Breakfast Bento and a Pomegranate Tip

Friday I had to get to work extremely early so I brought a breakfast bento.

In the top container, yogurt, blueberries, and some nuts.
In the bottom container, a toasted mini-bagel with peanut butter, a clementine, and some pomegranate seeds.

Now here's a neat way to get your pomegranate seeds out & separated without producing a bloody mess on your counter.

Slice just barely through the pomegranate skin from the outside, in quarters, like this:



Then peel the skin down gently along the slices, to reveal the seeds in all their glorious little compartments:



The seeds can then easily be removed and you don't smash them, as you would when cutting the whole fruit in sections first.

Usually when I make a great discovery like this, it turns out that everybody knew it already...so forgive me if this tip is already general knowledge!

My New Favorite Bento Seller on EBay

Oh my...I have been browsing unnecessary bento boxes on EBay and I found a new favorite seller: priesjapan. They are located in Japan but have pretty reasonable shipping, and a 'new buyer' offer of two shippings for the price of one.

I feel a bit guilty in telling you about their bento boxes because...they are so cute!!
And their descriptions in killer-cute Engrish are even better. I just bought the one above. Here is part of the information from their ad:



And there's more, about size of bento boxes:

"Most failure at the purchase of a lunch box is size differences.
Even if size is describing numerically, you should not have feelings.
If this is seen, you can realize a size, as it had a lunch box in the hand.
Your failure is defended!"

I feel much better.

"A Lunch Box is a casket of lunch.
All the menus are settled in one.
A full-course lunch starts at the moment of opening a Lunch Box.
Let's enjoy Japanese Lunch Box Menu using this Lunch Box!"

OK!! I'm in. Even if you aren't shopping for bento boxes, go look at their collection. They are the real thing!

I admit I also bought this one, even though it was a bit $$$:



I could not resist the inscription" The sheep is saying, "WHY AM I FEELING SO COLD?" Haha; too perfect for this frigid winter day.

Soba Bento

O how I love soba noodles!

Did you know soba are lower in carbohydrates than most other types of noodle? Important for diabetics and dieters. These lovely buckwheat noodles stand up to a sauce, keep their texture, and are very satisfying in a bento lunch. They always get a high score on the NHAB Scale: Not Hungry Again Bento.

So today, in the midst of a cold snap (it's 1 degree F. outside as I write!), my bento has:

Spinach sauteed briefly in olive oil, sesame soba, carrots and 'egg rolls' (flat omelet rolled and sliced); then in the other tier, sugar snap peas, clementine, and blueberries.

Stay warm everyone!

"How Have You Been?"

I love it when my lunch talks to me.

Especially in a helfpul, slightly enabling manner.

This little bento is willing to bring me anything, anything! I could ask it for rubies, or a horse property in Kentucky. A new saddle! Or maybe this bento box has magic powers and could make it not be Monday.

As it is, it is bringing me 3 fat umeboshi and black sesame onigiri, soy sauce in the bunny, ginger pork meatballs, and veggies, with a nice pear tied up in the furoshiki.

What more could I want really?!

NQBR: "Densha Otoku: Train Man" You must seee!!

Continuing my digression about movies, you have got to see "Densha Otoku: Train Man" right now!!!


Don't delay. Just rent it, buy it, find it on NetFlix, whatever you have to do. Watch this movie as soon as possible.

You will love it I guarantee and I stand behind my guarantee 100%.

"Train Man" is a geeky young Japanese man who has never had a girlfriend in his 22 years of life. A random encounter with a belligerent drunk on a train causes him to come to the aid of a pretty lady, and the movie unfolds from this situation.

But this does not begin to describe the cuteness of this movie. Train Man is a member of some online community, and the film flips back and forth from his online advisors, many of them as geeky and inexperienced as he is, to his actual situation: seeking advice about what to do with a prospective date.

Train Man changes his appearance on their advice: haircut, new clothes, shaving, etc.


A trio of hysterically funny online friends who happen to be the geekiest men in the universe completely captivate you and make you want to date all of them. "NAAAHH!!! She is inviting him to her house!!!! It's the ultimate defeat for all of us!!"

Absurdly comic scenes involving them are the most crazy/cute moments of the film.

As here they are depicted involved in a fantasy trench warfare situation. They may be gaming or they may just be thinking about their crazy online lives without dates.



The female lead looks a bit older than the male lead and I found this refreshing. Nothing in the film addresses it. She just is who she is: a youngish woman still living with her parents, no boyfriend until Train Man comes along.

The film has so much cute detail and so much visual beauty that you will certainly enjoy it. And without giving too much away I hope I can say: it looks like happily ever after is what's promised at the end.

Anime Fun!! "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds"

It doesn't usually take me 20 years to see a movie but with this one, it did.

OK I am little behind the cultural trends. "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds" was released by Studio Ghibli in 1984, based on a manga series that ran from 1982-1990. I got it from NetFlix with special features including a history of Studio Ghibli that was...not terribly exciting, except that it showed how many cigarettes Japanese men can smoke in a day - the overflowing ashtrays, the guys talking with cigarettes dangling from their lower lip, it was apparently a very smoky era for the anime movie.

Nausicaa is a great role model for girls, except for the fact that she appears to have given up wearing underwear.



She talks to trees and animals, she is utterly fearless, she collects botanical samples, she hates violence, she flies a glider with the skill of Luke Skywalker, and she saves the world.

The creature with the multiple eyes up above is called an Om, and when angered its eyes glow blood-red. The Oms on the march in this movie are visually stunning, as indeed is everything else about it. It is old-style drawn animation and has a peaceful beauty about it that digital animation lacks.

Set in a post-nuclear world like so many other films, this one shows a fragile culture kept non-toxic by the gracious winds which sweep in from the sea, and by a forest of trees who are hard at work cleansing the earth of toxins. The forest is misunderstood and feared by everyone except Nausicaa, who finally discovers its secret and thereby the key to saving human civilization.

There's a sad quality to the film: Nausicaa is battling against the inherent violence and aggression of humanity, and she almost loses the fight. We get a sense that another time, it might have gone differently, and we would all drown in a toxic sea of hatred and environmental poisons of our own creation.

Very pretty movie though and the award-winning sound track of ghostly themes and haunting songs is lovely too.

Studio Ghibli (pronounced zhee-blee, as they carefully explain, because "Gibbly sounds like a noise your stomach makes!") also produced many other blockbuster anime films in the 1990's including "My Neighbor Totoro", "Princess Mononoke", and more.

Years ago my younger son went through an anime phase and "Princess Mononoke" came and went through our lives but I paid no attention. What was I thinking? I missed a great chance to connect over Japanese films and lady heroes.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! May you have many anime days.

Hello Kitty Hello Sandwich!

It seems that packing a bento in a single-section container has its own challenges, more difficult than the two level containers with dividers. I'm slowly figuring out that if you really pack i.e. place everything right up against something else, the food arrives at noon in better condition - not shaken up and falling apart.

Here I made Jan a sandwich out of kalamata olive flat omelet, lunch meat, and cheese; then I stuffed a fresh sweet pepper with green olives and stashed that in the lower level. Granny Smith apple with peanut butter in the center, a pack of mystery snacks from the Asian grocery, sugar snap peas, mustard Kitty, and a small white chocolate pudding topped with chocolate chips. I put wooden picks through the sandwich layers to hold them together in transit.

My goal was to have the pudding arrive upright and sandwich still holding together and: Mission Accomplished.

Here's a photo of the types of picks I use. Jan is particularly amused by the somewhat phallic koala bear. The long slender ones are great for sandwich integrity.



These are all either from EBay sellers or J-List and are quite inexpensive.