Summer Bentos #3-5

Sorry for the barrage of bento posts.  It’s about all I have time to blog about these days.  Work has been pretty draining.  I didn’t even really have the energy to work on my thesis yesterday.

Wednesday’s Lunch:

Snapware container: Akai rice, sliced tongue, leftover spicy green beans, scrambled eggs with scallions, dried hibiscus flowers in the mini container; Sidecar: carrot sticks, fish and almonds snack

Thursday’s Lunch:

Snapware container: spinach salad topped with tomato slices and cold homemade won tons (made earlier this month and frozen); Larger sidecar: pear slices and fish and almonds snack; Smaller sidecar: soy-citrus-ginger dressing (grated fresh ginger, soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, splash of grapefruit juice)

(I didn’t bring lunch on Friday; decided to treat myself to a bought lunch for having gotten through my first full week of work – and anyway we get out of the office early on Fridays, so I didn’t have a lunch break).

Tomorrow’s Lunch:

Snapware container: another salad!  spinach and mint leaves, topped by hard boiled egg whites (yolks removed), precooked beets from Trader Joe’s, cucumber slices, nonfat feta, and grated carrot; Larger sidecar: dried hibiscus flowers, fish and almonds snack, mini bottle of dressing (grapeseed oil and rice vinegar); Smaller sidecar: nonfat greek yogurt to top the salad, with mint for garnish.

I have been trying to lose a little weight (I gained an alarming amount in the last 9 months – such that I now have a rather obvious potbelly).  My mom has theorized that at school, where I don’t buy a lot of meat (since it’s expensive), I fill up on carbs and full-fat dairy (in the form of cheese, mostly) instead of lean proteins when I am hungry late at night and need a snack.  So I’ve been trying to work more protein into my diet, and to eliminate excessive processed carbs and to stick to nonfat or lowfat dairy.  Hence the nonfat feta and yogurt, the large amount of egg whites and yogurt in the one meatless lunch, and the akai rice and soba noodles in my earlier bentos instead of white rice and somen.  Yes, I know that wonton wrappers are made with white flour.  But without the wrappers they’d just be meatballs, which, if you ask me, kinda misses the point.

Summer Bento #2

Look who actually managed to post two days in a row, even if it’s just a bento picture post!

Snapware container: Leftover soba, tongue and tomato with black pepper on top, soy sauce, carrot sticks, cherries, packet of fish and almonds snack
Sidecar: Dried sweetened hibiscus flowers from Trader Joe’s

* * *
I actually didn’t get to eat my lunch from today. They took all the interns out to lunch as part of orientation. So I ate my lunch for dinner when I got home instead.

Summer Job = Bento Time!

It’s really refreshing to be able to bento regularly again, now that I’m starting a 9-5 summer job tomorrow (well, technically it’s 8:30 – 5:00, but that doesn’t sound as nice). I actually needed to have been in bed about half an hour ago (getting up at 6:30 = not something I’ve done since high school . . . 0.o), but I was so excited about having made a real bento for tomorrow that I just had to post. The rest of the poladroids from spring semester can wait till later.

First, though, here’s an airplane bento from a month or so ago; not job-related, I know. But I took pictures of it then, so I thought I should post it anyway. The theme ended up being “green,” unintentionally. My BF and I had made sushi the night before, and these are the leftover rice and vegetables from our meal. He even had a plastic yogurt spoon that matched my Snapware box!

Closed:

Open:

(Contents: Calrose rice drizzled with a little vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, and sesame seeds; cucumber spears, edamame in the pod, avocado slices. Supplemented by the tons of snacks that Southwest Airlines always ply’s its passengers with . . .)

Tomorrow’s lunch (the seaweed was prepackaged and gives off a bit of a strong smell; in retrospect I probably should’ve packed something more “normal” for lunch; I hope my coworkers’ noses aren’t overly offended . . . yay, their first impression of me is going to be “the one with the smelly lunch” >_<)

(Contents: Cold soba noodles and green onions tossed in sesame oil, bottle of soy sauce, sliced beef tongue – made by my grandma!, kelp salad with shredded carrot; In the sidecar: Half a sliced pear; To drink, but not pictured: Apple Sidra; Also not pictured: little snacks to get me through the day – fish and almonds, apple, heart to heart cereal).

End of the School Year 2009 – Part I

I’m currently sitting in the San Jose airport waiting for my plane to Philly. After moving out of South Bend on Wednesday, I flew out here to CA and spent the weekend attending a wedding, doing research in Monterey, and spending lots of quality time with my boyfriend. Summer has been coming on way too fast – and by that I don’t just mean the weather (it was 95 degrees here yesterday). This year, I’ll be spending a few weeks at home for vacation, and then working in New York City for 10 weeks. It’s hard to believe that my first year of graduate school is already finished. My papers are turned in, my apartment packed up into boxes, and I’m all moved out. It seems downright surreal that I only have one more year left in my program. About a year ago, when I started this blog, I was just applying to MFA programs, and now I’m already starting to plan out options for post-graduation.

I haven’t blogged very much in the last few months, but I have been doing a lot of cooking, crafting, and photographing. So here’s a few poladroids from the end of last semester, as a retrospective of sorts (there’s a lot of them I’ve been saving up, so I’ll do a second post later, with more):

Homemade cheese crackers.

Spring tulips from the Farmer’s Market

Research for my nerdy, nerdy poetry manuscript.

New watch. (The old one died so I upgraded to something more grown up).

Discarded shoes and toys at a bridal shower.

It’s wedding season, full force, around here!

ND Photo of the Day

This week has been crazy. So this post is (very) short, but sweet.

In an act of shameless self-promotion, here’s a bit of news:

This photo that I took during last week’s round of our department’s National Poetry Month celebration readings . . .

. . . ended up being chosen as yesterday’s “Photo of the Day” on the ND web site (our awesome dept administrator submitted it – happy Administrative Assistants’ Day, Coleen, by the way – and thanks for all you do!)

That is all. Over and out.

Post-Easter Slump

I have an alarmingly long to-do list for the next two weeks, but I haven’t been able to get very much work done since the weekend.  (Hence my being up at 2:00 AM listening to Pandora and blogging).  Thought I might as well post some photos of my Easter table, since I wrote about all that food in my last post.

Centerpiece / Flower arrangement #1
(daffodils I bought from the Farmer’s Market):

Flower arrangement #2
(on the side table; daffodils that someone gave my roommate on the same day that I bought mine- likely also from the Farmer’s Market):

Friends opening a bottle of wine in front of the full spread
(Yes, ED and MM, you’ve appeared on my blog, just as you predicted . . .):

Closeup of the spread
(S’s pretzel rods and veggies w/ guacamole are hidden behind the flowers, but can you guess what everything else is?):

I discovered during the course of the party that the spiced nuts I made (using Nigella Lawson’s recipe) taste REALLY GOOD when mixed with jellybeans. S is still quite skeptical, but I maintain she doesn’t know what she’s missing.

While shooting these images, I had some trouble focusing properly (the light in my apartment is quite uneven, so I was spending most of my energy thinking about metering and exposure, and shot the latter two photos, in particular, very quickly so as not to be rude by taking lots of fangirl photos of my own food instead of being hospitable to my guests…), but I was rather pleased by the soft warm cast my images acquired as a result of the fact that the sun was setting and I had the front door and the drapes on our front windows wide open (the front of our house faces pretty much due West, so we are privvy to absolutely spectacular sunsets with breathtaking afterglow, and really interesting effects when the sun rises on clear days – as we live directly across from several large buildings whose bricks turn orangey-gold as the sun comes up, and then reflect the red sky in their windows, so that they look like they are on fire).

I’ve really been enjoying the Spring weather this month. It’s rained miserably for the last two days, but the weekend was glorious, and I keep reminding myself that when it’s raining, at least it’s not snowing, and when it’s sunny, it really is sunny and golden.

All right, bedtime now. (My Pandora list has also reached a Regina Spektor song I dislike – so I want to finish this post and stop typing so I can go turn it off . . .)

[By the way, in case you were wondering, the visible foods in the last image are, starting at the top right: egg and cress on mini baguette slices, Nigella Lawson's Union Square Cafe Nuts, roasted vegetable skewers, mini apple strudels from Meijer, roasted lamb and eggplant skewers, ED's homemade hummus and pita chips, cracked pepper water crackers with herbed goat cheese and peppered smoked salmon, more egg and cress slices, dark chocolate eggs, Starburst jelly beans; beverages half-visible in the distance are "French berry" (strawberry) sparkling lemonade, fresh mint iced tea, and a bottle of red wine].

Happy Easter!

He is Risen!

I bought those daffodils at the farmer’s market yesterday and was lucky to find an empty jam jar that fit them perfectly and some blue ribbon that complimented their color well.  I normally wouldn’t buy flowers just for myself, but it’s Easter, and I thought the occasion merited something special – after all, what’s Easter without spring flowers?

I’m being kept busy today by food prep. One of my roommates and I have invited a few friends over for a finger-food style dinner, and I still have several dishes left to prepare before they arrive.  I have about half an hour to kill before I need to turn on the oven, so I thought I’d take a break to have a light bite to eat and blog a little. The ladies at my church put out a big brunch spread after the morning service (which kept me full until about half an hour ago), and I have guests coming for more nibbles in a few hours, so I just needed a quick bite to keep me going.

(my quick mid-afternoon snack: soupy noodles with cilantro and egg – cooking makes you hungry; it’s hard work!)

I’m quite excited about this dinner, though at the moment I’m not 100% sure how many guests I’m expecting (somewhere between 4 and 6).  The others will all have eaten a big meal at the grad student Easter brunch (I skipped out to prepare food for tonight, and anyway, I had lunch at church), so I’ve tried to kept the offerings small, light, and bite-sized.  It’s Easter, so even though we have vegetarians, I’m making baked lamb skewers (as well as eggplant ones for the non-carnivorous ones among us), egg salad and cress on mini toasts, fresh mint iced tea, and Nigella Lawson’s Union Square Cafe nuts.  My roommate is going to cut up some fresh veggies to have with dip, a friend is bringing pita and hummus, and I’m also serving Easter candy (jellybeans and dark chocolate eggs), some goat’s cheese and smoked salmon on crackers and storebought mini apple strudels.  I was originally worried that we might not have enough food, but now I’m starting to wonder if we’ll have too much.  Oh, well.  Better to have excessive amounts  than not enough (that’s how my mother always rationalizes her own entertaining style…how very Chinese of me, for once in my life…)

It’s been a really good Lenten season and Holy Week, and after my partial fast from blogging, I’m feeling relatively weaned from the “need” to compulsively check my stats every few minutes.  It was nice not feeling the pressure to update or lose hits.  When you think about it, counting hits is sort of silly anyway, since I really only blog for myself.  I’ll be trying to get back on a semi-regular schedule of posting now, maybe once a week – twice if something special comes up.  It’ll be nice to take things slowly, and gradually ease back in.

Sorry, no photos this week…

[Edit: I was going to embed a YouTube video of the last few minutes of my reading, but it appears that neither wordpress nor youtube is happy about that, so here's a link instead.  Warning - you may have to crank up the volume to hear what I' m saying; the sound quality isn't the best]

My Sunday baking project for the week is spicy cheese crackers (based on this recipe), and as the dough is currently chilling in the refrigerator, I thought it might be a good opportunity to blog.

It’s been nice to have a calm, restful weekend after the last two weeks.  My reading on Wednesday went really well, the broken things in my apartment got fixed (a total of 6 things – including a water heater that needed to be replaced – went “kaput” over the course of the last week and it felt like we were calling maintenance every other day…but at least everything is working now), my project got finished, as did some other logistics with regards to my summer job search.  After all of that craziness, it was nice to relax and do some fun things.  My weekend actually began kind of early, since I was hosting a prospective student who got into my program for next year.  On Friday night, at the end of her visit, I took her downtown and we went to Saigon Market, had dinner at a sports bar, and then drinks with some of my classmates (ENABS for me and her) at the local Irish pub.  After she left the next morning, I headed out to the Farmer’s Market with some friends, and came home bearing tulips and daffodils for my roommates (as a thank-you for their hospitality during my visitor’s stay), and a jug of fresh apple cider.  I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the Market (we hadn’t been since late Autumn).  I worked a little and phoned my bf and my parents in the afternoon, and then rounded off the evening with a wonderful homemade crepe dinner, made by my awesome roommate M. Today, it’s snowing again (argh!), but I’ve been able to spend most of the day indoors, resting and cleaning my house, so it’s been all right in the end.

Easter is approaching quite fast. Next week is Palm Sunday, in fact. In honor of that fact, I thought I’d link back to the palm cross tutorials I posted last year:

Palm Cross 1

Palm Cross 2

This year’s the first year I’m going to have time off from school to celebrate Good Friday and Easter Monday. Unfortunately, I also cannot fly home during those days (too much schoolwork), so it’ll likely be just me and one of my roommates for Easter. I thought it might be nice to invite some people over and try my hand at my dad’s roasted leg of lamb recipe this year. We’ll see how it works out.

Luisa Igloria’s Visit to ND, and Linzer Cookies

Last week was ridiculously busy, and this week doesn’t look to be any better.  I’ve been preparing for my big department-sponsored reading (which takes place this upcoming Wednesday), taking care of household and financial logistics post-Spring Break (among other things, it appears that my tetanus immunization has expired, so I need to go have it renewed this week), doing regular classwork (I have a big project for one of my classes due this Thursday, the day after my reading), doing church (I got to read one of my poems during the offertory today) and volunteer related stuff (Riley readings are supposed to start again soon, and I’m taking over for next year) and running on an insane sleep schedule – my body having refused, point-blank, to readjust to EST after returning from the West Coast.  (I think I’m still a little  jet lagged, even now).

In the midst of all this, getting to hear last week’s guest poet read was a welcome respite. Fabulous Filipina American poet Luisa Igloria (the winner of this year’s Sandeen Prize) came to campus to read from her book Juan Luna’s Revolver last week, and I was privileged to have the chance to converse with her afterwards, and to eat breakfast with her the next day.  Prof. Igloria was very encouraging to me about my work, and really lovely to speak with.  She also proved to be quite gracious, even though there were several logistical snafoo’s among us MFA students that resulted in our being 20+ minutes late to pick her up for breakfast the morning after her reading.   I always love a good, long conversation about craft and vision, and it was great to hear some of Prof. Igloria’s thoughts about teaching and writing, which she punctuated with colorful anecdotes.  Her stories about home and family reminded me of the importance of story and narrative to my vision for my own work.  All through these projects – both Cannery Row and the Women Scientists (which might tentatively be called “Physics at the Dinner Table” – I’m hesitant to slap a title on it yet, though, before I finish the work as a whole and see how it all fits together), it’s been the stories I’ve been looking for.  Voices, and ghosts, and ghosts of voices that tell stories with ghosts of other stories hiding beneath them.  I’ve just recently started to add the layer of my own personal and family stories to my work with the Women Scientists, and it’s been really interesting to me to see how everything  kind of bleeds together at the edges and piles up in unexpected layers.  Prof. Igloria also does a lot of historical work in Juan Luna’s Revolver, and had a lot of good advice to give to me about process and resources.  I’ve started reading a little of the book, and it’s been very interesting to contemplate how some of what she’s doing there can serve as a model for what I’ve been trying to do.  Her visit actually came at a really appropriate time for me, as I’m just now beginning to see the faint outline of a shape emerge for both of these works, and now it’s about continuing to collect information along the way as I follow those thin chalkmarks, and doing the work of sitting and writing, to try out different ways to flesh out what will eventually appear inside the outlines.

* * *

Last Sunday night, the experimental dinner I concocted from the very random leftovers in our fridge (we do our grocery shopping on Mondays) kind of bombed.  So in order to make myself feel better, and to try out the new mini food cutters I bought at Daiso when I was in California for Spring Break, I made Linzer Cookies using King Arthur Flour’s recipe.  I halved the recipe, except for the egg (because the dough seemed too dry without it).  Unfortunately, I think the other half of the egg ended up being a little too much, because the resulting dough was slightly more sticky than it ought to have been, even after flouring and refrigeration.  I filled the cookies with half raspberry preserves (heart cutouts) and half apricot jam (star cutouts).  I ended up being pretty happy with the results.  They were more work than I had expected, but they were tasty, and anyway I love rolling out and cutting dough (I find it relaxing).  And for once, our house actually finished them all within the week.

Linzer Cookies (heavily based on King Arthur Flour’s Linzer Cookies)
Makes about 16 cookies, depending on the size of your cutters.

1/1 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup confectioners’ or glazing sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 cup Trader Joe’s almond meal
1 1/8 all-purpose flour
1/2 of a beaten egg
raspberry jam and apricot jam
confectioners’ or glazing sugar, for dusting

Beat together the butter, sugars, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and flavor. Mix in the almond meal, flour, and egg. Divide dough in half and wrap well. Refrigerate for 60 minutes, for easiest rolling.

Roll the dough 1/8-inch thick. Cut the dough into rounds with a large (2 inch) daisy cutter. Transfer the cookies to a foil-lined baking sheet. Cut windows into the centers of half of the daisy rounds using a mini-cutter and remove the inside shapes (you can either roll them back into the rest of the dough for recutting, or bake them as little mini cookies). Bake in a preheated 375°F oven for 8 to 10 minutes, until lightly browned on the edges. Cool on a rack. Dust the cookies with cutout tops lightly with confectioners’ sugar.

Spread the solid cookies with jam. Place a cutout cookie on top. Let stand for several hours, until the filling is set.

* * *

It’s late now; actually past midnight already (I waited till the last minute to start writing this blog entry – not the greatest of ideas when you’re trying not to stretch the limits of your Lenten disciplines), so I’ll stop here.

Wish me luck on Wednesday.  ::Crosses fingers for a good reading::

A Dose of California Sun

Sunshine, warmth, green hills, wildflowers and fruit trees blooming all over the place, Stanford, the Pacific Ocean, quality boyfriend time, hangouts with good friends, AMAZING food, city walks, photoshoots, arts community, lots of time and space to sleep and write . . . exactly what the doctor called for. I had a wonderful, restful vacation this last week, and am sad that it’s ending (though the weather in South Bend has perked up considerably – perhaps Spring is around the corner here, after all).

My airplane bento for the flight there:

Leftover homemade pizza, carrot sticks, kiwi, pistachios (more carrot sticks under the kiwi). In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t used pistachios as gap fillers. They got rather soggy in transit, and their shells got all coated in cheese from the pizza. Egh. I also brought ginger candy for my tummy and a supply of herbal tea bags in a little sidecar to last me the week, since I wasn’t sure if my BF had a stock of non-caffeinated teas at his house, and I like something hot in the mornings.

A few highlights of my trip:

- 4-year Anniversary Date in San Jose with the BF (a surprise!  he wouldn’t tell me where we were going until we got there; lunch at a fabulous local Vietnamese restaurant, time in the beautiful Japanese Friendship Garden at Kelley Park, refreshing nap on the VTA lightrail back to Mountain View, dinner at Cafe Yulong – which makes the best fresh spinach noodles I have ever had, and which I am now desperately trying to figure out how to reproduce at home in South Bend).
- Road trip with a bunch of my girlfriends from college to visit our friend E in Monterey (miles of beautiful freeway studded with greenery, and overflowing with wild mustard and anemonies, yummy seafood lunch followed by dessert at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, tidepooling at McAbee Beach, window shopping, general good girl chat and catchup time)
- Finally walking the Stanford Dish (I am ashamed to admit that I never did it while a student there; my friend L called me up on Tuesday afternoon and said, “let’s go hiking!” and boy was I glad; you can see the whole Bay Area, all the way to the water, from up there, and the path this time of year was studded with beautiful wildflowers like California poppies and lupine)
- Evening excursion to San Francisco (dinner with another group of old college friends at an awesome little Afghan restaurant called De Afghanan Kabob House – delicious stewed pumpkin appetizer, and the best char-grilled meat I’ve had in ages – followed by ice cream at a sweets place down the road)
- Participating in OT’s Winter Reading (not only was it good to catch up with the others, but there was a great audience turnout, and I was totally blown away by the calibre of work – individual and collaborative – presented)
- Lots of other little lunch and coffee and dinner dates with good, old friends.

Some other notably great foods that I got to eat (besides the ones mentioned earlier):

- miso ramen from Maru Ichi
- sweet potato fries from Bullwacker’s in Monterey
- Korean glass noodles
- Satura strawberry shortcake
- pistachio ice cream (mmmm!)
- pho (!)
- hazelnut italian soda
- lunch at the Humanities Center (my former advisor invited me as a guest; that day they served baked fish with salsa, cilantro quinoa, asparagus, and salad)
- dried, sweetened hibiscus flowers from Trader Joe’s (I saw them while buying a few of my staple favorites and had to buy them; they were so good that I ended up eating them all before I got home; I didn’t have a chance to go back to TJ’s for more before I left, so I guess I’ll just have to wait till my next trip to have them again; either that, or make the BF send some to me in the mail ^_^)
- prosciutto and mushroom panini from Cafe Epi in Palo Alto
- Tapioca Express fresh watermelon juice

mmmm, mmmm, mmmmm.

I think my tummy had as much of a blast as the rest of me did last week.

I’ll leave you with another photo of Monterey (this one, of the tide coming in over the rocks):

Sigh. It’s going to be hard to get back to work tomorrow.