Bento Shopping Snack

Saturday we had many weary shopping-type errands, and I am not a very hardy shopper so I packed us a snack bento:

I was thrilled to discover that an English muffin fits perfectly ( with just a little smooshing!) into each layer of this Chinese bento box which has two little ghost-looking creature-heads on it and says

U
RA
RA

beside them. I fried tofu slices in some sesame oil and put a thin layer of Dijon mustard on each muffin side, plus lettuce. It was terrific! We needed them after being overwhelmed by the entire wall of flip flops which had appeared in Target:

There were two young ladies trying them on furiously, and one said to the other,

"I go through a pair of flip flops in a month".

Does she run marathons in them?

But O how I wish I had a 6-year old daughter who could wear these!

Can't you just see these, standing at the bus stop, all of life ahead of them, ready for mud puddles and spring?

Bubble Tea: Rhymes with 'Catastrophe'

You can't always get what you want. Someone should write a song about that.

Lots of interest in bubble tea lately in the blogosphere, and I decided to try my hand at getting some ingredients and making it at home. Does it look refreshing and tasty?

It was blech, bleaach, ptooey, awful.

1. "Yer doin it wrong." Yes, I made a bad mistake while cooking the giant tapioca. Can't add tapioca to cold water and bring it up to a boil, then forget to stir. You will produce a giant evil looking gelatinous mass.

2. "Caveat Emptor". Ordering online is a fun adventure but you should expect the occasional bad choice or random substitution by someone in a warehouse in California who just wants to get off work dammit and go home.

3. "Better living through chemistry" doesn't always hold. Specifically, mango flavored powder whose ingredient list reads like your brother's Christmas chemistry set lo those many years ago is going to disappoint you.

4. My husband is a saint: He drank it all and struggled with getting the glob colonies to travel up the straw, almost to the point of turning his head inside out, and then said, "it's not really all THAT bad".

The good news? It went down the drain without a struggle. The bad news? I have 4 3/4 pounds of giant black tapioca pearls in my refrigerator, and about 2 pounds of methyl-ethyl-cellulose mango substitute in the pantry. Partay!!!

Bento of Cute Overload

Jan's bento is as kyoot as I could make it this morning. He has: jalapeno egg salad, tabouli salad made with kashi and soybeans, keftedes, grapes, triscuits and a Babybel cheese, wasabi peas, and a Korean cake/cookie from Madison.

To kyoot it up I added little animal picks in the grapes, a teensy dill pickle on a blue plastic lamb fork, and (my current pride & joy!) little monkey face sauce containers with ketchup and Kewpie mayonnaise for the keftedes. Inside each monkey is a teensy spatula for spreading the sauce! Can you top that??!! (I KNOW Avie can...)

When I started making Jan bento lunches, they were all for the Zojirushi Mr. Bento and my purpose was to keep him from going to the candy machine at work or running out of energy, while also staying within the diabetes nutritional guidelines.

OK I think that is working - but can we also reach his cute threshold? Mr. Bento is very 'masculine' in a way: sleek aluminum, uniform diameter round containers. The crazy merriment that is bento at its best, is hard to work into Mr. Bento. So this week I am on the cute mission. Octo-dogs incoming!!

Here's my own lunch, in the black sheep shopping bento that I adore:

Same stuff but more grapes for the fruit-bat in my soul.

New Thai Restaurant Bento!

How good is this?

1. New Thai restaurant within walking distance of my house.

2. Food and atmosphere are both super. Spring salad rolls - oh my were these terrific.

3. Proprietor is giving FREE Thai cooking classes every Sunday, and a new series of 4 classes starts this Sunday - we are going to be there! You get to eat what you cook. This Sunday it's sauces and basic herbs.

4. Our waiter introduced himself and shook hands after the meal, and said he'd be looking for us again now that he knows Jan likes his food super-hot.

5. We had leftover green curry beef for our bentos this morning.

6. We had dessert of fresh cut mango and sticky coconut rice that was so good it could almost make you cry.

Also in the bentos today are cheese and parsley microwave omelettes from JustBento's recipe file. These cooked up just as described but when rolled in paper towel to set, they did stick. I'd use the plastic wrap next time. We also have salad with baby greens, grapes, and sakura flowers of cheese, a little stick of smoked mozzarella 9Jan liked yesterday) and Jolly Jelly to cheer us up through the budget crisis that's raging on my campus.

Oh and Jan expressed a desire to take Mr. Panda Bento to work so he will. For the picture I put crazy teeth on him or maybe he's just been eating bamboo...

Double Trouble Bento

Two different bentos: mine is the panda and Jan gets the pretty butterflies, just for a change from industrial Mr. Bento.


There is: fried rice, sesame and hot-oil fried red cabbage, quail eggs, veggies, daikon butterflies and their outlines, steak strips, a chunk of smoked mozzarella,
soy bottles, and a cake or cookie for me (love the sweets!).


I love these little animal picks:


A sweetness comes from having many different bento boxes and possibilities. I love the idea of lunch made beautiful and environmentally sound and nutritious...in a panda bento!! Life is good indeed.

Happy Koi Bento!

I love this fishy but I can see he has one drawback: no inner lids, so this yogurt might prove to have been a mistake. Cold sesame udon, shoyu tamago, red chard with daikon butterfly; home-made yogurt (yay!) with cranberry topping, cookie-cake from Asian grocery in Madison. Picture me trying to get this to the car, to campus, and to my office without tilting it even the tiniest bit. A challenge.

"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.