Bento box lunch makeover

I don’t know why I don’t bring my lunch to work more often. 

I hate buying lunch, the hassle, the expense, the poor quality.  I hate it even more than I hate the picture of me and Rodney that sits on my desk.  I used the red eye remover to zap one of his eyes and accidentally made it bigger and darker.  Now it looks like he’s got a cyborg eye and it stares at me while I do my work. I want to flip it over every time someone stops by my desk and says “oh, that’s your husband?”  I feel the need to say that while yes it is, he doesn’t have a cyborg eye.  You’d think that after 6 years I’d change it, but then again, something about my desk wouldn’t feel right.

The irony of my lunchtime situation is that it would take less time to pack up some good leftovers than it would to go through the whole process of leaving the building, standing in line, ordering, and returning to my desk.  With horrible food, like this little getup that cost me nearly $10 from our local deli.

Tuna salad on limp lettuce that’s one microbe away from giving me a nasty case of dysentery.  Not an exaggeration. My husband loves to get chicken and tuna salads from NYC delis, and I can count on two hands the number of times it’s made him sick.  And stay away from those yogurt parfaits.  And the fresh orange juice.  Actually, in your average NYC deli, stay away from anything that’s not hermetically sealed.  Most of the time you’ll be fine, but once in a while you’ll get nailed and you’ll only have yourself to blame.

After the recent limp tuna experience, I had a flashback to a Bento blog I’d read a few years ago (strangely enough, Bento blogs are an actual category).  Suddenly I got excited about the prospect of making myself a jeweled little present for lunch.  I’ve never been a sandwich-from-home kind of person.  Although I love sandwiches, I’m a little crazy about the bread – it has to be really fresh or it’s not worth it at all.  And rarely am I in a position at 7AM to sprint to the bakery for a fresh loaf, baby under my arm like a football, just so that I can make a perfect sandwich that day.  Although that is definitely something I would do.  

So I bit the bullet and ordered a set of Bento boxes from Amazon.  And immediately put them to good use on a school field trip to Legoland.  I won’t comment on the creativity of the food inside the Bentos as it was more about ingenious repackaging of our fridge’s leftovers than culinary magic at work.  But it was fun to dig into those little boxes on our break.  Even Sam, our notorious picky eater, was eager to scarf down some star-shaped pasta out of a shiny red box.   

As for me? I’m hands down going to start bringing my lunch to work from now on.  And who knows, maybe cyborg Rodney will find a new home too.  But not yet – too much change isn’t good for the soul.