Bring Your Own Lunch!

veggie rice with kimchi, tofu, salad and spinach!

Packing a luch is something everyone who is away from home during unch should try doing more often. I know, some people associate packed lunches with boring wonder bread sandwiches and sort of limp salads, but packed lunches are actually the greatest ting ever. 

For most people money is a concern. Eating lunch out can add up to a lot of money if you do it all the time. And as a vegan, it can be annoying trying to find varied options during the day when I only have around 30 minutes to get my food and eat it between classes. On my campus the fully vegan meals often cost a little bit more than the regular meat and cheese filled sandwiches and salads and wraps. In fact, the amount of vegan options on campus just went up this semester, last year it was even harder to get a good meal there.

So I started making my own lunch. I did start with salads and sandwiches, and those are still good, but then I moved on to bentos. I have shown a few bentos on here before but never really talked about the. Bentos are amazing. They are easy to make, can be filled up with any tasty things I want, and help me save money.

Bonus- Bentos can be super cute!

chickpea salad, tomatos with olives and vegan sausage

Bear Box #4! Asian Barbecue Veggies with Steamed buns

Top Tier- mushrooms and carrots in asian barbecue sauce and steamed buns with barbecue sauce and ginger

Bottom tier- steamed brown rice with edamame 

Bear Box #3! Sweet Potato and Quinoa Croquettes, Sauteed Veggies and Pasta with Sweet Potato and Tomato Puree!

Top level- Rice pasta with a puree of sweet potato and tomato with garlic.

Bottom level- On the right, asparagus and mushroom sauteed with garlic and oregano and topped with crushed roasted nuts. On the left are croquettes made form sweet potato, quinoa, onion, garlic and gluten free breadcrumbs on a bed of baby spinach.

Croquettes are a great lunch box staple, they're easy to make in batches and travel pretty well. This box is loaded with veggies and healthy crabs to keep Bear full of energy all day long. 

Bear Box #2! Chickpea Omelette, Rice and Marinated Tofu

More bento! Bear was in the mood for Asian food for dinner again so I made another bento. I decided to play on some bento classics, white rice with umeboshi (pickled plums), omelettes, and marinated tofu. My version has brown rice, a chickpea omelette and tofu marinated without fish sauce.

Tofu marinade-

3 tbsp soy sauce

1 tsp grated ginger

1 tbsp chili sauce  

1 tsp Worcestershire 

Simply mix these together with the tofu and let it sit for at least 30 min. Cubing the tofu lets it soak in easier. Then I fried the tofu and set it on a bed of spinach.

Chickpea omelette-

1 part chickpea flour

1 part water

1 tsp baking powder

This is the basic ingredients for the omelette. However, this would be a bit pain. The great thing here is that chickpea omelettes are very easy to season in different ways so they can be eaten with a lot of different things. For this recipes I added sesame seeds, garlic powder, salt, and pepper. Then you just cook them like a pancake. 

I then shredded up some carrot and diced some onion and sliced a handful of mushrooms, sauteed them in sesame oil and garlic and then rolled them up inside. 

The rice was pretty simple. Brown rice cooked in the rice cooker, some pieces of nori, a hanful of shelled edamame and an umeboshi with the pit removed. Steam the soy beans and the rice and layer it all neatly into the box and you're done. 

Cute Cooking Is Best

This week I decided to really try and get back into cooking now that I have my own kitchen. It's not perfectly set up yet (pictures soon!) but it's still usable. So my first undertaking was to make bento. Bento is a style of japanese lunchbox packed with yummy and often cute foods. 

I bought myself a Nyanpire box with two levels and a small divider, made rice and then chopped up veggies and faux chicken. I used special cutters for the veggies to make them cute shapes and used rice molds to turn regular short grain brown rice into stars, hearts and even little bears! If you look closely you can even see my little bunny hot sauce container.

Now that I realized how fun it is to make cute lunches like this, all I want to do is get more bento stuff so I can make even more things! There's food picks, special food cutters, and dividers you can use to make your lunches special. I think taking the time to make a cute lunch is actually fun and in the end it's actually more satisfying then an ugly thrown together dish of leftovers.

These small silicone molds would be nice for making myself veggie sushi to bring to school.

I love these bunny food picks, they're cute and would be perfect for little fruit and veg skewers.

I love this three piece Pikachu bento box. I would put rice in the bottom layer, a veggie stir fry or curry on the middle and fill the top with fruit slices and nuts. 

Are any of you into making bento?