Tuesday bento – lamb cutlets, vegetables and salads

I was really looking forward to the arrival of these new bento boxes I bought recently on eBay.

They are plastic bento boxes, two-tiered, with a lid and removal mini food divider for the top smaller tier and a black bento belt. I believe the two tiers hold a total of 750 mL, but I’m not sure of the breakdown per tier.

I’d mentioned to Jac sometime ago that I’d really like to have french lamb cutlets for bento, and so for this Tuesday, she’d bought us two french lamb cutlets each. She simply seasoned them with salt and pepper, then panfried them on both sides until they were a perfect, juicy medium. To go with the lamb, I steamed green beans and baby carrots (another item I’d mentioned to Jac – we had some trouble finding baby carrots anywhere, until this week). As a sauce for the lamb I included a little container of smokey barbecue sauce. I made two salads as well – a potato salad, with thinly sliced cucumber, finely chopped bread-and-butter dill pickles and chopped homegrown spring onions. We didn’t have any potato salad dressing and we’d run out of mayo, so I used a little coleslaw dressing for the potato salad. It turned out great! The second salad was very simple – lettuce, cucumber, red capsicum, cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas, and cubes of South Cape low fat feta cheese we bought from Woolworth’s. That low fat feta is surprisingly good. It may not taste quite as rich as full fat feta, but you don’t eat it and immediately think “Eww, is this diet cheese or something?” :) You may notice that I placed the potato salad in bed of lettuce, which I positioned to act as a food divider separating the two salads. I highly recommend the edible food divider! :)

I packed the same lunch for Jac, except that instead of barbecue sauce, I gave her mint jelly to go with her lamb. It’s funny – I like peppermints and chocolate with mint and most mint-flavoured sweet items (mint ice cream, mint slice, mint biscuits etc); Jac won’t eat any of those at all. But she loves mint sauce with lamb, and I won’t eat mint sauce at all. Interesting!

To avoid spillage en transit, I wrapped our sauce dishes tightly with GLAD wrap. I could’ve used containers which had lids, but these new plastic cups were just the perfect shape to fit in the bento boxes, and I was compelled to use them.