Bento just for AP today. Rice mixed with salmon furikake, meatballs, tamagoyaki with spinach, and edamame. This one is lacking in red, I wish I've got a couple of strawberries in there. But we're going away for the weekend and I was trying not to buy any more fresh food yesterday.



I had a handful of spinach leaves left in the salad drawer so I threw it into the tamagoyaki. Just make it as you normally would, pour the beaten egg into the pan, scatter in the spinach leaves and scramble the mixture slightly. Allow to set and roll as normal. Spinach leaves cook/wilt very quickly so the residual heat from the tamogoyaki roll will cook it easily.

This was bento from Monday.  I am so behind in my posts.  Went to Assaggio's restaurant the night before and got a great veal marsala.  I hardly ever order veal.
 
Salad with lettuce, radishes, tomatoes, bell peppers in one box.  Veal marsala and linguine in the other.

Nutella & Banana Panino Sandwich


Bacon, Egg & Cheese Bagel Sandwich


More of everything @ LeahAndMark.com

I've learned to fill in the gaps.



Bacon Ranch Dressing
Cottage Cheese (I swear people, every.  day.)
Grape Tomatoes
Leftover Okonomiyaki
Cheese Curds (they're better than they sound; like very mild cheddar, from a local dairy farm)
Melon Jello

Flake Brownie Pie!

( Homemade with all the goodness of Cadbury Flake )

*I* cooked this evening (and I DON'T cook) and *He* shot the pictures!

A response to the 1st Thursday night Smackdown challenge, with a role-reversal for spice. 40 cloves of garlic, and the essence of Italian-Sicilian-American carbonara... cream, egg, and plenty of bacon. see more pics and recipe at Fotocuisine.com

Orange chicken stir fry, fruit salad, wheat thins and flower cheese, ( and a salad )

A friend of mine has been putting manjuu (steamed bun with various fillings) in her obento, and she always makes really cute faces for them so I decided to try that out. I cannot believe she does that every day...they're more difficult than I thought they'd be! They're cute, though! :D



( manjuutachi )

Attempted repost to get rid of the tag annnoyance

So, Monday my darling husband Eric asked me if I felt up for an "adventure." Now, in Eric-speak, an "adventure" means "I want to take you someplace, but I'm not entirely sure where it is, so we'll probably get lost on the way, but don't worry, I've always managed to get us home! :)", but it is a great way of finding places we wouldn't have found otherwise. So I said sure.

Twentry minutes later, we came upon a little Italian place that looked intriguing, so we decided to stop. Whether or not this was the place he meant to take me has yet to be determined. On the menu, we saw something...interesting.



I was still feeling adventurous, so I figured, why not?

( More pictures here )

For those in the Seattle-ish area, the restaurant was Galliano's Cucina, with two locations - Tukwila and SeaTac. Completely worth getting lost. :) Also, the leftovers reheated very nicely.

Today's lunch is the same for AP and myself. Cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, cocktail sausages, potato salad with egg and spring onions.

Just proof that i don't overdo the heart theme *every* time:



mayo and bbq sauce (i know, gross, but he wanted them together...i said fine, but stir them yourself!)
organic brown rice (refrigerated overnight in a silicone baking cup to shape)
frozen blueberries
Okonomiyaki  (recipe to follow)
cottage cheese (yeah, he really likes the stuff)

The first time I ever had this stir fry was when my sweet pea made it for me. I know it sounds simple, easy, lame, etc, but I love it. However, I must admit that I can never get it to taste as good as his did that very first time. [And neither can he, so ha!]


( Photos & recipe )

These are actually a few weeks old, but I forgot to post them before I went wandering all over Norway on holiday.  The first one is sandwiches and fruit and veggies and the second is rice, salad and eggs (failed egg chicks).  I had some issues getting the egg chicks cut neatly, any suggestions?

I used to loathe and despise beets.

But, when I was pregnant with my first daughter, who is now 18 years old, I craved them because of an iron deficiency, and went mad for them--the earthy taste that I had once curled my lip in disdain now attracted me. And the liking for them stayed long after Morganna was born, to the point that I now love the rubine beauties.

Here is the way I made some baby beets last night--simply simmered in water, honey, balsamic vinegar, a pinch of salt and garam masala--an Indian spice mixture that you can make yourself with my recipe--included in the post--or you can make your own or buy it from a store.

Garnished with lacy cilantro leaves, these beets were like jewels on a plate and tasted better than I had imagined they would, especially since they are a citified and Indianized version of the sweet and sour beets of my Appalachian farm childhood.

Recipe and a very, very pretty picture here. (Cilantro and glazed beets are just quite beautiful together.)

Since I've started making bentos, I've had and heard a couple of concerns about keeping my food cold or hot as to prevent spoiling and poisoning. So when I started making my lunches, I also started looking for ice and gel packs to keep my lunch cool.

Sadly, most of these are chunky and hard to pack around my lunchbox or even harder to pack into said boxes. I remembered my grandmother having these little plastic water-filled reuseable icecubes in a bunch of bright cute colors and set out to find those instead.

I've only found one place that carries them, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and I was wondering if anyone else knew of any places where I could find some of these to pack into my lunches.

I wrote a review of The Manga Cookbook here on Lunch in a Box. It's a Japanese cookbook with bento content done in manga comic style, aimed at children.

I wrote a review of The Manga Cookbook here on Lunch in a Box. It's a Japanese cookbook with bento content done in manga comic style, aimed at children.

I wrote a review of The Manga Cookbook here on Lunch in a Box. It's a Japanese cookbook with bento content done in manga comic style, aimed at children.