Top tier*: epic salad (5 bean mix, chickpeas, baby salad greens, snowpeas, carrot, capsicum, tomato, avocado).

Bottom tier: homemade dried fruit mix (papaya, rockmelon, mango, pineapple), sultanas, raw cashews, chickpea crisps, TVP jerky, dry-roasted green peas.

* Top in the photograph, it’s actually the bottom when the box is assembled.

André Vianco é hoje o escritor brasileiro que mais conquista leitores de fantasia e terror.
Seus livros, com tiragens iniciais na casa dos 15.000 exemplares são lidos de norte a sul do país, começando a pipocar também fora do Brasil.
Os leitores não têm idade. O escritor costuma receber gente dos 11 aos 50 anos em suas concorridas noites de autógrafos, em lançamentos das obras. (continua…)

I had a very simple bento lunch today. I packed both my thermal pots in one bag and off I went to work. In one pot I had steamed rice seasoned with shiso furikake and in the other pot I had cinnamon oatmeal. Both stayed nice and hot and were very welcome on this cold day.

I think I will be doing something similar tomorrow, but I’m waiting to see if there are any leftovers from tea tonight first!

Rice with seasonings

Yakisoba

Egg Omelet with Asparagus

Pork sausage

Stir fry beef with green beans

Zucchini

Yakisoba : cut vegetables(carrot, cabbage, green onion), fry that with sesame oil, add Yakisoba noodles and Yakisoba sauce, salt and pepper

Stir fry beef with green beans : fry thin beef and green beans, add Japanese soy sauce and sugar, sake

Egg omelet : beat eggs and pour into skillet, while it is cooking, add boiled asparagus across the middle of the eggs, then roll it up

This is Today’s Obento!

Cuando digo que los japoneses son los mayores gourmets no lo digo porque Tokyo tenga mas estrellas Michelin que cualquier otro pais del mundo ni por su comida de alto nivel, sino por la comida del dia a dia. Estas fotos son de unos bentos que son cajas de comida preparada que venden en el tren bala Shinkasen por unos 1000 yenes si no recuerdo mal. Si os fijais para ser comida envasada tiene una presentacion y calidad increibles.

Grilled Lemongrass Pork & Garlic Chinese Cabbage

Three Parts Bento

• Jasmine Rice
• Grilled Lemongrasss Pork
• Garlic Chinese Cabbage

OK, so bento hasn’t exactly been flowing over the past few days. I started the week with a disaster and I think it just spiralled from there!

So, I made my bento on Sunday night ready for the morning. Nice spice cous cous, steamed bun, veggie salad. It looked really tasty. But and here’s the biggie, the cous cous and the bun mustn’t have been cold enough before I put the lid on and stuck it in the fridge! Talk about a slimy mess when I opened it the next day. The lettuce holding my salad had gone really icky and the bun was soggy. Cous cous didn’t taste too hot either, but that was maybe just me after realising the rest of my lunch was not so nice. *sigh*

Todays lunch, although tasty, wasn’t exactly picture perfect, hence no photo.  Tortilla wrap, with lettuce, chicken, cheese and mayo, then toasted in my george health grill. It was really yummy but as I said, not very pretty!

So tonight I have my lunch all made and it is cooling before I pack it anywhere near a box! Char Siu bun for breakfast, steamed veggie gyoza for lunch and I’ll microwave some rice in the morning to put in my Miffy thermal.

I’m really bad this week as I haven’t a pick of veggie or fruit in the house, head is too busy thinking about work and trying to organise Christmas, so thinking about basics when grocery shopping went right out of my head and yes I did write a list! Anyone got a spare brain lying round I can borrow until mine gets back to reality??

Oh for those of you who are having difficulty following my blog, I think you need to subscribe to updates. Theres a link on the top left of the page as far as I can see on my laptop (I’m hoping you all can see it and it’s not just visible to me logged into wordpress) The link says blog info and there’s a drop down menu where you can choose to add to blogroll or subscribe.If this doesn’t work, please let me know so that I can investigate further, I’m still learning my way round wordpress myself, but I hope we’ll get it sorted out!

Home sick again today, same as yesterday.  My boss is not so happy considering its the days prior to thanksgiving and she really needs me there but the doctor instructed me to stay home as it could be the flu, most likely the swine flu.

So for lunch I made tamagoyaki!  Tamagoyaki is a japanese omelet made with eggs, sugar, soy sauce and, in my case, sake.  Todays recipe came from JustBento which I use often for quick and easy japanese bento recipies.  The blog also includes lots of how-to pictures and cooking instructions.

I probably should of paired it with rice but my protein craving got the better of me and the food has been ingested before this post even made it to publishing.

See, I am just really behind these days…trying to catch up.

Bento #182 with elephant head-shaped rice

Bento #183

Bento #184

Bento #88 had almost been called Garbage Bento because that’s where it ended up… But such a name suggests the contents was a load of rubbish and that, of course, is not true. It just didn’t get eaten because I got sick in my stomach and couldn’t eat anything substantial. Because it got made, packed and brought to work on Tuesday it still is a bento worth mentioning though

Roasted pumpkin & radicchio with a rosemary-olive salsa (in container) and parmezan cheese, cream cheese & chives stuffed sweet paprika, dry roasted peanuts, gherkin, marinated olive and potato croquet. On the side some fresh mint and honey for tea.

CSA (& organic): pumpkin, radicchio.
Organic: black olives (salsa).

Squid Ball & Crumbed Mushroom

Four Parts Bento

• Jasmine Rice
• Squid (Sotong) Ball
• Crumbed Mushroom
• Spicy Beanshoots

Foreground: Hardboiled egg on lettuce, unpickled tiny cucumber, cherry tomatos.
Background: Falafel, potato salad and a container with yoghurt-parsley dipsauce.

Cara’s birthday celebration at school was on Friday, three days after her birthday. Miss Tina made her a paper crown (as she does for all birthday celebrations) and Cara felt very, very special indeed.

I have become famous around preschool for Cara’s bento lunches, so I [foolishly] did a bento snack that day for the entire class. Someone slap me before I decide to do that again! It was a lot of work (and a lot of browsing through Flickr for ideas), but at least they came out pretty cute. The kiddos were very excited!

Yesterday, I received my new bento box from J-List!!!  I also picked up these pretty picks that I used in today’s bento as well.  The bento consists of  mini Korean chive dumplings, tamago with spam, a bear shaped potato and bacon croquette, sauteed garlic mushrooms, a few veggies, with rice and ume.  The box is pretty roomy so it was enough to feed both Sean and myself.  Hope you all have a great weekend!!!

Outro dia o Bandeiras ficou a pensar sobre como seria encontrar sua Santidade, o Pápa, no Modelo de Alcanena, por exemplo. Se fosse você, que acha que sua santidade carregaria no seu cestinho? Ficam abertas as opiniões. Vamos lá fazer um carrinho de compras à altura do Bento. O Pápa, não o gajo dos 4 meses a mais…

Lista será publicada em breve. Enviem sugestões e a razão da escolha.

Gonna eat this before aikido practice tonight.
Rice with furikake, vegetarian dumplings, broccoli, tiny cherry tomatoes, a zucchini quiche, a soy fishy and Pez on a lettuce leaf.

The furikake aren’t vegetarian (they contain fish), but the rest is.

Rice with seasonings

Egg Omelet with corn

Beer sausage

Boiled asparagus

Chicken nugget

Nimono

Nimono : boil Katsuo-dashi and Japanese soy sauce, Mirin. put Bamboo shoot and Satoimo into it, add Shiitake mushrooms.

This is Today’s Obento!

I made this earlier this week. Winter and darkness and bad weather coupled with stress are having a bad impact on my cooking habits – I feel tired and lazy and just throw something together, or decide I’m too tired to make a bento and eat out for lunch. Not healthy!

This is a quickie, but tasty – stirfried carrot flowers, zucchini leaves, mushrooms and leek with tamagoyaki and some of the tiniest cherry tomatoes ever on noodles with sesame oil, mirin and soy sauce.

I wish I had enough skill and enough time on my hands to make Bento for my dinner everyday.
Bento? You say.. Well. Bento is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento consists of rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables, usually in a box-shaped container.

But I am more interested in the cute ones!
So. Kyaraben or charaben, a shortened form of character bento, is a style of elaborately arranged bento which features food decorated to look like people, characters from popular media, animals, and plants. Japanese homemakers often spend time devising their families meals including their boxed lunches.

THANKS wikipedia

My favourite bento lady is AnnaTheRed

nom nom nom

Three Parts Bento

• Spam Rice
• Chilli Grilled Pork
• Coleslaw

Howdy, campers. How is your day going? This is my first time posting while on my lunch break, so it’ll be another short entry.

This here is all about lunch at work. As I mentioned in a previous post, I use my wonderful Mr Bento for all my lunching needs. 4 containers: a 15.2 oz main bowl, a 10.1oz side bowl, 6.8oz small side/snack bowl, and a 9.5 oz soup bowl. Ahh, so perfect. (Edit: I should also mention that it comes with a metal spork. Yes. A metal spork. You know you need this now.) I do most of my dinner prep on Sunday, then just throw a meal together the night before work. Today’s Bento consisted of Kashi Warm Cinnamon Heart to Heart for a snack, chicken, peppers, and onions for my main dish, brown rice with chickpeas and black beans  (Creole style) for a side, and some butternut squash and cauliflower soup (vegan!). Then an apple as another snack later on if I’m feeling snacktastic.

How do you guys prefer to eat lunch: brought to the office, at a restaurant, or back home? What do you typically eat?

Until later, alligators…