monday bento

Its been a busy day today- I've made all of our evening meals for the week in one go, so i don't need to worry about cooking for the rest of the week hoorah! I've made a pork vindaloo, a mandalorean beef curry, kofte curry, pork and parsnip stew, and picadillo... all lovely warming autumn meals. 

I'm out of the office training folk tomorrow. My bentos usually cause a bit of a stir and make a conversational point. This one isn't very cute however, but I've got a lot of different flavours so it should be good. It include salmon and quark wraps, pickled onions, ham rollups, mini babybels, duck wraps, olives, and some salad.

Mini burger bento

a last minute bento idea tonight, although it seems to have worked out alright. I've used left over risotto (see the previous recipe) with ham and carrot decorations, then I defrosted some hamburgers I'd made for a bento a while back. I reshaped them into smaller mini burgers, then grilled them, and made mini cheese burger bentos using salad and mini babybel cheese. They are held together with skewers and a piece of gherkin, then I have a gherkin and pickled onion skewer and a tomato and ham skewer.

risotto rules!

My friend Haymond told me today that he wants to try the pork vindaloo recipe I posted, so I thought that if he found it useful, I'd post a few more recipes. What do you reckon? Let me know by leaving a comment.

A cheesy bacon risotto? on a diet? well yes. And its very easy to do and only takes 20 minutes or so to make.

1. Chop some spring onions and four cloves of garlic. Spray a large frying pan with Fry Light (or use a dash of olive oil), and sweat the onions and garlic over a medium heat for a few minutes.

2. Slice approx four slices of turkey bacon or lean bacon rashers into strips. Pop them into the pan with the spring onions and garlic.

3. Add just over 300g of arborio rice to the pan and leave for about a minute or until the rice turns translucent.

4. Add about a litre of chicken stock to the rice. Bring to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the stock has absorbed into the rice. keep an eye out so the rice doesn't burn or stick to the pan- it can be a nightmare to clean. 

5. stir in a tablespoon of parmesan cheese and sprinkle with fresh chives and pepper. 

6. Serve and enjoy!

I'm keeping the leftovers to put into lunches tomorrow- yum!

Piggle Sammie

Cute piggy prawn sammie lunch for him...

(two piggies= Man size portion)

...and for her:

Dainty slimming sized portion for moi! These boxes contain low fat prawn cocktail sandwiches (1 healthy extra and syn free filling) with some salad (free), Low fat cheese triangles (healthy extras), a quorn sausage roll (2.5 Syns), tomato and grapes (free). See I'm getting used to this complicated Slimming World malarkey now!

Monday's bento box

C

Tomorrow's bento contains mini quiches (these arre very clever, using ham as the case... I'll do a post dedicated to them later I think), heart shaped egg, salad, onigiri, strawberries, and my favourite bit, an egg chick:

Its all syn free on Slimming World as well.

Slimming World Vindaloo

I thought I'd share this delicious recipe with you guys. Its a healthy pork vindaloo and is absolutely scrummilicious. 

1. Place 500g lean pork chunks into a bowl with 2 chopped onions.

2.  Using a pestle and mortar, combine 8 garlic cloves, 2 teaspoons of finely chopped ginger, 2 tsp cumin, 2 tsp whole mustard seeds, 2 tsp hot chilli powder, 1/2 tsp ground cloves and 1 tsp ground cinnamon. Add a little vinegar to make into a paste, then add 125mls vinegar.

3. Marinade the pork for 6-8 hours or overnight in the vinegar mixture.

4. Spray some Fry light into a large saucepan, and add the pork mixture and a can of chopped tomatoes, along with 1/2 tsp of artificial sweetener. Simmer for up to an hour or until the pork is tender.

5. Serve with pilau rice, and some fresh coriander.

Simple as that and absolutely delicious!

Tuna Pasta Bento

Well, I've been wholly unsuccessful so far in the attempts to lose weight, but with the beach holiday looming 2 months away I'm now taking it seriously... Well apart from the massive blowout over the weekend including lots of food, drink, and a small amount of sleep... So I've joined Slimming World online and these next few months we are really going to go for it and try to slim down and get fit. Lunch tomorrow is a tuna pasta salad with lots of lovely fresh veg and a fat free vinagrette... of course I gave it a little cute bento twist by using a mini flower cutter and a cute sauce bottle and pick.

Bento Monster

The bentos for tomorrow feature a cute little monster modelled on Domo. The breadcrumbed chicken is a bit too light for Domo and i should have given him rounded corners, but overall not too bad for a first go! (I suspect many more Domo-kuns may follow in the future- I heart him!) Domo is standing on furikake sprinkled rice with spring onion grass, and i have a spinach and watercress salad with bacon-wrapped asparagus (a clever way to fool the husband into eating some greens- disguise them as meat) topped off with cheese and pepper flowers.

Fat Club

When I changed jobs, I went from working in a very busy community pharmacy where i was on my feet all day and had no time for lunch to a desk bound job in an office with lots of biscuits. I've put on quite a bit of weight as a consequence and am nearly up to the heaviest weight i've ever been again. Luckily at work we all decided to get fitter and we started Fat Club.

The first rule of Fat Club is... you don't want to be in fat club!

We paid a pound a week for weigh ins and the person who lost the most by percentage body weight won all the money. It ran for three months January- March. I was doing really well to start with but then a three week holiday to Toronto did me no favours whatsoever and by the time I got back to work, everyone else had fallen off the thin wagon too. We've decided to try again, just for a month this time, as we should all be able to stay motivated for a month.

At least the bento lunches are much healthier than sandwiches and biscuits and I'm trying to walk into work a lot more and increase my exercise substantially.

fingers crossed that this fat club is a bit more successful than the last one!