Snack bento

The bento I made for us for tomorrow's lunch is a side/snack bento rather than a lunch bento. It will accompany our usual lunch made up of leftovers, which happens to be rice with broccoflower beef (broccoflower is a hybrid of broccoli and cauliflower that just tastes like cauliflower). After last week, I realized I needed to ease us into this bento thing so that we could get used to the smaller portions and the aesthetics of a lunch meant to please the eye.

I only took a picture of Nick's bento, because mine looks exactly the same. The only difference is that I have grapes where he has cherry tomatoes. Here it is:


On the top tier I placed a cran-strawberry-grape jello, some cherry tomatoes, a little container of ranch dressing, and a tiny matcha chocolate. In the bottom tier I placed a mini crudite platter of celery, cucumber, and flower-shaped carrots. Nick said he'd try his best to hide those, but I think the cuteness adds visual interest to an otherwise boring bento tier.

I'm not as happy with the redundancy of the two round elements in the top tier, but I didn't have any other way to include the ranch dressing, as both are too big to sit in the smaller tier. All my other containers were too small. I hope I get better at this as time goes on, because the reason I got into this in the first place was being able to utilize space in an efficient way while pleasing the eye and taste buds.

Now that I think about it...I should add more ranch since Nick is one of those types that likes to slather his salad with dressing. As for time management, since I know I'm going to have a busy morning tomorrow, I sliced everything up tonight. I decided to keep the carrots and celery in cold water in a tupperware in the fridge, and covered up my cucumber slices with a wet paper towel in the smaller bento. Hopefully that will keep them crisp and avoid drying out. We'll see how it goes.