04/28/09 Bento

For the past few weeks I've been trying to get myself into a good, easy-to-maintain morning routine.  Ideally, my morning would look like this:

4:45am - Wake up, stumble to the bathroom still half-asleep, briefly wash face and put on workout clothes. Grab water bottle, keys, ID and head out the door to the gym.

5:00am - Get to gym, work out for 45 minutes.

6:00am - Get home, shower.

6:15am - While letting hair dry and comfortably lounging in my robe, catch up on blogs, and other social networking sites like twitter and flickr.

6:45am - Get dressed, fix up hair somehow.

7:15am - While preparing the day's bento, eat bowl of cereal.  Take pictures.  With any extra time, read or play DS.

Between 8:00 and 8:15am - Leave for work.

This is how I want it to go, but that doesn't always happen.

Last night I was trying to do too many things at once and didn't get to sleep until 11:30am or so.  A few months ago, this would have been early, but it is decidedly late when I'm trying to wake up before five in the morning.  When my alarm went off, I made the decision to stay in bed, sleeping instead of going to the gym.  I finally got out of bed at 7:30am which didn't leave me much time to do anything.  I got up to the kitchen at 8:00am and put together a bento after chiding myself for considering fast food or other such options for lunch instead when I have plenty of healthy, tasty food at my disposal already.

(I should make myself a light box, but I don't really have anywhere to store one and can't leave it out in the kitchen all the time. Maybe I'll start taking my stuff outside in the morning to take the pictures?)

On the left is a breakfast bento with pita chips, hummus, strawberries and kumquats since I didn't have the time to eat breakfast this morning.  I'm still not sure how I feel about kumquats.  I may have gotten a bad batch, but they seem overly tart to me, even with eating the rind too.  I like them better as small slices than halves, though, that's for sure.

The main bento is two onigiri filled with seasoned seaweed paste with perilla, grape tomatoes, kalamata olives, a quail egg and celery for filling gaps.  One of the fish has soy sauce and the other has oyster sauce.  There's an apple for a late afternoon snack.  I bought this apple for its color so I could make checkerboard apples or apple bunnies, but didn't have the time.

The bento took me half an hour, so I was running a little late for work (I start at 9:00am and my office is about 35-40 minutes away).

Unfortunately, even after making the bento, I caved and had Wendy's for lunch. Just a small fry and some nuggets with a Coke, because anything more than that and I would have felt really stuffed and disgusting.  So, the above bento was actually for dinner instead.  I ate it before I left work so I wouldn't have to bother with dinner when I got home.  But I did have fun with the apple!

This took a lot longer than expected, but was pretty simple aside from the big chunk I accidentally scooped out toward the bottom. I don't see myself making these in the morning for weekday lunches, but maybe for special treats on the weekend or in the evenings.