Celery - Nature's Bento Divider

I really do need to invest in some real dividers...the celery only works so well. Mmm apples and cheddar sitting in Cali Slaw sauce. Carrot sticks work well too, but only if you cut them right -- round does not work well for liquid-proof stacking.

(That is a saran-wrapped oblong tuna onigiri, or rice ball, with sesame seeds. My onigiri are always infamously lazy. I really adore the ones you can buy wrapped and ready-made at Japanese groceries. The plastic kept it from the same fate as the cheese-and-apples.)

American Bento?

You're going to notice as we post our lunches/dinners/whatever meal our bento is for the day that I don't really have a lot of the pretty supplies that Colleen does. Rather, mine aren't traditionally "bento." I do actually have a two-tiered, very typically male bento (with the henohenomoheji face even!), but components were lost in the wash by family members and thus it's far from air-tight. That, and since I'm trying to be a little healthier and slim down a little bit, allowing myself a nearly 900-calorie bento meal isn't very helpful.

But then I stumbled upon the most random end-cap at Waldbaums ever (not that I'm complaining):



Now...what does this look like to you? Because to me it looks like a bento set -- complete with box, snack container, and silverware. In fact, it looks like a perfect facsimile of a single-tier, even down to the size. (The Cars container, which was supposed to come with the round bowl and lid you see on the greenish set in back, is about... 5"x7" I want to say. I'll have to take a proper ruler to it to be sure.)

I passed this end-cap every time I got groceries, and I can't seem to keep myself from going at least once or twice a week. It was part in amusement and part in total fascination -- "What's with these American bentos?" I ended up buying a couple of snack containers for Colleen because they ended up being about thirty cents each. Eventually I got myself a sandwich box...which I've so far used for guacamole.

Finally, because Lightning McQueen there kept watching me go, I checked the price, assuming it'd be at least ten bucks. So when it said it was less than two...well come on, I did need a new lunch box.

It just goes to show you that these things can crop up in the strangest, most unexpected places, so keep your eyes open. Granted our friends on the clearance end-caps might not have been popular enough to make it in the mainstream supermarket, but the better for us!

Food-making is Serious Business

The fun thing about a bento is that you have to think not only of what goes into one, but where that food comes from. I don't know how long Colleen has been trying for, but I've been attempting a decent food garden since I was in grade school. It's only last year that I actually got a clue as to what I was actually doing!

So, as a reward for being so productive today (including getting groceries, partly for said bento-making), I went out to Home Despot to pick up the beginnings of the season's seed-starting. (I have no idea what it is with me and hyphenated nonwords tonight.)

Tonight's purchases:
Burpee ecofriendly seed starting 36-cell greenhouse kit
1 x "" Catnip
1 x "" Basil
1 x "" Pea, Super Sugar Snap
1 x "" Carrot, Royal Kuroda
1 x "" Cucumber, Early Pride Hybrid
1 x "" Tomato, Sweet Snack Hybrid
1 x "" Tomato, Super Sweet 100 Hybrid
1 x "" Spinach, Bloomsdale Long-Standing
1 x "" Spinach, Early Prolific Hybrid
1 x "" Sunflower, Super Snack Hybrid
1 x Burpee Booster, soil inoculant for beans and peas (I have no idea if this will work, but it was on a limited run so I figured I would grab one of the three there before they were gone.)

First off, you'll notice I have two different kinds of some plants. I'm going to be watching them pretty closely; the Sweet Snack Hybrid tomato is more a grape size and one of Burpee's "Prizewinner" line, and the Super Sweet 100 Hybrid is a cherry type billed as being very prolific. Prolific in my small space is good. As for the spinach, the Early Prolific is ready for harvest only about a week before the Long-Standing, but they both have different resiliencies (Bloomsdale is slow to bolt, giving more harvest time, but the Early Prolific is resistant to rust), and I don't know what's going to crop up this year (haha, "crop" up), so I want to be prepared.

At worst, I will have a LOT of spinach.

These may or may not be the only plants that end up in the garden -- it's a lot considering the 6' x 8' space I'm working in, which gets limited light and seems to have fairly poor soil. I'm going to see what I can do about rigging some sort of reflection cape to make the most of what we're getting. The space is right under the overhang of a tree that I couldn't possibly hurt just for the sunlight. I'm also going to see what all I can't do about setting up some tiers or raised beds, if that might make things a little easier/allow for more plants. I do know that I'd like, eventually, some strawberries and cantaloupe.

I just crunched one of the Super Sweet 100 seeds with my elbow. Might move these now.

And then, there's the seed-starter -- last year, I used cardboard egg cartons and potting soil sitting on a cooking pan too big for the stove. I wanted so badly to be eco. It didn't work well -- the cardboard didn't like being so wet so frequently, and our cats did. Potting soil and water consistently ALL OVER the windowsill. Bad move. So this year -- something different.



True to its eco name, you can see that it has very limited packaging, I would hardly call it "excess" -- that shiny lump of plastic wrap is the only part that isn't specifically useful or biodegradable. I was super-pleased to find too, on taking off the cardboard collar, a "Burpee Plant-O-Gram to help you keep track of your seedlings," even if I can pretty much guarantee I'm going to lose it immediately.

The kit also comes with a little packet of plant food, and each cell is equipped with a "super growing pellet." I figure when the seeds are germinated, I can move them to another container and start another set in the cells with new pellets. The pellet refills were refreshingly cheap -- only three dollars for the 36 -- and when you've used the greenhouse cells as long as you care too, they're made of PLA, a completely biodegradable plant-based plastic.


So, this is what I'm up to at this hour...that, and trying to figure out what's going into the bento for tomorrow.