Monbento Original #36

 

It's been quite a while. My last post with this bento box was March 17, 2020. I noted, in that post, that everything was shutting down.

Well, it hasn't opened yet, but I had a few errands to run and I was cat-sitting and I wasn't going to be home at dinnertime, so I pulled out the bento box let it get my creativity going. I'm not yet shifting back to being a lunch packing blog. (And I may never go all the way back to that. The world is so different these days.)

This is a bed of green leaf lettuce with some Good Catch plant-based "tuna" with oil and herbs, a little cup of berries (strawberries and blueberries), some Cara Cara orange slices, and Isreali couscous salad (roughly following this recipe at the Green Loot, but with dried basil and no artichokes, because I had neither fresh basil, nor artichokes).

One of my errands has been picking strawberries from a friend's garden while she was away--not at all an onerous chore!--but there weren't many ripe yet so I have been using them judiciously as garnishes. But they are the best berries ever.

I have sorely missed the art of bento making. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd enjoy if I did it without a purpose--without planning to eat somewhere other than at home--but I was quickly reminded of the good parts I'm missing eating at home, like deliberately including bits of fruit.

I would show you the cat, but the whole time I was cat-sitting she only came out from under her owner's bed once to hiss at me, so except for the obvious signs that a cat had been using her litter box and eating her food I was dealing with a phantom cat. I was glad to tend to her anyway, somehow. And I understand the hissing. She's been with her owner mostly 24/7 for more than a year, and suddenly, she's alone in the apartment with a stranger! We'll make friends some other, less fraught time.

As it happens, I ate this at home, anyway, because I didn't get hungry while I was running around. But I pulled out my little Monbento fork and ate this out of the box as usual and felt, for a moment, some part of myself return to me. The food was good--pretty and simple and reasonably balanced. 

Here's hoping the next 14 months are easier ones for us.