Thermos 3-Tier Bento #57

 

I've been reading a lot of very old women's magazines and old cookbooks lately. (We all need hobbies.) As such, this lunch seems to have been inspired by the first decade or two of the 20th century. It consists of a banana sliced up and topped with homemade blueberry syrup and vegan marshmallows; Spanish-style lentil stew; and a cream cheese-spinach-cucumber sandwich.

The thing about the past is that some of their ideas are pretty good, and although I didn't get this specific combination from them, I did get the rough outlines from them. I did something interesting to my fruit. I made a sandwich whose main purpose is to make bread more appetizing, with bonus points for getting some veggies in. And I had some stew. All in all, it was balanced, colorful, and satisfying.

I don't normally make sandwiches that are side dishes rather than mains, but I love them. Because the women's magazines warned that a woman's lunch should have "dainty" sandwiches with the crusts cut off, I did cut off my crusts, which made it more like a fun tea sandwich, even though it was part of the meal and not there to make tea exciting. (Don't worry. I ate the crusts as I was packing lunch. I am sure this is not the dainty thing to do, but I'm a 21st-century person.) But sandwiches can be anything, which is the major lesson I have from reading the cookbooks and magazines of yore.

And truly, they were bread-delivery mechanisms, I think. People ate more calories then, and bread was a cheap, easy way to ensure you got enough. People needed more calories, because they did a lot more physically than we do; I'm perfectly fine with not doing as much as they did, of course. But that's why I had just one halved sandwich rather than making two to go with everything else, as was recommended even for children. Maybe one of the things they did to need more calories was make and carry tons of sandwiches around...

But anyway. This was fun! I may try more historically-inspired food.

The bananas-syrup-marshmallow dessert was good, but next time I'd add something, like crumbled graham crackers. It wasn't quite there yet, somehow. But there's always next time!