While last week’s Photo Friday post featured a recipe failure, this week’s features a recipe success: cheddar-thyme cornbread.  Lately, I’ve seen lots of pictures of cornbread with cheddar in it.  In fact, I think an issue of Everyday Food I was recently perusing had such a recipe.  But I didn’t like the recipe for some reason.  Then, I went off searching for other recipes.

One of the places I cruised was The Smitten Kitchen.  Smitten Kitchen is my guilty pleasure.  I pop into her blog when I want to ooh and aah and drool over food photography.  Really, hers is some of the best (in my opinion).  Then, I ooh and aah and giggle at the pictures she posts of her son (geez, that’s a photogenic baby).  And her recipes are just amazing.  Amazing because many are so complicated there is no way I’ll ever try them.  I read her blog because I think her food adventures in cooking are just the ultimate.  Anyhow, my perusing ran me across her bleu cheese scallion drop biscuits.  And to emulate the great Deb, I’ll just say that her bleu cheese turned into my cheddar, her scallion into my thyme, and her drop biscuits into my cornbread.  Don’t ask me why it worked out that way.  It just did.

And then after all that measuring, and mixing, and baking, two slices were buttered and tosted for breakfast the next morning with a spinach and egg omelet (of sorts).  I ate.  I sighed.  I was soooo content.

Today is Good Friday, and in South Louisiana, Easter weekend often means seafood for many families.  And today, I’m looking forward to enjoying boiled shrimp and crabs (OH MY!) at my parents house.  Then, I’m going to come home.  And no matter how much I’ve gorged on seafood, in a few hours, I’ll be hungry again.  Because boiled seafood, for me at least, just doesn’t keep me full forever.  In comes an easy bento for dinner.  I have today off since my workplace is closed on Good Friday.  A package of loose groundmeat spaghetti came out of the freezer.  Elbow macaroni was boiled (since that’s what I had).  In the bowl is a layer of macaroni, a layer of mozzarella, and a layer of spaghetti sauce.

To accompany the spaghetti, I have another small box of food.  Roasted cabbbage is my vegetable for this meal with a little smiley container of lemon juice.  For dessert, sliced oranges and 3 dark chocolate bites are included.  This should all make for a simple dinner, leaving me plenty of time to pack and get ready for tomorrow’s bento.  I work tomorrow, which means I’m supposed to have a food picture of my eat-at-home lunch.  YAY!

Have a lovely Friday everyone, and a great weekend.

Where do I begin with today’s bento?  I feel like I have so much to say that I don’t even really know where to start.  I guess I’ll start with saying how pleased I am with how it looks.  It is not often that I feel like I’ve packed a true bento box and not just a packed lunch.  But today, today I’ve hit my own personal bento nirvana.  Let’s take a look at what this box holds.  On the left is a panini with just plain old honey wheat bread with mozzarella cheese, spinach leaves from the farmer’s market, and some of the last of this week’s meatloaf.  Ahhh, I have high hopes that this thing is going to be overly tasty!  To the right of that bento-licious looking sandwich is a wedge of roasted cabbage with a small sauce bottle of lemon juice.  Roasted cabbage is a new-to-me item that will be featured on next Tuesday’s NTM post.  I’ll wait to say what I thought of it until then, but I will say that it appearing in my bento box is a positive sign.  We also have a few steamed carrots, a hard boiled eg, orange slices and two little pieces of dark chocolate.

This is beyond beyond.  I was looking for another different way to use the rest of that meatloaf and this sandwich came to mind.  Packed with the roasted cabbage, which is also my new recipe this week, and other leftovers from the fridge, I’m more than ready for lunch now!  Oh my!

When preparing to pack this lunch, I was really unsure of how to pack it.  I do not often pack sandwiches because I find them difficult to pack.  They don’t ever seem to fit right into the box and are always to high for the box I”m using.  However, this little plastic lunch container by Sterilite I found at Wal-Mart awhile back for $2.50.  They looked perfect for lunch so I had purchased two at the time.  Ever since then, I’ve used them often, and they have become a permanent fixture here on NEB.  Today, I realized that maybe this box would work.  While everything sits a bit too high for the box, that’s not a problem.

The top for this box is domed and curved around everything beautifully without smooshing everything down to bits.

And if you’re reading this on your blog reader, pop over to the post on Not Eactly Bento and take a look.  There is a new gallery feature with up close shots of different parts of today’s bento.  It isn’t something I plan to do for every bento, but this one deserved it.

This is for Day 1 of my 30-Day Challenge. What is the 30-Day Challenge? Check it out here.

This past weekend, I prepared for lunches this week.  I purchased brussel sprouts and red potatoes at the Farmer’s Market; they were roasted with herb seasoning and a bit of salt.  Two of the larger mini meatloafs I’d made and froze were defrosted for bento inclusion this week.  Yesterday, I made my first bento from this pile of goodies.  I love making bentos because I love leftovers.  I’ve often cook a meal for lunch the next day, and eat a sandwich for dinner.  I don’t know why, but that’s how my bento making tends to work.

The only thing when you make such a large amount of a meal is that sometimes by the end you’re so tired of what you made you hardly want to look at it again.  I’m always looking for little ways to combat that problem.  One way I keep the meal interesting from day to do is to add another side or two.  This  morning I steamed a few baby carrots and hard boiled three eggs.  I even went so far as to put one of the ggs into a fish mold.  Egads, I’ve gotten fancy all of a sudden!  LOL!  A grabbed a few spinach leaves to fill up the space a bit below the egg and added in the carrots for today’s lunch.  Now, things don’t look so completely like yesterday’s does.  And I’m completely ready to eat!  I hope you are too.

In a side note, I want to point out the graphic at the NEB’s front page.  On April 1, I’m announcing a 30-Day challenge focusing on accomplishing a bento goal that I have.  As part of this challenge, I plan to include NEB’s readers by asking, “What is your 30-Day bento challenge to yourself?  Do you have a goal you’d like to work towards completing?”  If you answer, YES! to this question.  Please consider entering the challenge when it is posted.  There will be chances to win bento box prizes at the end of April for those who choose to join and participate.  I hope you do!  In the meantime…

Be the bento everyone!

I am so a meat and potatoes type of girl.  Last night’s dinner was a perfect example.  I visited my parents house over the weekend to help my mom set up some new technology as she’d requested.  While there, she made steaks and potatos for dinner.   Aaaahhh, so satisfying.  This weekend, I visited the Farmer’s Market and picked up brussel sprouts and new potatoes.  I’d recently seen the Feisty Foodie roast these as part of a Sunday dinner.  I thought this a most excellent idea.  Today’s lunch will wrap up with strawberries (also from the market) paired with two pieces of dark chocolate.  I am so ready for lunch!  And I haven’t even had breakfast yet.  LOL!

Happy Monday.  Be the bento everyone!

Last night, I decided to try my hand at a breakfast burrito I had seen a book I had recently checked out from the library.   The book is all about make-ahead type meals that you make, then freeze.  I’ve been researching this plan-ahead type of cooking a bit since I find it is helping in the currently busy life.  I changed the burrito recipe a bit to use chorizo sausage.  There is egg, chorizo, and cheddar cheesse in that poorly wrapped burrito.  The little yellow container has sour cream to go with the burrito.  Along with it comes roasted broccoli, two pieces of dark chocolate and a caramel.  I have another container (not shown) with dice romaine lettuce and salad dressing.

I am taking this one for lunch, but the remaining burritos I made I froze per the recipe.  Then, I’m going to take one out and try it sometime next week. And if this works out well, I’ll revisit this recipe for a post here soon.  I want to try out this whole thing before I go, “AWESOMENESS” and share with you all.

Be the bento everyone!  And happy Friday!  My plan for my  Saturday off tomorrow is to go to the Baton Rouge Farmer’s Market.  I haven’t been in ages, and I’m looking forward to it.

Yesterday was a completely lovely day.  I went to the zoo with a friend and shot some great pictures.  They will show up on NEB Photos soon.  Afterwards, I came home, spent some time with the dogs, took a nap, had dinner with the folks, and stopped by Whole Foods on the way home.  I go through phases, and Whole Foods was a phase I went through about a year ago.  I rode out to the store, shopped there fairly often, and then came hom, excited with my finds.  These days, I don’t get to WF that often.  1.) I’m interested in other things by way of food purchase.  2.) The store really isn’t that close or to me.  But when traveling home from my parents after 9:00 p.m., they are one of the few stores that is still open in my area (for groceries). As well, it is sort of on the way home.

So I stopped in, and picked up some lettuce, milk, and a few goodies I wanted.  While there, I saw they had the Laptop Lunches kits.  Now, I’m not interested in the whole kit, just those inner boxes.  So I picked some up.  Blue and pink are the colors.  So cute.  So versatile.  This one fit my lunch today perfectly.  What isn’t shown is that I have a second container of lettuce with dressing.  I was going to pack it in the larger Laptop Lunches box.  So, I took that one out to give it a rinse before using it.  But it’s cracked!  EEK!  And there is no way I’m getting back out to that store anytime soon.  What to do?  Boo.  I find it quite a bummer.  Instead, I pulled out my trusty pyrex rouund glass lunch bowl, put the lettuce and Laptop Lunch dressing cup in there and called it lunch.  Ah well.  I’ll figure out what to do about the largerst box I suppose.

Have a great bento day everyone!  Be the bento.

When I showed off my new glass bento bowls, I mentioned I had received a gift certificate to Sur la Table as a joint Christmas/birthday gift.  I knew that this gift was going to help me purchase a Kitchen Aid stand mixer accessory I had my eye on for some time: the food grinder.  For quite some time, I’ve wanted to grind my own hamburger meat, especially after certain articles I’ve read.  Plus, it’s a novel experience.  And it seems on this food adventure I’m in, that there are alot of things I’d like to try at least once, or more.  This is something I can see myself using quite a bit.

And as I took it out of the box for the first time, I couldn’t resist snapping a few pictures.  I mean seriously, this is exciting for me.  I’m soooo ready to try it out (and I did!).  It’s all ready and waiting.  Ready for the first grind.  Ready to help me make a fabulous meatloaf.  And it did!

More to come on the actual grinding experience.  In the meantime, I’ll just bask in the joy of now owning this attachment.  And look for some fabulous recipes to try with it.

Today’s lunch is not terribly visually exciting.  In fact, it is down right boring.  But that’s okay.  Because it is lunch!  It is my lunch!  And it means I’m ready to eat lunch and not have to go out in the pouring rain to find lunch.  Which is what I did yesterday.  And while yesterday’s lunch was at a new cafe in my area that was ABSOLUTELY FABU, I could have done without the riding around in the cold, wet rain.  That is what comes from lack of planning.

I also like this lunch for it’s pumpernickel bread used in the sandwich.  Pumpernickel is a new item on my food list as of the last year.  It is something I had never tried before but always said I didn’t like.  Some of this came from listening to others in my family say how they don’t like this particular type of bread.  Okay, then I must not like it too.  Yeah, I know, typical me.  Once while considering bread options at the grocery store, I looked at some pumpernickel and thought, “Why don’t I like this type of bread?”  I’ve never really tried it until now.  It looks alot like the dark rye bread I like at a local restaurant.  Hmm….let’s give it a shot.  The rest, as is my own personal food history.  Pumpernickel is now on my list of fave breads.  When I was at Albertson’s this last week, they had store baked bread loaves buy 1, get 1 free.  There was a lovely 7 grain bread (which I really need to photograph) and this pumpernickel bread.  They both came home with me. 

I hope you have a lovely lunch packed too.  Be the bento everyone!

P.S. Check back around lunch time.  I have a NTM post this week. 

For quite some time, I’ve looked for glass containers to use as bento boxes.  Nothing has quite worked, leaving me feeling a bit like the Goldilocks of Bento Boxes.  Some containers were too small.  Some containers were too large.  And none were just right…until now.  I was given a gift certificate to Sur la Table as a combo Christmas/birthday present.  It was a sweet and pleasant surprise from a good friend.  I hadn’t had a chance to go to Baton Rouge to do anything fun in quite some time, so one Sunday I went by Sur la Table to check out the offerings.  I knew right away what the gift certificate was going to: a food grinder for my Kitchen Aid stand mixer.  As I walked to the store, past its big display windows, I saw a rack of storage containers.  It had been quite some time since I’d browsed SLT, preferring to spend less for my kitchen supplies at the restaurant supply store. I found three glass containers that seemed perfect for my bento needs.  I used one of them last week for chili.

This week, I put a bit more thought into the packing of my bento lunch, and this is what I came up with.  In the center is meatloaf.  Good old standard meatloaf recipe.  Though, this meatloaf is a bit more special than usual (think food grinder).  Around the meatloaf, I have steamed carrots, baked sweet potato, and pieces of zucchini and onion from pan-friend skewers that I made.

The two smaller containers I picked up contain apple cake and an egg with vegetarian eggrolls (store bought).  The eggroll/egg container I think I might eat as an afternoon snack.  I’m looking forward to it!  It will be something a wee bit different from Spree.  Yeah, I know.  Not the best, but I’ve been on a Willie Wonka candy kick lately.  The apple cake will be my dessert for lunch.  The recipe is basically the apple torte recipe, multiplied.

I really like these containers and look forward to using them…often.  In fact, I wouldn’t mind another set.  And for as expensive as Sur la Table can be, these didn’t hurt the pocket book too greatly.  The largest was  $5 and the two smaller ones were $3 each.  $11 is cheaper than having a cheap plastic bento box flown in from Japan, since I don’t have a way to purchase them any longer (sniff… I miss Ichiban Kan…sniff). 

Happy Monday and be the bento everyone!