Bring on the bentos!

Wow, it's been a while since I've done a bento post! I'm hoping to get back into it so hopefully you'll see more of these! Let's see what I packed for tomorrow at the office . . .




The left container has 4 of the mini frittatas I posted about earlier. When I said mini, I wasn't kidding! These are about the size of a quarter! I plan to have those with some oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow. I also have some cucumber slices and a Laughing Cow wedge. The right container has some leftover lemony spinach couscous with parmesan and some garlic shrimp I cooked up to go with dinner last night. Just need to figure out an afternoon snack and I'm set!

I also want to remind you that my 100th post is coming up -- this one is #93! I plan to do a give-away of some awesome stuff like spice mixes, maybe a cookbook or two, and maybe a couple of surprise items. Intrigued? :)

A long delinquent lunch post!

After seeing all the yummy oatmeal combos people keep posting, I was inspired to do one this morning. Last night I took oatmeal, vanilla almond milk, cherry Craisins, and some slivered almonds and put it in the fridge to soak overnight. This morning after yoga, I heated it up and proceeded to add some brown sugar and some orange marmalade.

Sounds good so far, right?

All that anticipation as I was making it, and after I took a couple bites I just didn't want it. It tasted fine, but I was running late for work and for some reason I changed my mind about the oatmeal. So it's sitting in the fridge for tomorrow. I forgot to take a picture of it too.

Part of the reason I was running late was that I was packing my lunch and since I haven't done a bento pic in a while I was busy taking pictures and then uploading to Flickr.



Not only have I not done a bento post in a while, but I haven't used my little sandwich box in forever! I forget how handy it is!

Today's lunch is a turkey, havarti, and spinach sandwich on whole wheat bread. I have a small campari tomato and some strawberries on the side. Not pictured are some peppercorn ranch Sunchips and the last couple squares of my dark chocolate with orange peel.

Hope everyone has a great day!

P.S.

Sweetie Pie was kind enough to remind me to remind everyone about this week's BSI, which is BASIL! You have until midnight on Sunday to submit your creations, which I look forward to drooling over.

First bento of 2009!

It has been wayyy too long since I've done a bento!

I packed some yummy leftovers from yesterday's New Year's lunch -- can't wait to eat!

Left: whole wheat mini-pita on bottom, tossed salad of green leaf lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion slices.

Right: chicken seekh kabab, potato samosa, red onion slices and lime wedge

Lunch!

Just can't think of a cute title today. Might have to resort to something boring like dates.

Cooked up a storm with a friend this weekend, then cooked a little more today. I'll post pics from Saturday night later.

For lunch tomorrow -- starting on the left is a green bean and potato dish from Saturday night, then some beef korma I made tonight (cheated and used a Shan mix), then some leftover white rice (not basmati, unfortunately). On the right are baby carrots and grape tomatoes. Probably should have made it look prettier, but oh well.

Doctored-up leftovers

No funky photo formatting today, I promise!

It's been hard getting my motivation back to start making dinner each night. Flipping through my cookbooks and exclaiming "oooh! This one looks good" is apparently not enough to produce a dish on our table. I must shamefully admit to succumbing to pre-prepared frozen items or having fast food more often than I should. Somewhere, the good little weight watcher in me howls mournfully at this setback.

Anyway, so surprise surprise I was too tired to cook tonight so we decided to eat out. Now in my defense I did work out with my trainer today, so I will blame my laziness on that. We thought we'd try this new Greek restaurant nearby, but as we pulled into the parking lot we were informed the restaurant didn't open until Monday. Scratch that idea. We ended up at Copeland's instead, which is a Cajun/Creole type of restaurant.

For once I decided NOT to throw all caution to the wind and order something fattening and eat it all. Nope, not today. I ordered Shrimp Creole, which was served over steamed rice and came with a very yummy biscuit (okay so that wasn't so healthy). The dish was basically shrimp in a spicy tomato-y sauce. Not bad at all. I even managed to make myself stop halfway through and have the rest boxed up to go. Wohoo!

Then on the way home I began thinking of how I could make it look all purty in my bento for tomorrow. Clearly a sign of madness, as I was even debating which color would best suit the food. Oh and then I got the bright idea to add some turkey kielbasa to the leftovers to make it more substantial for tomorrow. And of course I had to pack raw veggies to make it all look healthy. Do you like the dried parsley flake garnish on top of the food? I do! It makes it look all fancy-like.

And I just realized that nobody probably really cares that much about my leftovers, so it's time to shut it. :)

Falafel and veggies

They're baaack!

It's been so long since I've packed a bento nicely for photo ops and I didn't realize until after I was done taking pics when I was trying to close everything up to put into the fridge that I messed up and the veggies and falafels should have switched places. Needless to say, the bento that is waiting for me tomorrow doesn't look as nice as this one. Oh well!

So lunch is going to be grape tomatoes, cucumbers, and baby carrots with some Tzaziki sauce for dipping, as well as some falafel balls I found at Costco last week. I pulled them from the freezer, which is why they look a little frosty. We were out of pita bread, which sucks because I could have had mini falafel sandwiches for lunch. Next time.

Kicked-up Keema

Sorry about the cutesy title!

FYI for those not in the know, keema is just the South Asian name for ground meat.

Anyhow, although I don't cook beef that often, when I do it tends to be ground beef because it's quick and it's very hard to mess up. If I'm cooking it desi-style, I usually don't make it the same way twice, I just dump in whatever sounds good. Lately I've taken to poshing it up with frozen "southern-style" hash-browns because I'm too lazy to chop up potatoes as well as adding frozen peas and carrots for some color.

Tonight I added the veggies and then took the opportunity to use up some leftover Chicken Jalfrezi spice mix that had been hiding in my fridge. Weird notion to use chicken spice mix in ground beef, but all it contained was red chili powder, black pepper, salt, and turmeric and I was in a hurry tonight. I added some ground cumin, chili powder, and garlic powder and that was it.

Decided to jazz up the rice today by adding some Patak's curry paste to it before I added the water. Didn't add much flavor but it added some color.

Since we actually had leftovers and I haven't done a bento in forever, guess what I did? :)

Breakfast bento!

Okay I have a small confession to make.

I had no clue what I wanted to pack for tomorrow's bento. Dinner tonight was a semi-flop and would have looked and tasted nasty as leftovers. I didn't want to make something new just for lunch. Chances were that I was just going to be nuking something come lunch time tomorrow.

And then I figured if I didn't have a nice lunch to look forward to then I could at least have a yummy breakfast to start the day off properly.

Breakfast during the week is usually a hurried affair. I seem to take more and more time to get out of bed and get ready so that means I'm usually grabbing something tried and true and quick on the way out to be prepared at the office.

One of my absolute favorites that keeps me satisfied through most of the morning is my breakfast sandwich. It's quite simple -- either a low-calorie bun, light english muffin, or 2 slices of light bread, a turkey or vegetarian breakfast sausage patty, and a slice of Kraft 2% pepperjack cheese - the processed kind. In a perfect world, I also have time to add my secret ingredient: Taco Bell hot sauce. I don't know what it is about the combo of Kraft 2% pepperjack and Taco Bell hot sauce, but it makes the sandwich. In a more perfect world, I am able to use a toaster oven to toast the bread with the sauce and cheese, nuke the sausage patty and then happily assemble just before eating. Most mornings this doesn't happen. But I digress.

To make my breakfast even more cheerful looking, I opted for my cute little orange 2-tier bento box. I love the way fruit looks in this set, all vibrant and inviting. Anyway, so we have a ready-to-go breakfast sandwich and some grape tomatoes in the bottom compartment and some strawberries, blueberries, and grapes in the top compartment.

Mmmm, can't wait for breakfast!

Back to being "good"

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July weekend! We went down to Florida to visit the in-laws and I got to indulge in plenty of my mother-in-law's yummy Bengali cooking. So of course now I gotta get back on the weight-loss wagon, which I fell off of a LONG time ago!

Tomorrow's lunch is simple and healthy, but yummy of course. I made turkey and cheese roll-ups -- some mesquite turkey slices and string-cheese rolled up in some green-leaf lettuce. Then some grape tomatoes and blueberries to finish things out. This is the first time I used one of my mini food cups and I have to say, I like the way it neatly holds the berries and adds color at the same time.

New box!

The bento box buying bug continues!

This is one of a set of 3 small square-ish box sets I got off Ebay. The set comes in red, yellow, and blue and is the Urara "brand" of boxes -- they have the more oblong 2-tier sets in the same colors as well.

Anyway, here's what I've packed for lunch:

Left box: Morningstar "chicken" nuggets, oven baked fries, and mini pizza cups.

Right box: blueberries and grapes.

In hindsight, I probably should have packed this lunch in the red box set because all the stuff in the left box is yellowish and makes for a monochromatic effect. Whatev.

Oh and the mini pizza cups were the result of Sunday morning restlessness while I waited for the hubby to get up. I just took canned biscuits, pressed the dough into a mini muffin tin, then filled the biscuit cups with some garlic & herb pasta sauce, turkey pepperoni, and shredded cheese. This all got baked at 450 degrees for about 10 minutes. I liked them, hubby wasn't such a fan.

Mixed up pasta!

This is what happens when you have just a little bit of pasta left in different bags! I had some whole-wheat penne and whole-wheat rotini that needed to be used up, as well as some whole-wheat radiatore pasta that we added to make enough for us.

From left: some frozen garlic bread we baked up, some chicken/smoked mozzarella/artichoke sausages I got at Super-Walmart of all places, then the pasta mixed with some garlic & herb pasta sauce and sprinkled with a mix of romano, asiago, and parmesan cheeses. And some dried parsley flakes for color and flair. :P

Spicy leftovers!

This is short and sweet because I just got back from a girls' weekend away in Savannah and I'm pooped!

The left tier contains orange segments and mini chocolate-filled koala cookies.

The right tier contains leftover beef Pad Kee Mao from dinner at a Thai restaurant. It was basically spicy rice noodles with beef, baby corn, peppers, tomatoes, and basil leaves. Oh and a few jalapeno slices and romaine lettuce as garnish.

My what cute buns you have!

Aren't they precious?

If you don't already know, I'm one of those freaks that actually likes to go grocery shopping. I love to go up and down the aisles to see what's new and promising. Fun for me, torture for the hubby who tends to pout and keep an iron grip on the cart when he's tricked into going with me.

Anyway, yesterday I happened upon a new-to-me product in the frozen foods aisle called Bundinos. I found them where the pizza rolls, bagel bites, and other yummy frozen snacks were. It looks like they have both savory and sweet varieties to choose from. The savory ones range from about 200-230 calories for a serving of 4 while the sweet ones are about 280-300 calories per serving. They looked so gosh darn cute and perfect for bento-ing, so I bought a couple flavors to try. I decided to try out the chicken chipotle-flavored ones for tomorrow's lunch.

So in my shiny black bento box I have 4 Bundinos and some grape tomatoes on a bed of lettuce. I'm hoping the tomatoes aren't the ones affected by salmonella. I guess I'll just have to live dangerously and let you know! Oh and the bento box is one I've had for a few months but haven't used yet. It's a one-tier 430-ml Vive box. It came with 3 divider cups but I opted not to use them for tomorrow's lunch.

Dinner for One

With the hubby being out of town, I thought I would finally get to experiment and make recipes I'd been eyeing or finally buckle down and be a good little weight watcher.

No and no.

Even after going on a "healthy" grocery shopping spree after dropping the hubby off at the airport I still found ways to conveniently be too tired to cook dinner and pack a lunch.

We'll just say Wendy and I became good friends over the past few days.


So today, faced with the prospect of a good flank steak about to go bad, I decided enough was enough and damnit I was going to cook a nice healthy dinner for myself.

Et voila, a beef stir-fry was created.

It's nothing fancy, just sliced up some flank steak and marinated it in soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, ginger, chili paste, lime juice, and green onion for a few minutes and then stir-fried it with some vegetables. Easy peasy AND I had enough for dinner, tomorrow's lunch, and dinner tomorrow night.

I hope Wendy doesn't miss me too much.

"Fast Food"

I'm playing around with the old digital camera again, but still seem to take crappy pictures. I know a lot of it is the lighting in the kitchen and for some reason my hands shake when I take the picture. Oh well.

Tonight's dinner came together pretty easily, which was good since I was tired from running errands after work.

I'd bought some Trader Joe's Boolkogi a few weeks back and decided a couple days ago that it was time to pull it out of the freezer. It's basically Korean-style marinated sliced beef. I just grilled up on on our grill pan (leaving the mess for the hubby to clean up!) and it took less than 10 minutes. I had one of those bags of ready to steam broccoli from the produce department, so that got nuked for 4 minutes while the beef cooked. Then I had those handy pre-portioned brown rice cups I've been finding at Kroger on and off. A minute later in the microwave and dinner was ready! Healthy, delicious, and fast -- my kind of weeknight dinner.

And of course I packed leftovers in a bento for lunch tomorrow. This is one of the last boxes I bought way back in January, can't remember if I'd used it yet. It's pretty small, but if packed right should keep me full for a few hours.

The " 3 B " Bento

I've been bad. Not only did I manage to recruit some new members into the bento cult recently, but I've been dreadfully remiss in packing bento of my own. And we won't get into my horrible eating habits lately. We'll just blame it on the tax-season monster. :P

Sundays are usually my day to sleep in, read, watch tv, do groceries and cook. That doesn't sound very relaxing, does it? Strangely, it is for me. Anyway, today I knew that I needed to do some pre-emptive advance cooking for the week so that I had fewer excuses for not packing lunch and sneaking off to Subway or living off frozen crap instead. My strategies today entailed cooking a batch of brown rice and steaming some veggies for lunches and cooking one desi-style dish for dinners. Well, I managed to do it all somehow!

Tomorrow's "3 B" bento consists of oven-baked brown rice (I'll do a recipe review later), broccoli steamed in soy sauce, crushed red pepper, and some garlic, and some leftover rotisserie chicken from Publix. So we have brown rice and broccoli -- what's the third "B?" I could be lame and say it's for "bought" chicken. Or I could be equally lame and say it's for "boring" since this is the epitome of a diet-y lunch. Whatever, I'll let you decide!

Oh and as for the desi-style dish I cooked -- it's aachar gosht, which is meat cooked in Indian pickling spices. I will definitely do a recipe review for this in the next few days.

Craving Chinese

I apologize in advance for the wacky photo formatting -- I sometimes have trouble getting a good pic of my food and I haven't really learned how to edit them. But I hope they at least show how yummy my food is!

I've been bento-ing sporadically the past month - it's tax season and my time and motivation are limited. I'll try to post as often as I can.

Tomorrow's lunch will be Trader Joe's frozen chicken fried rice in the top tier, and a Van's chicken eggroll, some edamame, and a little fishie sauce container filled with soy sauce.

The frozen fried rice is not too bad -- the serving size is 1 cup for about 200 calories. I usually supplement it with some broccoli slaw, soy sauce, and sambal oelek. The eggrolls are a tried and true repeat purchase. They're about 140 calorie per roll and don't taste low-fat at all. All in all this is a pretty easy and healthy way for me to assuage my frequent Chinese food cravings.

Good things come in small packages

This should be the official bento motto.

So when you see the apple in there, you're probably thinking "that's a HUGE box, how the hell is she gonna eat all that??"

Rest assured my friends, it is not a huge box and I will indeed eat all of that.

The secret? A teeny tiny cute little lady apple. I seriously almost squealed in delight when I saw these baby apples at the grocery store. Perfect for bento!

So what's for lunch today?

The bottom tier of this half-moon bento box contains white rice, steamed broccoli and cauliflower, and some leftover butter chicken curry I made last night. I used one of those preprepared spice pastes I see in random places like Whole Foods or World Market. I only used 1 tbsp of butter when I made it since I hate butter but wanted it to taste like what it was supposed to. Such a good little Weight Watcher. :P

The top tier is my fruit tier, obviously. Fresh blueberries, strawberries and that oh-so-cute apple. Oh and the blueberries are in their own little divider cup that came with the box. No way am I that obsessed about arranging my blueberries on a diagonal.

Happy lunching!

Bento is back!

Yay!

So what happened for the past couple months? The hubby and I went on a 2 week trip to Bangladesh in November, then December just flew by.

I've actually been unofficially bento-ing for about a week. And of course I've been obsessively adding to my box collection. Look, I can't help it if there's so many cute boxes! The hubby just rolls his eyes when yet another Ebay package makes its way into our home.

In lieu of the typical New Year's resolution to lose weight, I've decided to just focus on my health this year. So I've been reading up on nutrition and have been very intrigued in particular by a book called Superfoods Rx that has a list of 14 "superfoods" that have a huge impact on our health. I've been trying to incorporate more of these foods into my daily routine.

In tomorrow's lunch we have blueberries, apricot, strawberries, and spinach and hummus pinwheels. Not sure if the hummus and the whole wheat tortilla count, but everything else is a superfood.

Protein-packed lunch

I can pack all the cute lunches I want, but if I want to actually have a shot at losing weight then I need to pay attention to what I eat and how much I eat.

After yet another weekend of eating nonstop, I will try to get my act together and try to make an attempt at eating lighter.

I decided that tomorrow I'd make myself gag down a salad. I baked up the last hunk of lemon-garlic marinated turkey breast and portioned it out into pieces for lunch this week. But to make the salad more palatable for me, I decided to make it full of protein. None of those sissy all veggie salads. Pffft. My salad has hunks of juicy, flavorful turkey and chunks of pepperjack cheese. If I can remember to pack some dressing, even better!