bento to the rescue!

I'm going to be gone Friday and Thursday, so unlike a normal week where I'm trying to cram 7 days of work into 5, this week I'm going to attempt to cramp 7 days of work into 4, and whatever's not done by Thursday will roll into next week, to be crammed into 4 days. And for my next trick, I'll cure cancer....

black strawberry box:

• egg fried rice with heart-shaped carrots for garnish
• Pixie tangerines with the last of the dried cherries as gap fillers
• carrot sticks
• yogurt and dark chocolate covered raisins

The fried rice was actually a last-minute "aha!" dish. Last minute, as in, "crap, it's 10:30 and I can't think of anything for tomorrow's lunch!". We had the jasmine rice that we'd had with skewers the weekend before last, and it needed to be eaten up, but I didn't really have much for a protein other than hard boiling some eggs. It finally dawned on me that I could combine the two, and that I had another leek that could be substituted for green onion (can you tell we have a few leeks to use up?). Scrounging in the freezer yielded the last little bit of a bag of frozen peas and carrots (maybe a quarter of a cup, if that), and voila! I scrambled up an egg, then added everything else. Since the rice had been made with beef broth, I didn't add anything else for flavor other than a bit of sea salt. Turned out pretty delicious and would've made a good dinner instead of the handful of cheese and crackers and leftover potato salad I'd eaten earlier in the evening while trying to get some work done.

The proportions are all out of whack, but I'm just glad to be eating something relatively healthy -- at 10:15 last night, it was looking like an eating-out-for-lunch day. But nope, bento saves the day again.