Thermos 3-Tier Bento #59

 

Here I have a lunch I packed for working on site when the library where I work was closed and I was the only one there: A raid-the-fridge vegetable curry soup garnished with nigella seeds, a mix of leftover brown rice and millet (from the meatballs I made that you saw a few posts back), and some small cubes of smoked tofu. I didn't need the top tier, so I used that for my napkin. At lunchtime, I poured the soup over the tofu and grains and stirred everything up.

Honestly, I planned to go to the store earlier than this, and somehow couldn't bring myself to face it yet. But also I still have food. And so, needing to use a little bit of coconut cream, one of the things I did was to make this veggie soup, inspired by this recipe for "Anything-You-Have Curry Soup" at Pinch of Yum. What I had was an onion, a carrot, some celery, a bit of cauliflower, some broccoli stems, a small potato, and green curry paste to substitute for the red. It was delicious. I didn't blend it up; I just let the veggies simmer in the broth and had it with the grains and tofu. I made this soup as written a long time ago and wrote in the blog post about it that I would find it more appealing, probably, if I didn't blend the soup and added more veggies to simmer in the broth; it was great, so I guess I was right!

I don't know when I bought nigella seeds. I am sure I had a reason. They were likely on sale. I'm not sure how I feel about them yet, but they worked with this soup. If you have ideas for how I can use up nigella seeds, please let me know!

As an aside, I'm so glad I worked a few days in the closed library alone this year. It was amazing. If you have never had an entire library to yourself for days on end, you are missing out. But I suspect that's an experience few of us will ever have, especially in a special collections library, which most people only get to see the front-of-house part of anyway.

I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but it was soothing. And because I was alone, I got to eat in the break room, with no mask--I actually had a few days without a mask there, and that was probably one of the reasons it was so delightful.

Time off is good, too, and I took some. But it didn't feel like work to work on the days I did, and that feels instructive somehow. Here's to self-discovery.