Thursday, September 7, 2017

Comfort Food Bento

This bento is on the theme of favorite, comforting foods.

Contents:

6 Tuna Puffs: These remind me of tuna casserole, but they're portable. You'll find the recipe here.

Medium Container of Roasted Baby Potatoes: These are just 4 baby red potatoes, quartered and placed in a baking pan, drizzled with a little olive oil and sprinkled with salt, and roasted in a 400 degree oven for about 30 minutes.

Mini Container of Ranch Dressing: For dipping the potatoes in.

Medium Container of Sesame Steamed Green Beans: Steam some fresh green beans for about 10 minutes, then toss them with a little bit of sesame oil, rice vinegar, sesame seeds and salt.

Medium Container of Pea & Cottage Cheese Salad: This is my favorite thing to make at a salad bar. It's just cottage cheese, thawed frozen peas, ranch dressing, and sunflower seeds mixed together.

2 Watermelon Wedges: The ones in the picture look yellow because they are yellow. Yellow watermelon was on sale at Hy-Vee that week. Regular watermelon works, too.

Miracle Cinnamon Crumb Muffin: Get the recipe here. "Miracle" is my name for these. They are made from all healthy ingredients, wheat-free, refined sugar free, and are only sweetened with a little bit of maple syrup and a little bit of honey. And they taste exactly (and when I say "exactly", I mean EXACTLY) like cinnamon streusel coffee cake. They have coconut flour, coconut milk, and coconut oil in them but do not taste at all like coconut. They also have a banana in them, but don't taste like banana. I substituted stevia nectar (at half the amount) for the maple syrup because I don't like maple, and I substituted regular coconut milk from Dollar Tree for the coconut cream, and they still turned out completely awesome. Seriously, folks, you need to try these.

Here's what it looks like all packed up in the Dollar Tree cupcake container:

Saturday, August 19, 2017

The Box

OK, so you start with this:

It's a cupcake holder from Dollar Tree. Cost: one buck.

You can find a whole host of different small containers to go in it, such as a snap-top sandwich container...

a veggie & dip container...

icepack-lidded containers in two sizes...

cups with lids...

smaller condiment cups with lids...

and snap-top containers in many sizes.

You can even get a cool bento-looking set of cutlery in the kids' dishes section. This matches the red of the box exactly and the fork and knife even snap together! How cool is that?

I was able to get several different combinations to fit in the box so that the lid would still go on it.

You do have to mess with the lid quite a bit to get it to go on right, but once you have all four sides clipped, it holds together quite well.

Here's a pic of my packed Mexican Bento. I couldn't find room for everything, so two containers had to ride shotgun.

Recipes and meal plans for what goes into the Dollar Tree Bento will come in later posts.

What This Blog Is About

This is a companion blog to my Omaha Walks blog. I've enjoyed making healthy bento box lunches so much for that project that I've started to come up with bentos of my own, which I will post here. It's also about my discovery that you can create a nice bento box container from stuff you can get at the Dollar Tree. See below for more.