Long Time, No Write....

I haven't written in a little while for a few reasons.

First, it has been way busy at work with getting ready for days off due to the holiday season.
Part of this business was due in part to meetings that required lunches...
Which means, I didn't bento as much this last week as normal.
I do have 2 bento pictures.

But to see them, you will have to go to:
Not Exactly Bento's New Site

That's right folks! I decided before too many people know my site that I would give it its own address: http://www.notexactlybento.com. Furthermore, I have the capabilities there to create static pages. So, I plan to have a page of links to the recipes I've been finding and using and much more. I'm excited about this.

So if you have been reading this blog or have it in a blog reader, please change your links. I hope to see you there!

Pack. Eat. Repeat. (Bento #48-51)

Whew! This has been a busy week at work. I haven't had a chance to do any posting because of it. Here are my lunches for this week.

Monday & Tuesday's lunches (Bento #48-49) were exactly the same. They included:
Mini hamburger patty, corn, cucumber, carrots, 1/2 an egg.



Wednesday's lunch (Bento #50) included:
Loose groundmeat spaghetti, cucumber, carrots

By Thursday, I was a little tired of the repetition, so a trip to Whole Foods found me some delicious cherries and blueberries! Thursday's lunch (Bento #51) includes:

Mini hamburger patty, corn cut from the cob, cucumber, carrot, cherries, blueberries

Hopefully, I'll have more variety and excitement next week. Even though there were alot of repeats this week, I didn't eat out. YAY! Most of these lunches were quick to put together. I always keep a few frozen, homemade hamburger patties in my freezer for when I don't have alot of time. I do the same thing with spaghetti. It certainly came in handy this week.

It's the small things....

that can be so frustrating sometimes. This was a busy weekend with family gatherings and Christmas shopping. Not much work done on the kitchen renovation front. However, I decided tonight not to ignore the kitchen completely. This kitchen redo has forced me to rethink how I'm using furniture and other items throughout the house. Furniture has been shifted and moved. I moved a small table I have next to the stove since I don't have a real spot to set things when I'm cooking. I also decided that I wanted a small shelf to hold commonly used spices.

Here's a quick pic. This shelf took me 40 minutes to figure out how to hang without destroying my wall with huge amounts of wrongly drilled holes! It was the first time I've ever hung a hidden mount shelf.

However, now that I've done the first one, I know what to do. And it's even level! I'm going to work with this little setup this week. If I like it, the shelf and the table are in line for repainting when the kitchen is finished being painted.

Slowly but surely, it is all coming together.

It's Cookie Time!

Tonight was the family get-together on my dad's side of the family. Many of us tend to make a little something to give to each other. This year, I made mini shortbread cookies for the families. Of course I kept a few for my bentos this week. Plus, my aunt gave me mini pecan pie muffins. YUM! Here is the recipe I used for these cookies, with a little less than a 1/2 cup of pecans mixed in. No jam obviously.

Please welcome The Feisty Foodie

There has been a new commenter on this blog lately, the owner of two fun blogs: All My Bento Are Belong to Me and The Feisty Foodie. If you'll notice, All My Bento Are Belong to Me is in the link list on the right hand side. It was one of the original links on this blog. How exciting to have her reading my blog. I've discovered over the last three months of having this blog exactly how addicting blogging can be!

So those of you visiting and reading this blog, be sure to check out All My Bento Are Belong to Me. Today, she has a scrumptious looking bento containing kickin' chicken that looks way wonderful!

They're Here!! & More

There is no lunch to post today. I'm going to a retirement party for a collegeau today and will most likely eat lunch out. I do have a bit of bento related news.

First if you look the right hand side of this blog, you'll notice all links are now bento-related. I've decided that this blog will be about bentos with a bit of my life and dogs interjected now and again. Any jewelry related items (which there have been little as of late) will go somewhere else.

Secondly, I must announce that THEY ARE HERE! The new cabinets I ordered from Home Depot that is. They are just simple wooden freestanding cabinets. I was so excited I snapped a picture of them still in the box.

I have three to put together. Since some of the sides seem to come preassembled, I'm thinking (hoping), it won't be too bad.

I'll show off pictures later of them assembled.

Why Pillows Really Go Flat...

When I created this blog, I chose the title since I knew my posts would not always be about bento. As is the case of this post. Ever wonder why your pillows go flat for no real reason? For example, you've just purchased new pillows in the last 3 months and already there seems to be a big groove in one of them. For me, I discovered why today:

Seems as though my dog Gabby has decided she likes this pillow. So that's where the groove in the illow is coming from! All that bed space, and she just HAS to lay ontop of my pillows. Silly dog.

Pork Tenderloin Tortillas (Bento #47)

Some of yesterday's tasty pork tenderloin became leftovers for today's bento. Amazing how something that was cooked specifically for this week's bentos could be a leftover...odd.

Anyhow, I took some of the pork tenderloin and cut it into small chunks, added some boiled corn kernels (cut from the cob), and topped with mozzarella cheese. It was all then rolled up into 3 pretty tortillas and baked. Here they are ready for baking.
Now, here they are in my bento not so pretty anymore. This bento could have used a bit more pre-planning. In other words, I should have wacked the ends off the tortillas before baking. Instead, I had to tear the ends off to fit inside the bento. Ah well, cook and learn ;)

Today's bento consists of:
Pork and corn tortillas
Grapes, blueberries, tangerine
Dessert is 2 peanut butter filled pretzel, 1 chocolate covered pretzel, and 1 chocolate covered dried cherry.

Roast Pork Tenderloin (Bento #46)

Take a look at this; it will absolutely make you salivate! This roast pork tenderloin recipe was so delicious an expletive escaped my lips every time I took a bite. It was uber-easy too. I highly recommend trying it. All you need is about 6 basic spices, an oven, and the tenderloin.
This vision of beauty became....


part of today's bento! Woohoo. This is gonna be tasty. This bento includes:
Roast pork tenderloin slices
Carrots & green beans, steamed lightly
Orange with blueberries
Chocolate covered pretzels

Faked BBQ Sausage (Bento #45)

Okay readers. I'm back! It's been about a week since my last post. It hasn't been a good bento week with continued kitchen revamp work and some overtime at my real job. So, here's everything that I want to report. Get ready, it's gonna be a long post! Plus, I'm not showing off the bento until the very end. Don't cheat! Don't scroll down to the end first. Stick around and ready my woeful adventures in kitchen cooking first!

First, Lunch Buckets asked how the kitchen renovation was coming along. My answer is: slowly, but surely. I have gotten myself back to a point where I can cook. I still have some painting and other work to be done. It's taking a bit longer than I expected, but I'm happy with the results so far. No complaints on the diy renovation end.

Here's a picture of one section of the kitchen basically done. The cabinets have been painted white; the doors, a sage green. The new cabinet hinges and pulls are a pretty oil rubbed bronze finish. Some cabinets are getting back their doors; some are not. Whatever you do, DON'T LOOK DOWN! The floors look bad as does the kitchen countertop. Those are the next phases of this renovation (read that as sometime next year).

With this kitchen update, I decided to update to a newer stove. It arrived Saturday. Wheee! It is a ceramic glass stove. Just when I was feeling fairly good about my cooking, I've gone and changed my stove. I'm back to not being able to boil an egg! ACK! We will persevere though.


One of the most exciting things to me about this new stove is the oven window. Look at that! You can see those ready-to-bake rolls browning! I couldn't see anything through the previous stove's window. I find this to be the best feature of this stove. Well, maybe not the BEST! But it definitely ranks in the top 3.

While cooking dinner, I realized I didn't want to just move a pot from one burner to another like I did with my previous coil stove. Okay, I'll move the pot to this little table I put next to the stove just for that purpose. Uh oh! What do I put that hot pot on? I don't want to burn the top of the table. A trivet. I need a trivet! Uh oh! I don't even OWN a trivet. What is a culinarily challenged gal to do? Out comes the mini cast iron skillet I normally use for decoration. This cast iron skillet once led a wonderful life. It was owned by my grandfather who used it to cook. The man was an awesome cook. Now it is owned by his granddaughter, who uses it as a trivet. Poor little skillet. It has come down a few notches in its culinary prowess.

Now that I have properly bemoaned the poor fate of the skillet (as I promised it I would), here is some really exciting news! The items in this post were prepared in part with the help of a new set of kitchen knives! Wheeee! I had a gift card to a local department store. I decided this gift card was destined to become something kitchen related. I looked through the store not seeing anything that caught my eye until I came to the knife area. "Eureka," I thought. I could use some more kitchen knives. My current collection consists of an odd assortment of paring and steak knives. One knife that is sort of longish but not real wide that looks like a paring knife on steroids with a pituitary problem. My other knife is a large chef's knife I suppose. None of them cut especially well, despite my attempts at sharpening them (I'm most likely doing something wrong). There sat two great looking knives by Calphalon that promise to be my best kichen friends. Folks, they slice, they dice, they mince. They pick up your food like a spatula and transfer it to the skillet. (Or so the packaging says). I love my new knives. Run out a buy yourself a pair today.

Now to the dinner that will become the bento of today's post. Not only did I work on the kicthen today, I also hauled off 2 car loads worth of stuff to a local charity. Clothes, furniture, and house goods went. I'm in a purge-this-house phase. It was a long day. By the time I thought of dinner, there wasn't much time to cook before I knew my body would collapse. Out came the turkey sausage. Sausage is my quick-cook meal when I don't have alot of time. I learned a recipe from my cousin Tammy, who I shared a rental place with when I first came out of college. She would take sausage, cut it into slices, fry it up quickly in the pan, add some bbq sauce at the end, and slap the whole thing between two pieces of bread. Very tasty.

Tonight, I decided I would cook sausage, but use my grill pan instead and not slice up the sausage. It turned out to sort of be a faked bbq sausage, with grill marks and everything without the mess of firing up the bbq pit!

Here are my links of sausage nicely grilled. Next step is to just brush on a bit of bbq sauce and cook a little more to heat up the sauce.

Then serve! Leftovers from this dinner became...

tomorrow's bento. In tomorrow's bento we have:

• Faked BBQ sausage with sweet potato chunks.
• A small navel orange, blueberries, boiled egg.
• The container has a bit of butter for the two pieces of bread (not shown) that will go with this bento.