Basic bentos today for a planning meeting I'll be at for most of the day. Have no sitter so food for The Kidlet is a necessity. I am particularly proud of today's bentos as I managed to master making omelets Japanese-style! Plus mine is mostly transformed leftovers.

( Pics and notes... )

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Read about my obsession on today's blog post.

In honor of Sesame Street's 40th Anniversary, and this weeks bentochallenge.



DH wanted Cookie Monster for his bento.
Left tier has a Cookie Monster made from Jasmine Rice dyed blue with Nori for his mouth and eyes, on top of a leaf of Romaine Lettuce. Below Cookie Monster is some left over Mongolian beef.
Right tier has 3 chocolate chip cookies with the letter "C" drawn on with Buttercream (C is for cookie, after all,) Blue cheese dressing in yellow silicon mold, baby carrots and Celery.



I chose Big Bird for mine.

Left tier has Big Bird made from Jasmine rice dyed yellow, with a cheese beak and eyes colored with food markers. He sits atop a Romaine Lettuce and Mongolian Beef nest.
Right tier has 2 chocolate chip cookies, seedless red grapes, and sliced starfruit.

Number 143 has nothing to do with Sesame Street, it's a special request from one of the local policemen. I tried making his patch, but my food markers fail me once again, even after buying a new brand. But if it saves me from getting pulled over, it served its purpose, right? erm.



Turkey, Provolone cheese and lettuce with Honey Mustard sandwich, surrounded by chocolate chip cookies, seedless red grapes, Skittles, and some Tostitos.

xposted to bentochallenge

I'm stubbornly clinging to the idea that summer isn't all gone - although all I need is to look out of the windowat the grey, wet, windy, YUCKY weather... So I'm having my little bit of summer here in the bento instead...

Bento # 656 Spaghetti and spicy sauce, covered with a flower made of ½ egg, green pepper and carrots. Corn Cob. more green pepper, grapes on a skewer. Shaslik from a can.

I believe it was on this blog that someone posted a link to the "History of Bento" documentary hosted on YouTube. Wonderful little film. One thing about the documentary was that when it interviewed people about their bento boxes, I noticed the meals were a lot simpler than what I imagined them to be. One guy in particular (a fisherman whose floating, round box was being showcased) was eating nothing but rice with a few strands of brown seaweed sprinkled on top.

Outside of the city (whose boxes seem to be the more typical ones showcased...especially those made for children or theme-based) are the bentos far more simpler and with less ingredients?

It's starting to get cold around here now, I don't think I'll feel my toes again til march, so the pasta with tomato and pepper sauce is in a separate box to be microwaved come lunchtime.  The other box has a mini pork pie, the last madeleines, a laughing cow cheese triangle, some cherry tomatoes and some sesame biscuit things. 

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

i have a bunch of pics trapped on my old camera and can't get them off bc the cord is borked. oh well. borrowed camera ftw. here (with contents listed under each) are this week's bentos thus far:

jalepeno shrimp tomatoes over brown rice with cumin. top tier is pomegranate in one side, avadado with lime juice and a babybel in the other.


yellow and green zucchini sauteed with cherry tomatoes and herbs. cut up pear with blue cheese wedge and walnuts.


whole wheat pasta, andouille sausage, left over sauteed zucchini with more tomatoes added. plain yogurt with pomegranate seeds and walnuts.


sliced steak over greenbeans with a hot cherry pepper on top. pears with blue cheese wedge and some walnuts. not pictured is the salad greens i will probably put everything on before i eat it, now that i realize exactly how protein centric this lunch is.

Today's lunch:



( Bird's Eye View )

Clockwise from Bottom Left:
1 - Blackberries
2 - Stewed Acorn Squash
3 - Onion, Mushroom & Feta Pastie
4 - Broccoli
5 - Tamagoyaki
6 - Carrots
7 - Cherry Tomato

WW Flex Points = 6

( Veggie & Cheese Pasties Recipe )

 

( Stewed Acorn Squash Recipe )

Dementedchris guest blogs about her Beijing food trip on Kitchen Cow.

http://www.hapabento.com/2009/11/10/quinoa-2-ways-2-bento-box/

http://www.hapabento.com/2009/11/10/quinoa-2-ways-2-bento-box/#comments

 

Chicken teriyaki patties with edamame, crab shumai, grapes, steamed rice with furikaki.
( Little D's bento box, too. )</div>

 Here is BoPeep's flower ham and cheese sandwich with apple slices, grapes, raspberries and baby carrots. 

It is all the bikes' fault. I'd all but forgotten I'd bought those bike-shaped pasta but when I saw them in my bag of "funny pasta" I keep around, I got the idea to the traffic light scenario. And since it's far too seldom I have a reason to use my hiragana-cutters, I leapt to the possibility here and wrote とまれ (STOP!)

The horribly overexposed blob in the corner is a Cinnamoroll-shaped egg btw. I hate photographing eggs...

Bento # 655 Egg, corn cob. Hotwings. Broccoli. Mini farfalle with spicy sauce. Pasta bikes. Traffic light is nori and bell peppers. とまれ（止まれ） made out of carrot

Leftover Bruschetta from tonight's dinner are the main part then there are multi coloured tomatoes, some sort of sesame biscuit thing, two fruit gummys and some druit fruits and almonds and then a sort of italian brioche/cornetto thing with protective baking paper in case the apricot jam oozes.  The brioche thing was the result of a terrible recipe that managed to produce something delicious but was so not what I set out to cook!

After a week of no bento, here's #4! I was pleased with how this one turned out visually, even though I'm sure there's still room for improvement. Same for the photography. I'm definitely getting more used to how much food I need for a satisfying lunch.



Top: baby carrots, two leftover meatballs, brussels sprouts
Bottom: the rest of the brussels sprouts, roast beef and swiss cheese wrap

Bento #3, yesterday's bento, didn't come out that great, so I'll put it behind the cut.

( Bento #3 )

Comfort food

Chicken noodle casserole with a very small amount of mashed potatoes
Red and green grapes

Snackish

Grapes, flower/star carrots, pumpkin cake muffins, peanuts, Hershey's kiss, hotdog crab

I want to have more vegetables in my lunches, but I can't really get the fresh stuff. Anyone know any recipes (or where to find them) for frozen vegetables in one or two servings?

As always, if my pictures are too big, let me know. :-) Thanks!

I haven't posted in a while, but I haven't had time to make a bento for lunch lately.  So here's today's lunch.



Right Section: ham sandwich with muenster, pickles and mustard
Left Section: apple sauce, salad (w/ carrots, tomatoes and red peppers) and caesar dressing