Tag Archives: bento

Bento strategery.

Bentō, , ,

In which this is a quick primer for all y’all who are innarested in packing your own lunches all healthy and cute-style.

Matro said this, so I’m saying this:

Bento boxes are nothing more than lunch boxes that happen to be from Japan, so you can put non-Japanese food into them if you want (and I do all the time). They are compact, visually appealing, and reusable. They have a variety of accessories, including chopsticks, fork and spoon sets, sauce bottles, food cups, picks, food dividers, carrying bags, and more.

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I'm Baaaaaack!

Bentō, Travel, ,

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!

Bento ArticleI’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:
Boarding

Random Crap. (With pictures!)

Domestic Goddess, , , ,

In which I still need a vacation, but haven’t scheduled one yet. (Teh BF says he’s taking me to Wildhorse casino for his birthday next month, though, so that’ll be good.)

Since my content is so lame, I am including images. I love you too.

WEATHER
I am tired of this ten-degrees-below-average-for-this-time-of-year weather. The wind, overcast skies, and unnecessary chill are all getting on my nerves.

I want spring to get here already. Isn’t wonderfully mild weather the whole point of living here?

BENTO
Here’s my lunch. Innit adorable?

Bento #59: Quasi Middle Eastern

Making it this morning and then eating it this afternoon will doubtless prove to be the absolute highlights of the first ten hours of my day. Happy Monday.

WORK
My employer is advertising to hire another employee! I’m almost giddy with relief, actually. I had myself all convinced I was about to get laid off.

Silly brain.

THE DOG
My G’ma is feeding my dog entirely too much. AGAIN. The stuff she’s feeding Bindu not only keeps the dog on the verge of obesity, but it also gives her itchy butt, runny stools, and gas. (I realize that’s entirely TMI but food that does such things to a creature cannot be at all acceptable.)

I’ve tried being nice to G’ma, I’ve tried reason, I’ve tried being openly hostile, and I’ve tried simply keeping the dog away from the house as much as possible, all to no avail: there is no way to get the woman to stop overfeeding my dog each and every chance she gets.

Break Time

I have resolved to go buy appropriate dog foods this Sunday – boring old IAMS or Nutro kibbles (and, in a massive nod toward compromise, some canned food as well) that the dog is unlikely to gorge upon. I will bring these items home and put them in the pantry, and I will then proceed to throw the crap G’ma stocks right out into the garbage. The sheer wastefulness will, I hope, get her attention.

I’ve had this dog through scores of jobs, men, and miscarriages. Bindu is the love of my life and my baby. I will not let the length and quality of her little blue life be compromised because G’ma apparently feels compelled to spoil animals to death.

THE BELOVED NETBOOK
I watched the director’s cut of Blade Runner in bed last night. With earphones in and the Eee PC on my chest, it was a totally awesome movie-watching experience!

Size Comparison

I really love my tiny little laptoplette.

ANNOYING THINGS
* The grocery store two blocks from my house no longer accepts my debit card, so in order to shop there I have to take cash out of the ATM and pay $1.50 for the privilege. Fuck that.

* I remain unconvinced that I can crawl back to the bandleader and be civil enough to get my old gig back. I’m just too wrapped up in my ego’s utter rage at being fired for no reason (I’ve never been fired from a band in my life, and particularly not when I did everything I was supposed to do). I’m thinking of cutting my finger nails and taking my Breedlove to open mic come Wednesday.

I can’t play for shit, but they’ll let me on stage anyway because they know I can sing.

* My dog is still fat, and it’s not even my fault.

* I don’t have a bicycle and am, apparently, too stupid to get one bought.

THE NEW HOBBY
This evening, after spending some time with Teh BF, I hope to move forward on some of this:

Pattern drafting: complete

I really want to change my whole master plan and make the awesome dress out of the purple stuff (because it’s cotton instead of rayon), but I won’t. I will stick to the plan, because it will give me a chance to adjust the pattern with fabric that I don’t like as much. Then I can go out and buy moar cotton knit next weekend! Yay!

THE OLD HOBBY
I haven’t knit anything in months.

Apparently I’m as incon(si)stant with my hobbies as I am with literally everything else.

It's Bento Nirvana Here, Folks

Bentō, , ,

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

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

Bento Swap Goodness!!!

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

Bento Goods

Food! Bento accessories! And two new boxes!:

New 'Yellow Studio Deli' Bento Box from Loft

New Cocolon Bento Box

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.

So, yeah. Not so much. And you?

Bentō, , ,

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:

iPod eBay Application screen shot

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!

Food Hobby

Blurbs

In which I update you on how ineffably fun lunch can be if you have a bentō box to put it in!

One morning last week I was in the kitchen packing my lunch and my brother walked in. He watched me in silence for a moment, and then intoned, “Food hobby.”

Bento #7 - close

And that’s exactly what it is: a food hobby! It’s somehow much more fun to pack a lunch in a bentō box. I can look at pictures of bentōs on the Internet all day long. I can surf for bentō boxes for hours. I have collected a list of Japanese recipe URLs as long as your arm. I’ve been making friends on Flickr with other bentō makers. Bentō is the crack rock of luncheon!

Here are my bentōs and bentō accessories thus far.

Um, I may have ordered a second bentō box from eBay last week. In yellow!

I'm a Rockstar, Baby

Music, , ,

In which there’s a recap of my weekend, with links to Flickr pix.

Friday night after work I went bowling with the boys. I bowled a kick-ass first game with a final score of 143: that’s over twenty pins higher than my average! W00t. That’s rockstar-style bowling, peeps.

Saturday I had an appointment with my stylist at 2 PM to get new rockstar hair. Sound check was at 3:30. Plenty of time, right? Wrong! The woman colored my hair, did two hair cuts, rinsed me, and then did two more cuts before she did my cut and style! I didn’t get to Sapolil until nearly five. And when I did I looked like a Botox-injectee because she did my eyebrow wax last. I had dye all over my forehead (I still do, actually) and all the skin around my eyebrows was hot pink: this, I suspect, is probably not very rockstar.

But it was so worth it! I really needed my hair colored. It was three inches half dark brown (and silver! …okay, gray) at the roots, with weird washed-out red on the ends from my obnoxious box job from a couple of months ago. But now? It’s all a nice even color, fairly close to my natural one, with cute little highlights. Yay! Rockstars should definitely have nice hair.

The house was absolutely packed Saturday night, SRO even. The crowd was awesome; responsive and fun and supportive. (I felt extra-special because I had two aunts, two uncles, a boyfriend, and a co-worker there to hear me.) For the last set, I had a table full of admiring guys to my right, one of whom apparently plays cuts from my EP on his radio show every week. Rockstars totally get airplay!

I’m not sure we got enough good takes to make a live album, though. I haven’t heard the roughs so who knows… sometimes idiot mistakes and random trainwrecks – of which there were many (I myself fucked up Love For the Blues TWICE) – end up sounding brilliant. Honest. To quote Barefoot, some of the best takes are more “Whoops! I’m a genius” than the actual arrangements you intended to play.

During the show Teh BF ran the board and watched the recording software. I think he had fun.

After the gig, we did what we always do after the gig: we schlepped gear!

After the schlepping, K and I went around the corner to Vintage Cellars for a beer, and I spent an hour wedged into a love seat getting wine drunk with a couple of totally hawt babes who had been at Sapolil for the show. (There are hi-fucking-larious! photos of this pile of drunken women, but you can’t see them because they are Not For Public Viewing according to my partners in crime. Private party photos? Are extremely rockstar!)

After that since we hadn’t had a proper supper, K and I went and ate at Shari’s. (Jesus. No wonder I’m perfectly round.) Pudginess is not very rockstar, but it is pretty diva!

Sunday we slept in, woke up, got busy, got up, drank coffee, and then went to 4-year-old’s birthday party in Milton-Freewater. We gorged on pizza. (Jesus. No wonder I’m perfectly round.) When we could no longer stay awake, we went back to Kaje’s and watched Torchwood Declassified drowsily on the couch. I got dropped off at home around 7:30 and did a load of laundry while I packed my lunch for today. (I still love the bento even though I haven’t gotten around yet to making any hella cute shit yet. (Yes, I said ‘yet’ twice.) Although I think I feel some veggie sushi coming on. Sushi is totally rockstar. Even if it’s homemade.)

Today I rolled into work wearing 9-year-old jeans and a bulky sweater with Crocks, frizzy hair and no makeup. Because on Monday mornings? I’m a call center drone, and totally not a rockstar.

Election Day and Bento

Blurbs,

In which my lunch was cuter than your lunch!

My bento box arrived yesterday. This morning I packed a lunch in it. (I didn’t feel creative enough to make a patriotic election day theme, but this person did.)

I truly adore my cute little bentō box. It’s tiny but it holds more food than you’d think. (Maybe the Tardis is part bentō!) If it’s not packed with solid dairy fat, it holds around 600 calories… which shall prove to be much better for me than, say, a 1200 calorie plate of Mexican food from across the street.

In other news, there is no poll voting in Walla Walla county. This means that I have failed to vote because I didn’t mail my ballot. I figured I could go vote in person today, but there’s nowhere to do so. (Apparently only two counties in the entire state of Washington still have poll voting, and I’m not in either of them.) I didn’t know any of this in advance because this is my first election day living in this state; I just learned about the no-live-voting thing before lunch when I was looking online for a nearby voting location.

I also don’t really care. I know that not caring about democracy is bad and wrong, and that every vote counts and that my participation is necessary, but I find politics to be a game I’m not interested in. Talking heads bug me. Political analysts make me tired; they’re all just a bunch of debate team freaks growing their egos talking on the telly. I do not believe a single thing that any politician says because due to the very nature of the system they cannot keep their word even when they want to. I happen to believe that the office of president cannot be held by a moral person; and that even if a moral person were to gain the office s/he’d have to do immoral things in order to get anything done. Like tic-tac-toe, it’s a game that simply cannot be won. Not that winning is the goal of all human endeavors, of course not, but compromises that allow evil or that fail to accomplish anything whatsoever? Pshaw. I’m not interested in it.

[No, it doesn’t escape me that I would likely be a lot more interested if I lived under a more unpleasant type of regime, which admission in and of itself is an argument in favor of the efficacy of the very democracy (or whatever it is that we have here – constitutional republic?) that I enjoy the freedom to ignore: I’m not a total idiot. I just don’t care for politics. Or beef tripe. Or country & western. Or raisins.]

Suffice it to say that if I had managed to vote today, I’d’ve voted Obama. Because what the hell, I’d much rather spend money on welfare than war.

Update: (I just wrote this in comments over at Brad’s and decided to re-post it here.) I can’t believe we’re all so pleased with ourselves for electing a black man in this year of 2008. You know, there are countries all over the world that have had blacks and even women at the helm! Imagine THAT! *rolleyes*

Big! Brown! Bento! Sweater!

Knitting, , , ,

In which there are two things! Two exciting things! Two!

The first exciting thing is that last night, while watching an episode of Torchwood, I completed the Big Brown Sweater. (You may cheer; I will hear you even over the Internet.) It spent a year and ten months on the needles, but it’s finally finished and it rules.

(The pattern is Abigail, the yarn is Decadence in chocolate, and both were from Knit Picks. Teh BF was forced at gun point by my pointing my coffee cup at him to photograph it this morning so I could put it on the intarwebz.)

It fits, it’s soft, it’s brown, I made it myself, and I intend to wear it every. single. day. from now until summer returns next year! Yay!

The other cool thing is that yesterday I decided to become obsessed with bento. (I believe it was this page that finally decided me, but I’ve had bento boxes on my wishlists for quite awhile now.)

Today I ordered the! cutest! bento box set! ever! and a few other necessary bento accoutrements (vegetable shapers, mini sauce bottles, a boiled egg shaper, resuable silicone food cups for separating wet from dry foods, and an onigiri mold) from jbox.com. They should be here late next week, and from then on I shall spend a little time after dinner every night cleverly packing leftovers for the next day’s lunch.

This new hobby will not only satisfy my cooking creativity to a certain extent (I hardly ever cook any more!), but will stop me eating at the Mexican restaurant across the street from work like twice a week. It will help me control my caloric intake, something I desperately need to do because I’m forty and built just like a brick these days, and it will have the added benefit of being way totally HELLA COOL!