I made this for work last Tuesday because, as per usual, I was craving eggs. I crammed, and I do mean squished most of the sandwich in the bottom tier. When I opened my bento at lunch time I had to really dig in to get that sammich out.

Well shoot, I’ve just gone and put off writing this blog for a whole week and can’t find or remember what was in the bottom half of the bento! What a shame.

Where there’s bad business in a delayed blog, I have good news on the home front. I just passed my TEAS nursing exam in the 98th percentile. Whoo hoo! I’m not completely out of these harrowing times yet (ha…) as I have to recertify my EMT skills Sunday. If I don’t, I’m out of a job on the 30th. :/

Double the bento!
February 28, 2011
Posted by Nicki @ 11:29 pm

My boyfriend and I have an agreement of sorts that when I remember, and when I’m in the mood, I make him lunches for work. This is the first bento I made for him. When he saw me making sandwich cut outs the other night he asked if I was making some for him too (which I wasn’t) but I ended up adding one of mine in his normal sandwich bag to surprise him and I think he liked it.

When I showed him this bento though, the response was, “I thought you weren’t going to make them cutesy like that.” Oops! Couldn’t help it. His rice needed soy sauce and I thought he might like the panda best….! Hopefully he doesn’t end up eating it alone in a corner to hide his shame. D:

Bento for my boyfriend

Here it is! For lunch tomorrow we’re both getting two soy sauce eggs (because I liked them so much the last time), about 2 cups of rice with furikake (he’s getting a little more and I’m getting a little less than that though), some edamame I cooked with the soysauce leftover from the eggs and water and jello. My lunch is packed pretty tight so there shouldn’t be much shifting around in there but I’m worried about the boyfriend’s since he’ll probably throw the whole thing into his backpack. Danger!

No nasty string cheese this time! I’m working another 24 tomorrow so I may have to grab some cheese and perhaps an apple on the side. Mmm.

Lazy, tired Bento

Posted by Nicki @ 10:42 am

So the night of the 25th was definitely a time where I would have much rather gone to sleep early and purchased lunch the next day. Getting home near 11:00pm after 10 hours of working and then waking up at 5am for a 24 hour shift is so frustrating! It is, unfortunately, my Friday/Saturday ritual….yaahooo. :/

I decided, in lieu of that, to make my bento for Saturday as quick as possible. I couldn’t have done it without my cheap-o rice cooker ($10 from Fry’s Electronics!) and the stock of hard-boiled eggs I had put in the fridge just the night before.

Lazy, sleepy bento

Lunch was a cup and a half of rice, two soy sauce hard-boiled eggs (recipe from here), a sliced kiwi, a stick of string cheese ripped in half and a little bottle of soy sauce. I’m finally starting to get to use my cute panda picks and dividers (hiding behind the cheese). I picked up the heart silicon cup at Michael’s craft store years ago for use in making mini cheesecakes. Just goes to show you can find bento supplies everywhere!

All in all, it turned out pretty well but I don’t think it was enough food. Also, I have learned to just leave the string cheese in its plastic pouch and carry it separately. Unbeknown to me, string cheese is packed with a watery substance inside the wrapper and as the cheese nears room-temperatures, the liquid releases and goes crawling all around the bottom of one’s bento. Not cool! It was made even worse after I tipped my bento on it’s side in my ambulance and the kiwi juice mixed in with the cheese juice! I’m glad I figured this all out before the nasty mess mixed with my delicious soy sauce eggs!

Nutella lunch!
February 26, 2011
Posted by Nicki @ 12:15 am

So all I had to do today was put a tiny amount of nutella (about 1 tbsp.) and pretty much my entire lunch was dipped in chocolate. It only added about 100 extra calories! Hi-yah! I felt pretty good about that today.

Lunch today (or yesterday now) was almond butter on whole wheat bread, cut into flowers, bunnies and bears and Nutella in the top box. I sliced an apple and attempted to fit the whole thing in the bottom but I ended up eating some of it before I could get it to close. I think I’ll need to chop smaller sizes for next time!

Off to bed with me as it’s 12:13AM and, although I just got settled in, I have to wake up at 5am and run a 24 hour shift at work. I hate this Friday/Saturday nightmare schedule. I think I should just sleep at station sometimes. I suppose that’s where my addiction to tea comes in!

My First Bento
February 24, 2011
Posted by Nicki @ 11:30 am

Hello everyone and welcome to my new blog! This is a bit of a grand idea of mine as I’m a girl who’s more prone to lose interest in my projects than see them through to completion. Here I am nonetheless, trying my very best to bring to the [as of yet...uninterested population of the Internet] my trials and tribulations of learning how to Bento among other things. I’m a huge hobbiest and no doubt my side projects will work their ways through here.

My reasons for attempting to create bentos are simple enough. First of all, I work a job where all of my shifts are 10 or 24 hours and buying out every day is starting to hurt my wallet. I need to find cheaper ways of eating (and avoiding fast food won’t hurt me either!!). Secondly, I spend most of my days at work (about 8 to 10 hours minimum) being completely sedentary and in all my active college years I’ve never seen my body start to balloon up like it has over the last few months.

Ah yes, I hear you asking already…”But what is a Bento Nicki?” Well I’ll tell you. Click here.

Gladware Bento

Here it is, in all of its boring, monotone, glory. My first bento….Ahh. So it’s not much to look at but it is healthy. I wasn’t feeling very hungry that day and ended up eating about half for lunch and the rest for dinner with still a little rice left over.

In the square glassware, I put 1 1/2 cup of rice (rice cooker cups measured while dry) with furikake (rice seasoning), two hardboiled eggs and a decent serving of salted edamame (soy beans Mmmm). In the round plastic container, I put half a package of firm tofu (drained in the microwave) and marinated with mustard, minced garlic and soy sauce with powdered chicken bouillon. I baked the tofu for 35 minutes or so at about 375 degrees in our oven. That’s one of my favorite quick, easy recipes for tofu I’ve made yet. The tofu is fairly salty but great with rice. ^_^

This actually isn’t the first bento I’ve attempted but it is the first successful one. One of the cardinal rules of making bentos is to keep things from getting moist (condensation is the enemy of fresh food) and I’ve struggled with it pretty bad.

The lessons I learned from this one are: hardboil and cool your eggs the night before. Cook the everliving soul out of your tofu (those things are little water sponges) AND once you drain the water from the edamame, let them cool in the pot a while (the heat will keep the steam rising out of them) and then deposit them on a paper towel for extra drainage. I also wiped the condensation off of the lids after I took them out of the fridge in the morning and it was perfect. It stayed fresh all day.

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