Tuesday bento
For last Tuesday’s bento lunch I used the barbecue-flavour chicken strips Jac cooked on Sunday afternoon, along with leftover coleslaw, broccoli and marinated mushroom salad, and sweet potato wedges. I’d also asked Jac to bake me an extra potato or two so I could boof up the salad with it.
I used a little lettuce to create an edible divider between the chicken and the broccoli/mushrooms. The chicken looks like it’s burnt, but the barbecue flavour was really delicious. I always try to add in extra salad by placing the chicken or other items on a bed of greens (which I did in this case). I tend to eat everything that is edible in my bento box, which is of course very good if it’s mostly salad.
I chopped the leftover sweet potato wedges into cubes. I also chopped up one of the plain baked potatoes into cubes and seasoned them with a little garlic salt and black pepper before mixing them through the salad. I was in the mood for a big salad, which is why I used this particular bento box for my lunch.
We found these excellent plastic containers at Woolworths supermarket! They are Decor Tellfresh Quarters and are rectangular (with rounded corners) with four removable white compartments. I was keen to give them a go, and for this particular bento, I removed two of the compartments and put salad in that half of the container. Obviously, this Decor container isn’t cutesy, but it’s not at all expensive (can’t remember the exact price – around AU$8.00 or so) and let’s face it, if you live in Perth where there appears to be no bento gear shops and you don’t want to trawl eBay or internet stores to buy bento boxes, it’s just perfect for bento! On the topic of bento box leakage however, I probably wouldn’t put anything too liquid in these containers.
So this was Jac’s lunch. The cupcake moulds were a little too tall for the Decor container, the mini cupcake ones too small for the amount of coleslaw I wanted to put in them, so I used a paper bento food cup instead. We had roughly the same amount of chicken, broccoli salad and coleslaw. She had a slightly smaller salad than me, but I packed her some bread and butter too (not pictured). Jac thought this new lunch box was great!
I packed us both fresh strawberries, papaya and watermelon. This has become my favourite lunch time fruit combination. I’ll be sad when they go out of season – especially the papaya. I loved papaya when I was a child growing up in Malaysia, and have only recently rediscovered it. This papaya we’ve been buying from Woolworths is grown near the Ord River in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
