three Musketeers bars, highly recommended by a friend.

1st Day New Semester Bento!!!

Cold sesame soba with green beans, shoyu tamago, rice vinegar pickles, carrots with ume vinegar and sea salt, and a sliced white nectarine.

Honest to Parker this was one of the best bentos I've ever eaten. I am trying to figure out why. Possible explanations:

1. The soba noodles were unusually good. I don't use a recipe any more for the sauce and sometimes it's a little myeh, but this time it was terrific.

2. The pickles were spicy and cold.

3. The carrots got just the right amount ume'd by lunch time.

4. The nectarine was sweet and had that honey fragrance white ones sometimes have.

But most of all: I was starving, because this is day 1 of my new regime: Get up at 4, get to work by 6, hit the gym there at 6:30 when it opens, jump on my favorite elliptical, realize that I have forgotten my earphones so I have to lip-read junky TV for 60 minutes, then go to the weight room and pretend I know what I'm doing with all those machines for 20 minutes, then go to the showers and try to hide my body from the 19 year olds so they don't contract a crippling fear of later life, then be at my desk by 8:15 and start thinking about my bento lunch.

"Hunger is the best sauce"; my mother's saying collection, saying #284.

This shall be my process for T-TH-SAT all this semester, except for Sat when I will come home and take a nap instead of going to work. That's my plan anyway.

'But the instructions made it sound so easy!'

Things we won't be trying again soon: making egg flowers for bento.



This sorry mess, the massacre of an innocent egg, was the result. Beneath the shards of my dignity there are nice cold sesame noodles, and the other half of Mr. Koi has raw carrots splashed with plum vinegar and couple of nice crisp olives. The vinegar will caress these carrots all morning and by noon they will be fragrant and salty and tangy...yum.

Jan is getting the koi bento today; mine has the same contents minus the axe-murdered egg, but plus Hello Kitty cookies in the lid:



And speaking of koi: the new place where I am boarding my horse John has a pond with actual koi in it!! They are orange, white, and orange-and-white, very pretty and mystical. Somehow fish create an alternate reality of quiet under the surface of the everyday. I love watching them!

TGIF All-Japanese Bento

Last night I went to bed with no ideas about today's Mr. Bento; I'm not sure why. And I overslept this morning, which left very little time to prepare anything. In a mad rush I grabbed things out of the pantry and fridge, and this was the result: cold sesame udon with cucumber chunks on top, garlic shrimp with red pepper, miso soup with snow pea and mushroom, ginger cookies and a truffle (OK the dessert was not so Japanese).

The seal of approval was definitely given to the shrimp and the udon. I was glad to have found a cold sesame noodle recipe that I like; there seem to be many ways of making this sauce and nothing so far has matched that one transcendent cold-sesame experience I had in Sausalito way back when...

How many times do we go in search of that Holy Grail, the 'best ever' dish we had once upon a time? And sometimes the atmosphere or the occasion was such a big part of it - so the dish itself is forever a fugitive or a ghost, slipping away even as we reach to recreate it. Sausalito makes everything taste better! Especially if you have just come from hiking in the redwoods. And on that particular afternoon, the sun was slanting over the beach making everyone golden. But those noodles now, they really were divine...