Jammin'! NQBR

NQBR (Not Quite Bento Related):

I picked strawberries this past Thursday at a nearby "U-Pick" farm - they were all really ripe so I had to make jam and such as soon as I could. My jam turned out about as well as my octo-dogs usually do, so I have a lot of strawberry sauce - about enough to drown a Queen Mary sized bowl of ice cream.

It is good!!

I noticed there were several philosophies of picking posture: the kneelers, the backbenders, the sitters, and the changers. I was a changer. As various body parts went to sleep or started to ache, I would move.

It made me think about being a migrant worker who does this all day every day for a meager living. And this gave me a real gestalt shift when walking down the produce aisle in the supermarket -- all the human work hours that lie behind those piles of berries, cherries, tomatoes, heads of lettuce... It's a little scary to contemplate. From one perspective, our food is expensive (prices have gone up). From another angle though, it is far too cheap.

Strawberries!!

Is there anything better? Good for you, no calories or fat, taste like heaven. I got these at a roadside stand yesterday and they had such a fragrance. The guy selling them seemed depressed; I guess they were so ripe they could hardly last out the day, and it must be sad to stand there and watch your strawberries go over to the dark side, while people drive by talking on their cell phones and eating fast food out of styrofoam cartons...

Anyway I froze a bunch of these, gave some to my neighbor, and had a little strawberry festival all to myself.

Jan's bento on Wednesday looked like this:



Brown basmati rice, pork stir fry, tamagoyaki, turkey sausage rounds with a sauce container of Sriracha to dip them in, a few grape tomatoes, dark sweet cherries, a babybel cheese, a few peanut butter pretzels, and a vanilla mousse chocolate wafer.

Kind of too much protein, but for Jan's diabetes the rice has to be kept to a minimum - rice really makes his blood sugar go sky high. It's too bad because so much good & cute bento stuff is rice based. Kind of too much sweets too! This wasn't a very well planned lunch. Optimal for him is protein and vegetables, a small bit of carbs, that kind of thing.