goblinbox

In which we talk about breakfast! Yum! Because while I read a lot of involved, uplifting, active, and self-referential blogs, personally I’m just not that interesting. Plus: there’s a bunch of food porn!

Yesterday I was craving a big old bowl of the Egyptian breakfast food known as ful medames. The stuff is just so delicious I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Since my shift today didn’t start until one o’clock, I got up and took myself to the grocery store this morning. I didn’t go to Loney’s because they don’t carry fava beans and I never can find any pita bread there. Instead, I took my brother’s truck and went over to Super 1. It was gigantic:

There, I spent about two million years fifteen minutes looking for fava beans and pita bread. They were there, but not where I thought they would be, and I must have covered two thirds of the store’s square footage before I located them.

Then I went home and watched this video again on my iPod Touch, because it’s my favorite recipe for ful and I couldn’t remember how much lemon juice to use:

After that, I cooked up a big old batch of beans with garlic and lemon and garnished it with olive oil, parsley, tomato, radish, hard boiled egg, green onion, picked vegetables, and olives. It looked really pretty plated up:

And then?

And I eated it! With whole wheat pita bread! OMG teh yum!

(G’ma said the concoction “looked pretty, but didn’t taste all that good.” This is because I did not salt it per about ten recipes I’ve read which don’t call for salt. At all. Apparently you’re supposed to salt at the table. Which I did!)

The last time I had ful was in Brooklyn, in an Egyptian place around the corner from Deboka’s brownstone. It was freakin’ delicious there, too, and came with a giant squeeze bottle of tahini (!!!) and even had green peppers in it.

The time before that, I made a batch myself and packed it in a bento box with some falafel:

And here’s an entire gallery of fuul porn, just in case you doubted the status of my fandom for this dish! (Go look. Srsly. I’ll wait.)

Ful is the bestest, cheapest, fillingest breakfast ever. Bonus: it has the added benefit of giving you garlic breath first thing in the morning!

And yes, apparently I did just write an entire post about beans. Guess who needs to get laid?

In which no news is… well, no news.

Since I haven’t got anything to say, here’s a picture of my lunch:

Yay bento!

In which Dallas rocked, Amma was wonderful, and I’m glad to be home.

There’s really nothing more kick-ass than coming home after a ‘net-free vacation–the hotel wanted $11 a day for wi-fi and I said screw that–to find one’s blog packed full of comments! I LOVE you bitches!

I’m very excited about the new job, and it seems my new employers are excited about me too (they made some of those comments, God bless ‘em). I can’t wait to start over there next week. It’ll be so nice to be back at a real ISP again.

My bento article took up 2/3 of the Food & Lifestyle section yesterday and looked really cute; I’d link it here but it doesn’t appear to have made it into the U-B’s online edition you can read it here.

Dallas was hot. We never made it downtown because transpo was hella expensive. The airport is gigantic and covered in concrete. The Tex-Mex was gooooooood.

Seeing Mother was restorative and reaffirming and all the impossibly powerful and necessary things it always is; coming home though makes me feel a little nostalgic for Fairfield. If I gave someone here prasad from Mother (I brought home a mango) they wouldn’t have any idea what the fuck I was talking about. I ain’t moving back to BFE, no, it’s just nice to live in a community that groks your vocabulary – that’s all I’m saying.

Click here for the vacation set:

In which two packages arrive.

I’ve taken to doing Flickr swaps lately.

What this means is that I send stuff to people I don’t know in real life, and they send me stuff back. In the mail. On purpose.

It’s awesome.

A week or so ago I sent one of my three Argus C3 cameras, a 100mm telephoto lens, and two rolls of film to Florida. Yesterday I got this:

Two Argus lenses… and a Polaroid SX-70 Land camera! With a bright yellow skin! W00t!

And last week Left Coast Girlie and I sent a couple of baby loaves of Tillamook cheese, some smoked cheese, candy, and a couple boxes of crackers to Tokyo. And in response, we got this:

Another explosion of Japanese bento goodness! I got a tamagoyaki pan!

Moral being that, in spite of having to pay for postage, swapping is hella fun. Because who doesn’t love getting presents in the mail?

In which I am in total heaven because today I received THE BENTO BOMB!

This is what happened to me today (in pictures!):

I got a big giant huge massive collection of bento-junk goodness in the mail today!

Food! Bento accessories! And two new boxes!:

Now. How did this awesome explosion of straight-from-Japan bento lurve happen, you ask? Good question! I shall tell you!

Long story short:

I befriended someone on Flickr in one of the bento pools. She’s an ex-pat living in Japan, and as a NW girl she misses Tillamook cheese, among other things. So we arranged a swap!

I sent her a box of stuff (cheese, crackers, Neutrogena eye cream, flour tortillas, Mexican spices, stuff she can’t get easily over there) from my local grocery stores, and she sent me a box of stuff (the highly-anticipated BENTO EXPLOSION FROM HELL!!!) from her local stores. She put post-it notes on some of the items explaining what they were or giving useful translation details (like “not microwave safe” or “this is a giant Cheeto”). She also included a really cool tourist guide for Tokyo, and a lovely hand-written thank you note for the box I’d sent to her!

I’m so happy I could just pop!

I spent over forty dollars in shipping (cheese and tortillas are heavy!), BUT IT WAS SO. TOTALLY. WORTH IT.

In which I’m fat, obsessed with bento, and refusing to see any possible correlation between the two.

Misc

Teh BF’s bento box arrived so I packed a lunch in it and gave it to him today. He seems pleased. My mom has emailed that she needs sci-fi, so I’ll be lugging a pile of books to the post office this week. My eBook auction was up to $102.50, but then the hapless individual who’d bid it that high must have done some comparison shopping and discovered s/he could buy a new one for fifteen dollars more, and retracted! I was disappointed, to say the least.

…aaaaaaaand here’s a gratuitous iThing screenshot of my eBay app, from last night when I was still making bank on the eBook:

Spring

The weather is wonderful. I walked to work today without a coat on! I saw bees today! This is the kind of mild winter weather I moved here for; screw that Midwestern-style frozen tundra crap.

Fat

I weighed and measured my body this morning. HOLY SHIT. It has gained 11 pounds and 2.5 inches (in girth, not height, sadly) since I got a boyfriend. This is empirical proof that men make me fat. So, yeah, thanks for asking, I’m totally on a diet now… and will remain so, to varying degrees, until I can cut my own damn toenails again without running out of air. Water, walking, and isometrics are now my life. Damn.

…it will be interesting to see whether I’ll choose food or cocktails for dinner tonight, though. I have between 386 – 736 calories remaining today, so I might be able to have a little of both. Yay!

Mail

In other (very exciting!) news, I’ve made an online friend through Flickr and she and I have arranged a swap. She’s sending me a bunch of bento-junk love in exchange for things she can’t get in Japan: Tillamook cheeses, crackers (like Triscuits and Wheat Thins), Mexican hot chocolate, and Neutrogena eye cream.

I can’t wait to get my box of authentic bento junk from Japan! Whee!

In which I post again about bentō-making, because it’s all I think about lately.

I woke up at four this morning and immediately started thinking about what I’d make for today’s bentōs. Literally! Four in the damn morning! I laid there in the dark in my blanket-cocoon, and went through all the possible combinations of foods I have in the house. I finally settled on a breakfast theme and went back to sleep.

I got up at nine and started the sticky rice. Then I made a 3-egg omelet (eggs, milk, dill, shredded cheddar). Then I rummaged through the fridge for random veggie elements: carrots, pickles, celery, leaf lettuce…

Down to the freezer in the basement to grab some frozen peas and a few veggie sausage links, back upstairs to turn off the burners under the rice and omelet pans. Slice, shape, arrange. Find some cute candies. Fill the onigiri mold. Cut the omelet into squares. Fry the onigiri, brush them with soy sauce. Throw them in the freezer to cool while I go shower and get dressed.

This is the third morning in a row I got up early to make bentōs. Yes, that’s plural: I’ve been making them for gibblesnix and Left Coast Girlie, too.

Tuesday, it was maki sushi. Wednesday, it was onigiri and chili. Today it was omelet and sausage links.

Just in case you were thinking about getting a food hobby obsession of your own: the best part of food hobby obsession is feeding the results to unsuspecting people in the office where you work!

I just can’t stop with the food hobby. It’s too fun. It’s also a lot like cooking, which I totally enjoy.

• jbox.com
• bento stuff on eBay
• just bento