Moar Bento!

Sundays have turned into Bento Day (really, only about half an hour to an hour after church).  I've only eaten out three times for lunch since starting to use a bento box for lunches a few weeks ago.  I'm putting more effort into getting things ready for the week so I can easily pack the box in the evenings.  I'm enjoying lunch a lot more, and an added bonus is that I've noticed one pair of pants and a skirt I wear a lot are a little baggier.

I cooked an entire box of Ronzoni Smart Pasta and divided it into one-cup servings, which I froze separately and have bagged in the freezer.  One serving, with a tablespoon or two of pesto or marinara, makes a decent entree.  I did the same thing with spaghetti squash, and bought a bag of small, frozen turkey meatballs.  The spaghetti squash also gets the pesto or marinara treatment, but I add the meatballs for protein.  I've been taking the marinara in a separate container because heating tomato sauce in plastic food containers sometimes damages the container.

Sunday is vegetable-and-fruit-preparation day.  I slice apples and pears, and put them into storage containers in the refrigerator with some lemon juice sprinkled on to keep them from browning.  I slice peppers and store them, and get lettuce torn and washed, then stored.  Last week, I made a fresh green bean salad.  This week, I chopped celery and peppers and mixed them with soybeans and dressing to make a French-style bean salad.

Fresh Green Bean Salad

Fresh green (string) beans
Grape tomatoes (or tomatoes seeded and cut into strips)
Red onion, cut into thin strips

Wash the beans and cut off the ends, then cut into bite-size pieces.  I like to use a Chinese cut-and-roll technique that gives me slanted ends on the pieces--to do it, line up the beans and cut across them at an angle, roll your hand across to turn them a bit, then cut again at an angle, and so on.  Put the beans in a microwave-safe dish and microwave for a couple of minutes.  You'll have to do this to suit your taste; I like mine very raw and crunchy, but you can soften your beans as much as you want.  Drain the beans.  Cut and seed the grape tomatoes, or use them whole, whatever you like.  Toss the tomatoes and onions in with the beans.  You can use a commercial balsamic viniagrette dressing, or make your own:  Combine olive oil (I like extra-virgin for dressings because of the taste), balsamic vinegar, a little minced garlic, and salt and pepper in a small container with a lid, and shake before using.  This bean salad is tasty and filling, and it's a break from plain lettuce salads.

French Bean Salad

1 can cooked soybeans
1 celery stalk, diced
1/4 each red or yellow and green bell pepper, diced
Commercial French herb blend (or thyme, tarragon, garlic, onion powder, parsley, etc.)

Wash and drain the beans to get the canning juice off them.  Combine everything in a bowl and mix (I use herbs to taste--but maybe a half teaspoon of each thing or three teaspoons of the blend).  You can use the same balsamic viniagrette for this as for the green bean salad, or something different if you're making both salads the same week.  I used the balsamic this week, but I have some Girard's Champagne Viniagrette that I'm thinking of trying next time.  The classic French bean salad uses small white beans, but soybeans have a little more protein, I think.  Soybeans are a natural plant estrogen, so if you're eating a lot of soy, you could switch back to the small white beans.

I acutally chopped two celery stalks and twice as much of the peppers as for the salad recipe, and used half of it for the salad and half to mix with a can of tuna.  A great plus to using tuna is that it not only supplies lean protein and Omega 3, you get exercise fighting off the cat.  I have a 20-pound Maine Coon, and he is a freaking annoying persistent animal, so I'm figuring I burned a few calories.

I'm looking forward to lunch this week!

Product Review: Laptop Lunches Bento Kit

I looked at a lot of Bento boxes and finally bought one from Laptop Lunches (www.laptoplunches.com). Their Bento boxes are Americanized versions of the traditional Japanese concept. Geared at first toward kids, the kit is a basic plastic box with grooves in the bottom where containers go, several plastic containers that fit inside, and a separate space for the metal fork and spoon that come with the box. Three of the containers have lids and are intended for wet food (two containers) and dressing or dip (a third, smaller lidded container); two are open and intended for drier (or, non-leaky) foods. The lunch box lid keeps things in place in the open containers, and the whole thing fits together pretty snugly.


Laptop Lunches has several options, some very elaborate with carrying bags, water bottles, hot food containers, cloth napkins, shaped food cutters, etc. These get a little pricey for a lunch box. I probably wouldn’t spend close to $70 for a child’s lunch box, or mine, for that matter, but truthfully, some of the higher-end ones look more like something an adult would have, anyway. For $25, you get the box, five containers (three with lids), a metal fork and spoon, and an insulated fabric holder/cover. Oh, and a 94-page paperback “User’s Guide” that has nutritional information, recipes, menus and lunch ideas. There are a number of interesting color combinations; I went with the more traditional Japanese black and red. My box is black, the containers are red, and the cover is black with a red and white “tire tread” plaid design.

The quality of the box is decent. The lids fit the containers well, the covered containers don’t leak, there aren’t any rough edges on the flatware, and the fabric cover seems well-made. The Velcro closure goes all the way across the tab that closes the cover; this could have been handled more cheaply with an inadequate Velcro dot, so the generous Velcro is a nice touch. The insulation on the cover is pretty thick, and it’s waterproof. The containers stand up to microwaving, though to be honest, I’ve only microwaved at half power. The lids are not microwavable; the company says they’re not, and I took them at their word and didn’t try it. The company says the containers, but not the lids, are dishwasher safe, but I’ve been washing mine by hand. The only thing I could criticize, and trust me, I’m very good at criticizing, is that I can see the plastic hinge on the box giving way at some point. It’s just a thinner, kind of scored plastic, hinge, the kind you see on pencil boxes and etc.

The book that comes with the kit has some interesting ideas in it (my cucumber cups stuffed with tuna was an idea from the book). It’s strongly geared toward kids being raised in vegetarian families, in an almost evangelistic way, but the nutrition is good and a lot of the ideas seem like they would make delicious lunch components for kids or adults. They get points for hammering one of my pet peeves, peanut butter that has hydrogenated oil and sugar in it (I’m a “just peanuts and salt” aficionado). That greased-up stuff is an abomination; eat real peanut butter!

The system is meant to be green, which is another plus. The idea is that by using re-usable containers and flatware, and the box, we won’t be using up a lot of plastic bags or wrap, or paper lunch bags. This is good reasoning. You can also purchase cloth napkins, and there’s room in the flatware compartment for a cloth napkin, to further avoid wasting paper. I plan to pick up a napkin at a discount shop in my neighborhood, but the ones sold on the site are pretty reasonable. I do love the idea of using cloth napkins. They are civilized. When my daughter was growing up, we always ate dinner at the dinner table, with cloth napkins.

All in all, I like the Laptop Lunches Bento Kit, and would buy more of their products.

Bento

Tired of protein bars, the 3-4 different salads offered at the cafeteria at work, and the odd can of Progresso soup tossed into my briefcase with an apple, I decided to start putting a little more effort into lunch. As is usual for me, my call to action involved a few kicks in the pants sources of inspiration.


I was inspired a bit by The Gospel of Food by Barry Glassner. According to Glassner, a study of people eating food they liked and food they didn’t like had some interesting results: people absorbed less iron when they didn’t like their food, and absorbed significantly more iron when they did like their food. This got my attention. Always worried about weight, I don’t like my food much a lot of the time; I’m eating what I think I can have rather than what I would like to have. And, I have to admit that I don’t put much effort into my food since it’s often not what I’d really like to eat. Hence, the protein bars and my friends referring to my usual diet as “Perpetual Lent.” I’m chronically anemic and can’t seem to absorb iron no matter what I do, so any talk about iron absorption is going to get my ears to prick up. And, I hate my iron pills. The smell of them makes me gag, now, after several years of taking massive doses of them and subsequently having gastric issues. (I’m wondering now if hating them so much is interfering with being able to absorb them…)

I guess I could try eating some of the other food at the cafeteria, but I don’t trust the guy who runs it. He’s a nice enough guy, an Italian New York transplant with a lot of restaurant experience, and the food he makes is really good. But, I’ve caught him selling “Atkins Friendly Wraps” that are made with regular tortillas (I know because I’ve ordered one and seen the tortilla being taken from a regular tortilla package) and he tells people that his mayonnaise is low-fat, and I’ve seen the sandwich maker refreshing the mayonnaise from an industrial-sized jar of regular Best Foods. A lot of the cafeteria food is breaded and etc., too, which is not great, and a couple of years ago I lost 11 pounds doing nothing but stopping eating lunch in the cafeteria.

I was reading A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, and loved the description of Elnora’s lunch box and all the goodies her mother and Maggie packed into it. I started looking around at different styles of lunch boxes, looking for a modern equivalent, and stumbled upon Bento boxes. They are cool.

Bento is a Japanese style of food presentation in which food is served in a box, or stacking boxes, with different compartments. Imagine that! Instead of a can of soup or a protein bar, I can have a lunch with several small courses. That’s very cool.

So far, I’ve taken lunch every day for a week, and liked it. I’m really enjoying my lunches, which have been accompanied by an interesting feeling of well-being. This is probably some artifact of earliest childhood, but I feel kind of loved knowing a nice lunch with freshly prepared, interesting food is waiting for me. I haven’t wanted to snack between breakfast and lunch, and that’s saying a lot considering that it’s after the holidays and everyone at work is bringing in all their post-holiday leftover crap to get it out of the house so they don’t eat it. There’s a definite psychological effect, too, to opening the box and seeing the little boxes there filled with good stuff. It feels special, even though it’s still healthy stuff and I know what’s in there because I packed it myself, and some of it is leftovers. I’m definitely enjoying my lunch, and hopefully absorbing iron!

I have been a little adventurous. I cut the ends off cucumbers and hollowed them out, and filled them with tuna salad. That was interesting and cool. I threw some diced pear and minced pecan into some Greek yogurt and drizzled honey across the top. Both of those experiments were very tasty.

This is my lunch from earlier in the week. Clockwise from the bottom left: leftover Cock-a-Leekie Soup, tuna salad on shredded romaine lettuce, sliced red and green peppers, and fresh pineapple. I left the small dip container out of this lunch because I didn’t need it. The soup and pineapple are in the lidded containers, with the lids removed for the photo. It really is nice to open the box and see a decent lunch, and everything stayed put. Because of the containers and the snug lid on the outer box, everything was pretty much where I placed it when I made the lunch—no wayward bits wandering into other dishes, no bunched-up salad with the tuna at one end and the lettuce at the other.