Bentolicious

Although I haven't been blogging about my own lunches lately, I have been reading a lot about other people's! I love the idea of bentos for children's lunches and I'm really keen to do something similar for myself, although since I spend most of the day in my room and rarely have to take a packed lunch anywhere, I probably don't need to invest in a huge selection of different boxes and dividers (but boy do I want to!).

That said, I did just order a pair of egg moulds so that I can shape boiled eggs into cute shapes before eating them. I just couldn't resist!

Today's lunch is a back-to-basics, lots of nutrition type lunch to get myself going again. Peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches in delicious seeded bread, a small amount of side salad (it's going off, not a lot of it is edible any more) and some cherry tomatoes. There's also a boiled egg, unfortuately just egg-shaped as the moulds won't arrive for 12-24 working days. I think they're being delivered from Japan by carrier pigeon relay.

As you can see, the salad looks rather sad - I discovered my fridge was too cold so in addition to being out of date it was also frozen. I picked out the least miserable leaves and had to throw the rest away.

The amount of food waste I produce horrifies me, and I do my best to use up left-overs and only buy what I know I'll eat. You can probably see that the sandwiches are missing the bottom crust, because there was a bit of mould on it and I felt it was better to cut it off and not waste half a loaf than to throw the whole lot out. I've transferred it into a box in the hopes that it will be more air-tight and less liable to go mouldy than the bag. A good half of the loaves I buy end up going mouldy before I finish them, because the supermarket (the only supermarket in the town centre) doesn't sell half loaves. In a student-heavy town, it amazes me that there is one small supermarket, one of the corner-shop types rather than a full-sized one, and that it caters for families more than individuals despite the fact that a good 60% of the town's population are students. Grrr!

I'll come down from my hobby horse to note the juice in the bottle - I managed to break another glass a few days ago, so I'm now on the look-out for some more sturdy tumblers.

Lunch will soon be back on the menu!

So the reason I started this blog was in a desperate attempt to give myself another motivation to eat lunch - hunger and health wasn't managing it alone.

Unfortunately I have been busy, even busier than usual, busier than ever before, for the last two weeks and I haven't had time to eat lunch. I haven't really had time to sleep - I think the most I've got is six hours and I normally can't function without nine. So that hasn't been great.

However, yesterday a marathon of work paused briefly and I seized the opportunity to clean my room - I can see my carpet again! And today I got back from lectures to a disgusting, vomit-type smell, so I abandoned the reading I'd been planning on doing and washed up dishes. For an hour. Considering that most of my crockery is currently being used as props for a play (don't ask), that is a long time to be washing up. But now everything is clean and back in the cupboards, so for my lunch I had...

a Cup-a-Soup. Because I haven't had time to shop for any food.

I'll get there eventually!

Pasta salad leftovers

Last night I cooked pasta with a sauce made from chopped tomatoes, carrot, mushroom, onion and garlic, and it was the first time that I've actually been happy with a sauce I've made for pasta! I fried the garlic and onion for a long time before adding anything else, which I think helped a lot, and then fried the mushrooms in with them so that the flavour was literally everywhere.

Anyway, there was a fair bit left over today so I've eaten it for lunch. I was so hungry that I'd almost inhaled half the bowl before I remembered to take a photo! It doesn't look like anything special but it's anothe step on my cooking journey :)

Comfort Food

First lunch of the uni year! It's nothing complex, just mushroom soup in a mug, bread (bit past its best but it was massively reduced), half a tomato out of my fridge :D, orange quarters and a banana, cherry and walnut muffin my mum baked. The pink juice is summer fruits and barley, my favourite.

It's great to be back at uni and I've got a fridge and a huge cupboard in my room which is being my pantry. The kitchen is right next door and a great size. I'm happy.

Delicious Angel Delight

This was not a lunch - in fact it was a late-night dessert - but it was delicious and pretty!

Butterscotch flavour, mmmm.

Lack of Lunch

Now you may have noticed that I have not posted a single, solitary, delectable lunch in the days since I announced I would begin doing so again.

This is because I have not eaten a single, solitary, delectable lunch. It is toooooo hotttt to eat and I seem to be having breakfast at 12 and dinner at 6 - there is no need for lunch in there.

But soon, I promise, I will do something interesting with this blog! I can't see a whole lot of home made lunches happening for the next two or three months, frankly, because I will be travelling round a lot and not have the opportunity or equipment to even make a sandwich (I am struggling at the moment because although I have bread and sandwich fillings, I have no knife).

Perhaps I will just take photos of delicious things I see or eat? That would be nice. And then next term we will recommence with the lunching, courtesy of my new fridge and new kitchen!

A vacation

It's the summer vacation and I've moved into a rented room for a while, where I get breakfast and dinner provided. For the last few weeks (it's been a while!) I've been madly busy with end of year parties, a week fairly badly ill, and a brief holiday in Europe, but now I'm back and will be making myself lunches.

Tomorrow I'm going to go shopping for things I can easily and quickly put together for lunch, without the fairly extensive kitchenware I had in my uni room. All of that is stashed in a garage somewhere! So there will be lunches, possibly fairly imaginative ones (and I've managed to pack my lunchbox, so I will maybe need to invest in a new one. Yay!).