With most of the food outlets closed for the festive season, I thought it would be wise to bring lunch to work. I made us sandwiches and packed some salad (mixed salad greens, which are hidden under the other vegetables; cherry tomatoes and mushrooms; carrot, which I shaped with one of my flower-shaped cutters; and a hard-boiled quail egg each, topped with freshly cracked black pepper). In the little containers (Jac’s was the blue strawberry-shaped one; I had the yellow teddy bear head) I packed us a little salad dressing – The Chilli Factory “Echidna Prickle”, which is a mild chilli honey mustard sauce/dressing. It is creamy, sweet, and extremely mild – we first tried it at the Royal Show a few years ago, and while I think it’s tasty (it’s become one of our staple dressings, along with Paul Newman’s ranch dressing and a few others) I’ve never really been able to taste the chilli in it.

I also packed us a little fruit – crisp and sweet seedless green grapes and soft fleshy pitted prunes. Sometimes the green grapes can be very tart, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how sweet this batch has been – they’re very easy to just keep eating. The quail eggs were leftovers from a batch Jac bought for her work Christmas party. I mashed up 4 or 5 quail eggs to make sandwich mix, but kept two eggs aside to serve with the salad. The more I eat quail eggs though, the more I think I prefer chicken eggs. Although I love the smallness and cuteness of quail eggs, they taste quite bland to me, compared to chicken eggs.

The sandwiches below, from left to right:

• hard-boiled quail egg, wholegrain mustard and mayo mix, with lettuce
• onion and tomato sardines with cucumber
• honey leg ham, swiss cheese, sweet gherkin pickles and Dijon mustard
• roasted garlic pork, horseradish cream and lettuce.

All sandwiches were made with multigrain bread. The sardines were straight out of a tin (John West Sardine Tempters range), drained slightly to avoid really soggy sandwiches (they did end up a little soggy, but those sardines are really, really tasty!). Jac bought a chunk of roasted garlic pork from a butcher, and I carved off nice thick slices for our sandwiches.

My bento note for Jac, below. Jac told me later she was having a really crappy day at work that day, but when she opened her lunch and read her note, it made her feel happy – she said it made her think “work may be crappy, but the rest of my life is good”. Knowing that the note had that effect made me happy. :)