A steak and salad bento! Jac panfried a steak medium-rare for her and a steak medium-well for me. I made my easy potato salad, and threw together a simple salad of mixed greens, grape tomatoes and red seedless grapes. I packed us each a container of smokey barbecue sauce to eat with our steak.

Jac suggested I slice the steak up so it would be easy to eat with a fork, and that’s exactly what I did. I made sure to slice the steak across the grain so the resulting pieces would be tender rather than chewy – that’s something I learned from Good Eats, from the episode called “Raising the Steaks” (scroll down the transcript to Scene 10 for a detailed explanation). :)

I always feel a little down on Mondays, but I try to be a little positive in my bento notes. I started with the sentence “Another Monday, but at least the sun’s shining”… and ended up with flowers and a fat little bee with green eyes :)

Here’s Jac’s steak, considerably redder than mine, just how she likes it.

I’ve made variations of this easy potato salad before. I cooked a potato using a potato microwaver. I chopped the cooked potato roughly into chunks, allowed them to cool and mixed them with Kewpie mayonnaise, a little wholegrain mustard and freshly cracked black pepper. I thinly sliced some cucumber and mixed that through as well. If we had spring onion, I’d have have added chopped spring onion as well. I’ve made this before also with cooked carrot, chopped ham and chopped hard-boiled egg. The “easy” part comes from just using what’s available at the time, I guess.

As always, I packed Jac some bread and butter as she loves eating bread with meals. She loved this lunch!