Quibbling Dot Net

Bento 3!

Originally uploaded by tiffany bridge

I declared the bento in the new box just as much of a success as those in the first box. I found that the sandwich roll on the first day was an inefficient use of space- I guess that’s the other thing about constraining to a bento box- you have to be more sparing with things like white bread that don’t have much in the way of nutrition. But since then, I’ve had bento with edamame and bento with multigrain bread, which both did much better.

The best advice I’ve heard about sticking with a bento-making routine is making sure to have a supply of easily-packed food sitting around, whether in your pantry, fridge, or freezer. When you cook, set aside small portions for lunches, etc. I have the leftovers thing pretty much mastered, but had not managed to keep enough stuff around to make sure I was balancing out that leftover mac’n'cheese with some veggies.

So I’ve started my joubisai, my “always available food” stash. Tom and I frequently (about once a week) have dinner in a manner we call “grazing.” Basically, I go to the store and buy celery, carrots, cucumber, bell pepper, whole grain bread, some cheese, and some kind of meat that doesn’t have to be cooked, plus some hummus or other dip, and for dinner we eat a giant bowl of raw veggies with some carbs, protein, and dairy. No one has to cook, but we aren’t ordering pizza, either. Win-Win!

I started from grazing supplies- in my fridge I’ve got a bunch of cut up veggies, some cheese, a small ham, hummus, plus half a loaf of multigrain bread. There are some leftovers as well- some beef from dinner the other night, some leftover chili and beef barley soup. I also picked up a bag of frozen gyoza that didn’t have any creepy unpronounceable ingredients, and I’ve got edamame from the farm in the freezer as well. So between that and the parade of assorted leftovers (Thanksgiving is next week! Mmmm turkey bento!), I think I’ve got a pretty good start.

   

A non-traditional bento

Originally uploaded by tiffany bridge

A few months ago, I decided that it was completely ridiculous to spend $10/day buying lunch when there was perfectly good, even BETTER food sitting in leftovers containers in my fridge. I set a very reasonable goal of buying lunch no more than twice per week. On the couple of days per week when I’d buy lunch, I tried to limit it to veggie-oriented options- the veggie sub at Quizno’s, the hummus-and-veggie sandwich at Cosi, or at most, the chicken and spinach greek wrap from the organic sandwich shop around the corner.

I did pretty well. And since I had been reading a lot about bento and how people were using it to save money AND improve their health, after I had proved that I could stick with this program, I decided to get some proper bento equipment.

The basic idea behind bento, aside from the simple idea of a boxed lunch, is that you pack the box a certain way, with certain proportions of food, and then the number of milliliters the box holds roughly corresponds to the number of calories you’ve packed in it. The Japanese guideline is 3 parts starch (usually sticky rice) to 2 parts vegetable to 1 part protein. Now, I certainly do not need that much white rice in my life, so I will probably tend to err on the side of extra veg, or some extra protein from a lean source. But the idea of constraining my lunch to a particular size of container, and putting some thought into balancing it for nutrition, as opposed to grabbing a container of whatever leftovers there were from dinner, in whatever sized container we happened to have on hand, is appealing.

One certainly does not need a fancy Japanese bento box in order to follow these principles, but there is an advantage to having some bento-specific equipment: Lunch boxes made for the Asian market, particularly for Japan, have a greater emphasis on being watertight- most American-made containers tend to be designed with the idea that the container will be sitting on a shelf in a fridge, or at least generally transported in an upright fashion. A bento box with a watertight seal is designed to be thrown into your bag with everything else you’re carrying that day.

Aside from that, it’s nice to have something attractive to eat out of. As someone pointed out on one of the bento blogs I read (and there are lots of them, so I can’t necessarily lay hands on the quote right now), we could all eat perfectly functionally from paper or plastic plates, but we buy good dishes because presentation is important. So since the idea of this exercise is to make my lunch both more convenient AND more appealing than going out, an attractive container is a good idea.

So I ordered a box from JBOX, which is the safe-for-work version of JList. (Taking a wrong turn on JList leads to scary Japanese adult products. Japanese erotica is truly frightening.) I got a bento box (with a pleasant leaf design, rather than anything too cute/blinged out/Hello Kitty-oriented), a little sauce/dressing container, and some silicone food cups for flexible containment of food that might mess up the other food if it touches it. Because the package is shipping from Japan, it hasn’t arrived yet, but in the meantime, the Bento Store Locator indicated that there was a good Asian market not too far from our place where you could get stuff. Tom had indicated interest in participating in my bento experiment, so I wanted a slightly larger container for his lunches, preferably something a bit more plain and manly.

As an aside- my trip to the Asian market was hilarious. I was definitely the only white person there, and almost all the signs were in Korean. The cashier looked genuinely surprised to see me, and spoke loudly and slowly to me to ensure that I understood. Fantastic. I would definitely go back.

I found some nice, watertight and dishwasher safe clear containers for Tom, and another simple leaf-motif box for me, complete with inner dividing containers.

So this morning, I packed my first bento from leftovers and stuff I had in the fridge (Tom had a lunch appointment with a friend and did not need a packed lunch today). I’ve got carrots with hummus, beef with onions and peppers, which will go on the roll (which also has some cheese stashed inside it). Because I haven’t constrained my lunch to this size before, I also grabbed a large Asian pear from the farmer’s market. I hate trying to work while I’m hungry, but don’t want to defeat the portion-control purpose of the box. So I figure that if this lunch isn’t filling enough, a big ol’ piece of fruit won’t destroy my efforts.

The box fit snugly inside my new bag, along with the pear for hands-free transport to the office.

Coming soon: Keeping a supply of packable, grabbable food for when I’m trying to balance my meal.

Tonight, for dinner:

Pasta with prosciutto and peas, seasoned with a little shallot pepper. Sauteed spinach and mushrooms with cannellini beans and garlic. Apple cider.

Mmmm, delish.  Especially after not eating very well this week. Tomorrow, for my celebratory birthday dinner, fajitas and margaritas at Los Tios.

Despite my avowed love for breakfast food, and my particular love for breakfast food wrapped in a tortilla, it had never occurred to me to make huevos rancheros until Deb posted about it at smittenkitchen. Of course, no sooner had she posted about it that the chickens at the farm started molting and there weren’t any eggs. And then the eggs were all getting bought up before we arrived at the farm. So finally this week, we ordered some eggs in advance and tonight… I made huevos rancheros more or less like Deb suggests.

WHERE has this been all my life? I can see this becoming a regular addition to the Bridge repertoire of “food when I don’t feel like cooking.” Unfortunately, with tomatoes being out of season, it’s hard to get good ones so I ended up using salsa from a jar, but when we start getting tomatoes in the late spring, it’ll be even better with salsa fresca.

Our beloved and much-missed friends The Wasyliks were in town this week for another beloved friend’s wedding, so we got to have them over for dinner on Thursday night.  We served steamed broccoli, mashed potatoes with chard, and garlic-rosemary lamb roast, and pretty much everything except the garlic and the butter and sour cream that went into the potatoes was from a local source. The potatoes, chard, and broccoli came from our CSA box, the rosemary came from our backyard, and the lamb came from our butcher, who specializes in locally raised and pastured meats.  Even the lemon olive oil the lamb was rubbed with, while not local to us, was purchased by Tom’s parents from a producer local to them and then given to us as a gift.

As you might expect, everything was delicious, even though none of it had a particularly fancy presentation. Mike and Tom, who generally eat broccoli because they should rather than out of any particular love for it, agreed that it was especially tasty.

During dinner conversation, Dineen asked what had made us jump so wholeheartedly into local sourcing of our food. It was a good chat, and I realized that I had written somewhat incompletely about these issues in this space before the Wordpress accident obliterated my archives, so I thought I’d ramble about that some more.

The more I learn about food production and our globalized food system, the more complicated it all proves to be. So I’m not saying I have all the answers, or that I’m doing anything but oversimplifying. At the same time, I can only act on the information I have as I understand it, and I find that preferable to throwing up my hands and buying a box of Froot Snax at the grocery store. I also recognize that I am fortunate enough to be in a financial position to act on this information, and that not everyone is. I am well aware that when you have $50 to feed your family with for the week, 14-cent ramen is high on your shopping list. However, since I DO have the financial means to make other choices, I will, and hope that as more people use their buying power to make similar choices, those choices will become more accessible to people who are less fortunate than I.

I suppose you could say that this really started way back when I was living in Pittsburgh. Tom came to visit me one weekend, and had promised to bring me caprese salad from the farmer’s market near his house. He showed up grinning, with tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, and a bouquet of wildflowers, “all produced within a hundred miles of [his] house!”  The wildflowers were a little wilty from the long car trip, but the tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella were some of the tastiest I’d ever had up to that point. 

Gradually, the farmer’s market became a regular part of our routine. And after all the food and Chinese product scares from last year and earlier this year, I started to think more about where it is that my food comes from.

We get rather a lot of our food from other countries. A great deal of what you see in your grocery store comes from other countries, where the regulations governing farming, processing, and production are implemented and enforced by governments we did not elect, and where the food is produced by people I will never meet. That’s all fine and good for my cell phone, my notebooks, and even my clothes, but it’s rather an overextended chain of trust for something as basic as the food I consume.

Aside from heavy thoughts about world trade policy, food that hasn’t had to travel as far to get to me is fresher (and therefore better for me) and tastes better. That makes me want to eat more of it, which is good for me too, at least as far as fruit and veg are concerned. That makes it a superior product, and deserving of my proudly capitalist dollars. Continue reading “food politics, deliciousness, and becoming a locavore and ethicurean”

[Baskets of eggplants] (LOC)

Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

In our farm box this week, we got two humongous eggplants. HUGE. And we have no idea what to do with it- Tom has not previously enjoyed his encounters with baba ghanouj, so I didn’t want to go leaping straight to that. Off to the cookbook shelf, then. I pulled down the New Best Recipe Cookbook, The Silver Spoon, Mario Batali’s Molto Italiano, and a random vegetarian cookbook I bought years ago for ideas.

The vegetarian cookbook is kind of useless, as it doesn’t have an index that features ingredients, so I didn’t spend a lot of time with that. Batali’s cookbook had lots of interesting ideas, but most of them seemed like things I’d rather try after establishing once and for all whether I even like eggplant. The Silver Spoon had some interesting but classic-sounding recipes for stuffed eggplant, breaded eggplant, etc. But after noting that we also got a zucchini and some tomatoes in the box, and have lots of fresh herbs growing in the backyard, I think we’re going to try the Best Recipe’s ratatouille recipe. I’ll let you know what we think, and we’ll try some of the other recipes next week if we get more.

We also got a little bag of really delicious apples, most of which were immediately devoured. There are a couple of acorn squash, which will no doubt be roasted later on this week, and perhaps eaten with some of the potatoes we continue to get. Oh yeah, and a little bag of edamame, which will enjoy boiling and consuming probably on Wednesday while Tom is in class.

We’ve only got a few weeks left on our CSA, and I must say, I’m going to miss it. Our grocery bills have dropped, our food quality has improved, and we’ve been able to freeze/preserve some for this coming winter to keep the deliciousness going.

This past week was the beginning of potatoes at the CSA. I learned that the potatoes you see at the supermarket are generally from last year’s harvest, so they’re about 10 months old by the time you actually get to eat them. That’s perfectly fine- one of the great things about potatoes is how long they keep when stored properly- but it does mean that potatoes from the farm, just over 24 hours since they were dug up, are a much better experience.   

I roasted some of our CSA potatoes last night, with some thyme and rosemary from Tom’s garden, and some lemon pepper, salt, and olive oil. Oh My. They were delicious, definitely the best potatoes I’d ever had. It’s a subtle thing, but there is definitely a better flavor- more potato-y, for lack of a better way to describe it.

I am now giving very serious consideration to adding potatoes to my list of Things I Will Never Again Buy At the Supermarket. The list currently includes eggs, peaches, berries of all types, and tomatoes. 

And don’t worry, all- I got extra potatoes so I can make potato salad out of them for the bbq this weekend.