A Healthy Alternative

Lest you get the impression that all I do is hobnob around eating dessert for dinner and making cupcakes by the dozen, I thought I'd post about another one of my recent eating habits. This is actually sort of a hybrid from several sources.

The first is Japanese-inspired Bento boxes. Traditionally, these are either bought "to-go" at train stations or convenience stores, or hand prepared by the woman of the household. Sometimes the food is prepared to look like animals or flowers or other artistic impressions. Lately, they've become quite popular in the US for either moms to prepare for their kids or for young adults to make for themselves. Key to this new interpretation are miniature servings of food, cute compartmentalized lunchboxes, and any food that's been shaped to look like something else.

The second, is my passion for reading food blogs. I love to cook, and I'm always interested in seeing new foods, techniques, tools, recipes, you name it. So when I don't have time to cook myself, I live vicariously through food bloggers. These inspired bloggers will blog at long length and with many pictures about recipes, ingredients, and foods that they love. I've made a habit of reading through these delicious blogs for inspiration when I don't feel like having spaghetti or cereal for the 5th day in a row. Some favorites are:

* Smitten Kitchen
* Homesick Texan
* FatFree Vegan Kitchen
* TasteSpotting
* Brownie Points
* Vegan Lunch Box

The important one I'm focusing on today is Vegan Lunch Box. It's written by the mother in a vegan family who prepares a cute and tasty vegan lunch for her son (Shmoo is his internet alias) every day. Her reasoning is that he won't feel as awkward about having to explain his family's vegan lifestyle or not having the cool juice boxes and string cheese everyone else has if he has the coolest lunch. Seems reasonable to me!

I love reading this blog and getting ideas for things that I can bring with me to eat for lunch at work or school. I like that bringing my lunch is cheaper, and usually healthier, than buying my lunch every day, but I run out of inspiration frequently.

Matt has been watching my enthusiasm for reading about bento lunches and recipes and cute foods for awhile with some degree of amusement. For my birthday, he searched all over the internet, and put together a package of great and exciting bento supplies! Among these are miniature cookie cutters for cutting vegetables, cheese (and cookie dough) into star and animal shapes, a sesame seed grinder, rice molds to make Japanese onigiri, and the piece de resistance...the same lunchbox that Shmoo from Vegan Lunch Box has.

Since then, I've been striving to use my lunchbox in creative and tasty ways to keep my budget and my eating habits healthy. My coworkers in particular are always greatly entertained by my "very organized" lunches. Below are photos of a couple of the lunches I've made recently.


I had this one a week or two ago; using up leftovers!
green box: Winter Vegetable Hash with major substitutions to use up things we had on hand and not have to buy things we didn't. Sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes, spinach instead of kale, butternut instead of acorn squash, and no mushrooms because I hate them.
blue small box: smoked cheese cubes
pink box: green peeps marshmallow candies
blue large box: strawberries
black furry body in the upper right corner: Tabi decided to help me make lunch.

This is today's lunch:
green box: sliced peach
pink box: little sweet japanese crackers
blue small box: nested inside this is an orange box with sun dried tomato and feta for my wrap, as well as a handful of Trader Joe's fat peanut butter cups.
blue large box: wrap made with vegetable cream cheese, cucumber, tomato and spinach wrap bread. (I know this is strange; I need to hit the store soon, the kitchen is looking bare)