Category: bento

Now that I’m working full-time at an awesome startup downtown I’ve been packing bento lunches again. In addition to being better for me, it’s substantially cheaper than buying lunch in midtown. A wrap or salad at the “usual” place ends up being about $9. Even considering the fact that Chris works from home a few days a week it adds up fast, to about $300 per month. A bento lunch generally comes in under $3.

Today’s lunch consists of a baby spinach salad with peppers, carrots, and mushrooms, and a chicken sandwich with pepperoni. I use fat free cream cheese instead of mayonaise. Fat free cream cheese completely fails as anything I’d want to put on a bagel, but does well in sandwiches. I used “low carb” bread. Low carb bread has a weird spongy texture I really don’t recommend. Stick with the real thing.

I haven’t posted many bento photos this week because I only packed lunches two days, and canada viagra for sale didn’t have time to photograph today’s.

I picked up a Benriner Japanese Mandolin Slicer at a Japanese market near here. It’s great for slicing veggies, but the blades are wicked sharp and the hand guard is kind of a joke. I’m a little scared to use it. I’ll probably pick up a cut resistant glove to wear when trying to slice harder veggies on the thing. It does however make nice even thickness slices of whatever you want.

I also picked up a few stacking bento boxes, a green one for me and a black one for Chris. I thought about getting him a Hello Kitty lunch box but decided against it.

This whole bento experiment has been really good for my fresh fruit and veggie consumption. Because they add color and can be chopped into whatever size I need they’re great for filling holes between bigger items. It’s also a good way to use up leftover veggies, since you’re packing in small portions of a variety of things. Overall I’m really happy with the lunches, and it’s totally worth waking up earlier to prepare.

The Japanese supermarket also had a HUGE array of rice cookers. Huge. I’ve decided that I’m allowed to have a rice cooker once I find a good home for the bread machine I have but don’t use much. Rice cookers range from cheap to insanely priced robotic controlled monstrosities. I’m looking at a mid-range one with a timer so I can leave the rice soaking overnight and have it ready when I come down in the morning.

I’m sure Chris will be STOKED to have one more gadget in the kitchen. Yeah, right.

I took Friday off, and was sick Monday, but I think you'll agree the latest bentos were well viagra tablet weight worth the wait:

Yes, it's rice balls in the shape of a goomba and a fire flower.

Chris's lunch contains:

• Fire flower rice
• Baby spinach
• Orange half
• Leftover chicken and udon
• Red pepper slices

Mine contains:

• Goomba rice
• Red pepper slices
• Orange half
• PBJ in a tortilla. This didn't turn out as festive as I'd hoped.
• Baby spinach

On Chris's I used some plastic grass from when we ordered sushi as a divider. On mine I separated things with a slice from the tortilla (which I cut into a square).

All out of cookies. Sad times!

I made the molds myself using the laser cutter at NYC Resistor.

I started with flat sheet and cut the mold layer by layer. Everything was laminated together using acrylic cement.

Version 1, shown above, had the backing (which holds the features like eyes and mouth) permanently attached. This was a mistake. The rice had absolutely no incentive to move. I had to dig it out with a knife. It was a total pain.

Version 2 features a removable back piece, which works quite well:

The registration marks (blue rectangles) are important, because the acrylic slides around once it's full of sticky rice.

While they're much too time consuming and expensive (not to mention the intellectual property issues) to make for sale, I've posted the plans for the Mario rice molds at Thingiverse so anyone can have their own molds cut.