Bento-style Thursday
The weather continued to be shocking towards the end of last week (and it’s been terrible this week too!), so I decided to bring lunch on Thursday to avoid having to go out in the rain to get food.
In my lunch box: garden salad, soy and garlic snow peas and cubes of juicy seedless watermelon to finish.
The garlic wasn’t really burnt, although it probably looks terrible. It was stained with soy sauce and was actually very fragrant and delicious. I fried the snow peas just long enough to take the raw taste away and retain their crispness. A splash of soy sauce in the pan, easy peasy! Little peas popping between my teeth has got to be one of my favourite sensations.
I can imagine some of you are thinking: “Is that all you had for your lunch?!” :) I made a pasta stir-fry too – with soyaroni, chicken, mushrooms and cashews. On Tuesday evening, I’d rubbed skinless boneless chicken thigh pieces with dark soy sauce, a teaspoon of raw sugar, a little corn flour, white pepper and a little sesame oil. I left the chicken in the fridge overnight to marinate. On Wednesday night I fried the chicken pieces in the wok until they were half-cooked, then added sliced mushrooms. When the chicken and mushrooms were almost done I added cooked soyaroni pasta and unsalted roasted cashews. When the chicken was cooked and everything was all hot and brown, I added a couple of extra splashes of dark soy sauce and another little drizzle of sesame oil, seasoned with a little cracked black pepper, stirred it all through and it was done.
I cooked the pasta stir-fry the night before so it would have plenty of time to cool down before I packed it away in the fridge, but I fried up the snow peas on Thursday morning. I like preparing the cooked vegetable side dishes in the morning so they’ll be as fresh as possible – cooked vegies can really shrink and dry out in the fridge overnight – and because they tend to be small serves, it doesn’t take long for them to cool down. To speed up the cooling process, I laid the cooked snowpeas flat on a plate while I had my breakfast, after which I packed them away in our lunch boxes.
This was Jac’s lunch. She had the same as me, but I chopped her snowpeas in half, for two reasons. First – so that they’d fit into the patty cake paper I served them in, and second, I’d strung the snow peas before cooking, but to be double sure they’d be easy for Jac to eat (she is extremely sensitive to snow pea string and finds it intolerable, whereas I’m not bothered and will just chew through it), I quickly checked the bite-sized pieces for string as I packed them (and you know what? I did find a couple of missed pea strings!).
I wasn’t going to show you the little notes I’ve been leaving in Jac’s lunch boxes because they’re kind of soppy, but I thought some of you would like to see them, so here goes. Jac’s said she loves reading my little lunch box notes, so I plan to try and leave her one in every lunch box I pack for her. :)
Initially, I wasn’t sure if Jac would like the pasta stir-fry, but I was pretty certain that chicken, mushrooms, cashews and sesame oil would be a winning combination – she told me that evening that she really enjoyed it. Soyaroni is one of her favourite pastas too. And she loved the snow peas! :-D Me, I always enjoy my own cooking. It’s very simple cooking, and funnily enough always prepared with foods I like. :)
Another thing I’ve been learning is how much food to pack for Jac. She doesn’t eat as much as me – she ate all her snow peas and pasta and watermelon, but she brought home some leftover salad. That wasn’t a problem however, as I used some of it in Friday’s lunch (not as salad though, wait and see!).
This post features the Lunch on the Go lunch box by Fit & Fresh.
You can buy the Lunch on the Go lunch box from my Amazon store.