Bento Box

I’m super excited…I just bought 2 bento boxes and other stuff. Bento boxes are a Japanese cultural item which are lunch boxes and the food is often artistic. I stumbled upon a Lunch in a Box Blog about a year or less ago and loved seeing how she made fast lunches for her family that were both interesting and nutritional. Food is such a big aspect of my life it’s kind of borderline crazy. I love looking at food pictures and reading about how to prepare dishes.

I’ve been itching to buy bento boxes for a while but never got around to buying the items. But lately it’s been on my mind because I hate when Nathan forgets to eat breakfast and goes hungry for hours while working. Plus he’s kind of anti-fruit in that he doesn’t like to actually take it out of the fridge…If I slice up apples and put grapes and oranges on a plate he will eat them right up, but he thinks of them more as snack foods and won’t willingly go to get them. I guess he likes meals in general so I guess he just thinks eating random pieces of fruit is unusual. It might also have to do with the fact that he’s been a vegan for so long that he is in ‘complete protein’ mode. Anyway, I know that if i prepare a bento box for him and add fruits and veggies he’ll eat them right up.

So yup this is sort of a random post but I was just so happy shopping for bento boxes. Oh how I can’t wait until my rice molds get here so I can make rice balls in the shapes of bunnies and bears.

Bread and Computers

Today was another bake day. I’ve been meaning to try out some loaf bread recipes but have been a bit scared to do it. I got the recipe from a site www.sourdoughhome.com which has a lot of interesting topics for baking. I used his seven grain bread recipe but modified it a bit. I actually used a 10 grain cereal and dry yeast since our market still hasn’t ordered any fresh yeast. I ended up only using 1.5 cups of Whole wheat flour and a lot of the all-purpose. Anyway I mixed it up and kneaded it and left it to rise.

  Boy my fingers look fat in that picture.

I then proceeded to put my computer together. The case is a beast…it could probably eat my old computer it’s so big..and the fan is the size of a cake pan. I’m proud to say I put most of it together although Nathan did help me figure stuff out and he put in the power supply and the processor fan. Interesting I know. Anway here are some pics because I’m proud of my effort and my power supply even came in a faux velvet bag. It looked fancy.

So that’s pretty much it. I’m not going to install the hard drive and CDrom until tomorrow because it takes forever and I don’t want to stay up until midnight trying to install all the software and upgrades. Windows stopped making XP so we went ahead and got Vista upgrade which the Best buy guy said should work since we didn’t buy the full version of Vista. If it doesn’t work…well I don’t even want to think about that. But on the plus side everything is pretty much in there and I’m a day away from being able to play games and watch movies without the lag.

Back to my bread…I just pulled it out a little while ago and it looks pretty nice. I’m really worried I didn’t let it rise enough the second time so we’ll see when we eat it. Either way I think it turned out nicely for my first loaf bread and I’m happy with the aesthetic results. I just hope it’s not a rock when it comes to eating it.