Monbento Original #52 (Double Tier)

 

This lunch has an assortment of unusual flavor combinations. First, I have a slice of mango banana bread with coconut and macadamia nut topping (recipe from Labeless Nutrition), some butternut peanuts, and apple carrot cucumber salad (I veganized the recipe from What's Cooking Mom).

I'll say more about the bread in an upcoming breakfast compilation. I really made it for breakfast, but because I made the whole loaf and knew I wouldn't get through it all before it went bad, I also snuck some into some other meals. It was really tasty, though to be fair banana bread is pretty well always wonderful.

The salad was pretty unusual--especially with the addition of cilantro!--but I'm glad I followed the recipe almost entirely as written (well, largely, anyway--I used a vegan honey (rice nectar) instead of the honey in the original recipe, and I cut the quantities down). I would probably make this again if I had everything on hand. It's also something I'd be happy to share with other people, because I think adventurous eaters would enjoy the combinations. It makes a lot of sense to me, after all, because apples straddle the sweet-savory world and so do carrots, and cucumbers are a type of melon, too, so all of that felt logical if not commonly brought together. But it was the cilantro that really threw me--and yet it doesn't matter because it was so nice!

This was a pretty humble lunch, but it did the job  nicely.