Lunches

In a lot of ways, things have been hard recently. It took me a long, frustrating time to find a job - not just a job that I liked, or that paid me enough, but just a job. As I'd moved into somewhere in March that, with my optimism, I was pretty positive that I'd certainly be able to afford when I got my new job, and surely, that wouldn't be more than a few weeks, right?, money has been...lacking. When I finally did get a new job, my previous job screwed me over in a fairly massive and unexpected fashion. Which really, I should have expected, seeing as they've been underpaying me and generally being totally unappreciative for the last year. This screwing over didn't really help. Sometimes I think about that Sheryl Crow song, No One Said It Would Be Easy. Some things are good, and generally things are beginning to very much look up again - I've got some amazing people in my life, my new job is going well - but money is still stupidly tight.

I've done this before, in that I know that I can live off $20 or less a week. It's a bit more of a challenge now though, as before I could go and steal as much food as possible from my Mom whenever I went home. Now I'm living off about £10 a week - and £7.50 of that goes on the fresh vegetable box that my flatmate and I get delivered. When you're seriously pushing the limits like this, and still trying to eat a fairly healthy and well balanced diet (hence the large spend on vegetables), it can get really difficult to come up with anything that isn't a soup or some kind of roasted vegetable. Especially when it comes to lunch.

I'm already eating miso soup for breakfast - it tastes fantastic, it's really good for you, it's got loads of vitamins in, and I can get over three weeks worth for £3.30. I love Japanese food anyway, and although my co-workers think that I'm a bit odd, it really works for me. Another bit of inspiration I've taken is from the Japanese is the bento lunch.

This is what I had today.


On the top are two yaki onigiri (grilled rice balls), one with fish furikake and the other mixed with cooked broccoli, a Babybel cheese, and three cherry tomatoes, and on the bottom is a mini-burger with teriyaki sauce, three more cherry tomatoes, and two-thirds of an orange. All in all, this meal probably cost me around £1.

This type of lunch is generally what I'm making these days - it's mostly rice and vegetables in some sort of way, but it's healthy, has loads of vegetables in it, and I'm still getting enough protein in my diet. It's working out well although I have to say, I'm really missing chocolate!

The life which bounced

In my new-found bento obsession, I've been eating a lot of rice. And when I say that, I really mean that white sticky rice has begun to dominate my lunches. Onigiri, or rice balls, with all sorts of fillings, fluffy rice pressed into the bottom of a container and then covered with flavoured sprinkles both make up the majority of my lunch these days. Along with some miso soup, the occasional hard-boiled egg (sometimes a tea egg) and some vegetables or fruit, my lunch has become one of my favourite parts of the day. Strangely, I've never felt better. It's great - I'm never hungry until about 7 or 8 at night now. I used to come home absolutely starving after having eaten at least one packet of biscuits at work. So the bento-style lunches are definitely a winner. ^_^

The obsession with them is also growing in leaps and bounds. Last weekend, while dragging a friend from Cardiff two the two Japanese-food markets that are within walking distance of my flat, I saw that they were having an odd sort of yard sale (odd, because it was really kind of a sidewalk sale. In Piccadilly Circus. Where there is barely space to walk to begin with.) in front of the Japan Centre. Walking up, my eye was immediately caught by the four small-looking bento boxes they had for £2.99. My inner Japanese 5-year-old kicked in, I grabbed the hot pink box, and clutched it to my chest while digging in my bag for my cash. I felt like running home to immediately make lunch, just so I could put it in the box and then eat it. I also bought a pair of small chopsticks with penguins on them. They are not pink, and they also do not fit into the chopstick holder in the bento box. It was a very sad moment. I've been rubberbanding them to the top, which is working well.

Now all I need is to start cutting out star shapes, and hearts, and making faces on my eggs, and I'll be full-fledged into the obsession. Maybe I can knit a holder for my bento box?

Hmmm...this will take planning...

Little boxes of goodness

Recently, I've been making a really big effort to take my lunches to work with me. This might not be considered newsworthy or interesting to most people, but for me - someone who hates the idea of just having a sandwich for lunch with some crisps (chips, for those of you back home) - taking lunch to work is an effort. It means thinking about what I want to eat all week on my precious weekend time, shopping for said food, and usually then cooking something.

However, I've also started right in on a new obsession. Bento boxes. And me being myself, someone who adores Japanese food, I'm attempting to create them using mostly Japanese food. Probably not as the Japanese would actually cook them, but as Japanese as I can get from the various stores in my area. So this week I've been eating onigiri with furikake, miso soup, little sweet buns with aduki bean filling, strange Hello Kitty gum, and I even attempted a daikon pickle. And it's great! I'm loving trying to pack everything into a little box, and have it look nice.

I'm feeding my obsession with the help of here, here, and here. So now in addition to all the knitting things slowly taking over my lone bookshelf, bento-making supplies are slowly starting to creep into my kitchen. This flat might not be big enough for more than one hobby...